3
" Welcome, in other words, to the Land of Plenty. To the good life, where almost everyone is rich, safe, and healthy. Where there’s only one thing we lack: a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Because, after all, you can’t really improve on paradise. Back in 1989, the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama already noted that we had arrived in an era where life has been reduced to “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”18 Notching up our purchasing power another percentage point, or shaving a couple off our carbon emissions; perhaps a new gadget – that’s about the extent of our vision. We live in an era of wealth and overabundance, but how bleak it is. There is “neither art nor philosophy,” Fukuyama says. All that’s left is the “perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.” According to Oscar Wilde, upon reaching the Land of Plenty, we should once more fix our gaze on the farthest horizon and rehoist the sails. “Progress is the realization of Utopias,” he wrote. But "
― Rutger Bregman , Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
14
" Der Bankmanager, der ohne Rücksicht auf Verluste Hypotheken und Derivate unters Volk bringt, um sich einen Millionenbonus zu sichern, trägt mehr zum BIP bei als eine Schule voller Lehrer oder eine Fabrik voller Automechaniker. Wir leben in einer Welt, in der die Grundregel anscheinend lautet, dass wir umso weniger zum BIP beitragen, je wichtiger unsere Tätigkeit für die Gesellschaft ist, etwa wenn wir reinigen, pflegen, unterrichten. "
― Rutger Bregman , Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
15
" Our standard of progress was conceived for a different era with different problems. Our statistics no longer capture the shape of our economy. And this has consequences. Every era needs its own figures. In the eighteenth century, they concerned the size of the harvest. In the nineteenth century, the radius of the rail network, the number of factories, and the volume of coal mining. And in the twentieth century, industrial mass production within the boundaries of the nation-state.
But today it's no longer possible to express our prosperity in simple dollars, pounds, or euros. From healthcare to education, from journalism to finance, we're all still fixated on 'efficiency' and 'gains,' as though society were nothing but one big production line. But it's precisely in a service-based economy that simple quantitative targets fail... It's time for a new set of figures. "
― Rutger Bregman , Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
