190
" As illusions go, this one is pretty stubborn. When you’re obsessed with efficiency and productivity, it’s difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only costs. They don’t realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors. Instead of regarding these increases as a blessing, they’re viewed as a disease. Yet unless we prefer to run our schools and hospitals as if they were factories, we can be certain that, in the race against the machine, the costs of healthcare and education will only go up. At the same time, products like refrigerators and cars have become too cheap. To look solely at the price of a product is to ignore a large share of the costs. In fact, a British think tank estimated that for every pound earned by advertising executives, they destroy an equivalent of £7 in the form of stress, overconsumption, pollution, and debt; conversely, each pound paid to a trash collector creates an equivalent of £12 in terms of health and sustainability. "
― Rutger Bregman , Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
192
" Whereas public sector services often bring a plethora of hidden benefits, the private sector is riddled with hidden costs. “We can afford to pay more for the services we need – chiefly healthcare and education,” Baumol writes. “What we may not be able to afford are the consequences of falling costs.” You may brush this aside with the argument that such “externalities” can’t simply be quantified because they involve too many subjective assumptions, but that’s precisely the point. “Value” and “productivity” cannot be expressed in objective figures, even if we pretend the opposite: “We have a high graduation rate, therefore we offer a good education” – “Our doctors are focused and efficient, therefore we provide good care” – “We have a high publication rate, therefore we are an excellent university” – “We have a high audience share, therefore we are producing good television” – “The economy is growing, therefore our country is doing fine…” The targets of our performance-driven society are no less absurd than the five-year plans of the former U.S.S.R. To found our political system on production figures is to turn the good life into a spreadsheet. As the writer Kevin Kelly says, “Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring. "
― Rutger Bregman , Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
194
" What we need is a “dashboard” complete with an array of indicators to track the things that make life worthwhile – money and growth, obviously, but also community service, jobs, knowledge, social cohesion. And, of course, the scarcest good of all: time. “But such a dashboard couldn’t possibly be objective,” you might counter. True. But there’s no such thing as a neutral metric. Behind every statistic is a certain set of assumptions and prejudices. What’s more, those figures – and their assumptions – guide our actions. That’s true of GDP but equally true of the Human Development and Happy Planet indices. And it’s precisely because we need to change our actions that we need new figures to guide us. "
― Rutger Bregman , Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
197
" One of the most vivid dreams was the land of milk and honey known as “Cockaigne.” To get there you first had to eat your way through three miles of rice pudding. But it was worth the effort, because on arriving in Cockaigne you found yourself in a land where the rivers ran with wine, roast geese flew overhead, pancakes grew on trees, and hot pies and pastries rained from the skies. Farmer, craftsman, cleric–all were equal and kicked back together in the sun. In Cockaigne, the Land of Plenty, people never argued. Instead, they partied, they danced, they drank, and they slept around. “To the medieval mind,” the Dutch historian Herman Pleij writes, “modern-day western Europe comes pretty close to a bona fide Cockaigne. You have fast food available 24/7, climate control, free love, workless income, and plastic surgery to prolong youth. "
― Rutger Bregman , Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World