I really enjoyed Rutger Bregman's book Utopia for Realists, although I did it over the course of several months due to duties and COVID-19 pandemic. His book shows us how the humankind has an opportunity to reconstruct a society into the mythical Land of Plenty. According to the author and numerous sources, it is not an utopia anymore.

Bregman is an avid proponent of the universal basic income, and a true globalist, meaning he would like to have open borders and all countries cooperating to eradicate poverty, and he's got a lot of data and cases to support his case. Some of the interesting quotes I got from the book:

• "[...] people living in unequal societies spend more time worrying about how others see them" (p.66)
• "When you're obsessed with efficiency and productivity, it's difficult to see the real value of education and care" (p.120)
• "[...] 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 sustainability" (p.121)
• In the U.S., the gap between rich and poor is already wider than it was in ancient Rome - an economy founded on slave labor" (p.184)
• [...] the lack of cohesion in modern-day society [is due to] poverty, unemployment, and discrimination" (p.225)

So what's Bregman's proposal? How do we all prosper and enter a new age? He believes we should completely reform the financial sector, pay people according to their real contributions, direct clever minds into science, education, and public service, invest into homeless and poor people, implement a basic income, and finally eradicate so-called bullshit jobs.

A recommendation.