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" Esther Duflo, a professor at MIT with a strong French accent, likens all this research on development aid to medieval bloodletting.6 The once popular medical practice involved placing leeches on patients’ veins in order to rebalance their bodily humors. If the patient returned to health, the physician could pat himself on the back. If the patient died, it was clearly God’s will. Though those doctors acted with the best of intentions, nowadays we realize that bloodletting cost millions of lives. Even in 1799, the year Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery, President George Washington was relieved of several pints of blood to treat a sore throat. Two days later, he died. Bloodletting, in other words, is a case where the remedy is worse than the disease. The question is, does the same apply to development aid? According to Professor Duflo, both remedies certainly share one key feature, which is the fundamental lack of scientific proof. "
― Rutger Bregman , Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
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" When Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008, and inaugurated the biggest crisis since the 1930s, there were no real alternatives to hand. No one had laid the groundwork. For years, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians had all firmly maintained that we’d reached the end of the age of “big narratives” and that it was time to trade in ideologies for pragmatism. Naturally, we should still take pride in the liberty that generations before us fought for and won. But the question is, what is the value of free speech when we no longer have anything worthwhile to say? What’s the point of freedom of association when we no longer feel any sense of affiliation? What purpose does freedom of religion serve when we no longer believe in anything? On the one hand, the world is still getting richer, safer, and healthier. Every day, more and more people are arriving in Cockaigne. That’s a huge triumph. On the other hand, it’s high time that we, the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty, staked out a new utopia. Let’s rehoist the sails. “Progress is the realisation of Utopias,” Oscar Wilde wrote many years ago.24 A fifteen-hour workweek, universal basic income, and a world without borders … They’re all crazy dreams – but for how much longer? "
― Rutger Bregman , Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World