Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman

1
The Return of Utopia
Let’s start with a little history lesson:
In the past, everything was worse.
For roughly 99% of the world’s history, 99% of humanity was poor,
hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly. As recently as the 17th century,
the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) described life as one
giant vale of tears. “Humanity is great,” he wrote, “because it knows itself
to be wretched.” In Britain, fellow philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–
1679) concurred that human life was basically “nasty, brutish, and short.”
But in the last 200 years, all of that has changed. In just a fraction of the
time that our species has clocked on this planet, billions of us are suddenly
rich, well nourished, clean, safe, smart, healthy, and occasionally even
beautiful. Where 94% of the world’s population still lived in extreme
poverty in 1820, by 1981 that percentage had dropped to 44%, and now,
just a few decades later, it is under 10%.
If this trend holds, the extreme poverty that has been an abiding feature
of life will soon be eradicated for good. Even those we still call poor will
enjoy an abundance unprecedented in world history. In the country where I
live, the Netherlands, a homeless person receiving public assistance today
has more to spend than the average Dutch person in 1950, and four times
more than people in Holland’s glorious Golden Age, when the country still
ruled the seven seas.
For centuries, time all but stood still. Obviously, there was plenty to fill
the history books, but life wasn’t exactly getting better. If you were to put
an Italian peasant from 1300 in a time machine and drop him in 1870s
Tuscany he wouldn’t notice much of a difference.

Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman