Since the English publication of Utopia for Realists in 2017,[1] the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman has become a bestselling star in the genre of policy proposals challenging business as usual. He is certainly worthy of the abundant praise he has received for inspiring his readers to dedicate themselves to promoting more just and egalitarian societies. His recommendations for reforms such as universal basic income and shorter workweeks are persuasively argued and presented in a wonderfully accessible prose. Regardless of long-term political outcomes, his ability to stir genuine hope among countless despondent people is a worthy accomplishment. My immediate reaction is thus that he clearly deserves all the attention and appreciation that his books are receiving.
Yet, the most significant of Bregman’s books – Utopia for Realists – leaves me ambivalent. On the very first page, I was repelled by his mocking denigration of premodern humans as “poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick, and ugly,” and by the celebration of modernity as unmitigated progress. While I fully agree with him about the many benefits of basic income and shorter workweeks, I cannot subscribe to the wider understanding of human history and world society on which these proposals are based. The main reason why their time has come, he argues, is the modern progress of technology. Automation has made human labour increasingly superfluous. Given how concerned he is with global inequalities, however, I am struck by the absence of attention to the uneven global distribution of technology. When Bregman discusses how ‘we’ are racing against machines, he appears to define ‘us’ as all of humankind, whether in the Global North or the Global South (191-192). It does not seem to occur to him that much of the technological infrastructure that may threaten to make people superfluous in the Global North is being accumulated and reproduced through the exploitation of people in the Global South. The phenomenon of technology, which for more than two centuries has been celebrated as liberating humankind from toil, may ultimately be a way of liberating one segment of humankind at the expense of another. From this perspective, machines may be understood not as labour-saving but as labour-displacing devices.
Admittedly, this understanding of modern technology is difficult to empirically demonstrate. The vast number of technical components deriving from different parts of the world, representing unmeasured fragments of variously remunerated human workdays – expended in extraction, refining, manufacture, and transports – impede conclusive calculations about whether a specific gadget really saves time in an absolute sense, or merely displaces human efforts. A compelling foundation for the latter view is provided by global satellite images of nighttime lights, showing how closely the distribution of technological infrastructure coincides with the geography of GDP density (that is, money). Given that technologies cost money and that recourse to modern technologies thus must correlate with purchasing power, the congruity between global geographies of technology and money is not surprising, but the final implication of this correlation is rarely illuminated. It is arguably telling us that labour-saving devices save time for the people who can afford them, at the expense of those who cannot.
While I very much sympathise with Bregman’s championing of basic income, I would thus argue that he champions it for the wrong reasons. If its time has come, it is not because the affluent masses of the North no longer need to work to earn their keep, but because it might be a way of replacing an obscenely unequal system of world trade that converts resource extraction and low-wage labour in the South into consumer goods and labour-saving technologies for the North. But to generate such transformative consequences, a system of basic income would have to be designed in a radically different way than Bregman suggests. To merely “give free money to everyone” (as in the title of his chapter 2) would not alleviate global inequalities but exacerbate them. In expanding the purchasing power of those in most need, it would clearly increase the demand for inexpensive food, clothes, and other commodities produced with low-wage labour and scant environmental considerations in the Global South. It would thus aggravate the contemporary logic of globalised capitalism. It is true that “free cash greases the wheels of the whole economy” (31), but “the economy” here primarily means multinational corporations and their distant suppliers. To create resilient local economies that provide people with basic provisioning security, we must design a more carefully considered system than simply giving “free money to everyone.” I shall return to this matter shortly.
In Utopia for Realists, Bregman devotes the first four chapters to arguing for basic income as a means of ending poverty, made possible by advancing technology. From my perspective, this is highly paradoxical, as the advancing technologies of the Global North are inextricably part of the global economic system that is generating poverty. I have suggested[2] that modern technologies save time (and space) for those who can afford them, at the expense of time and space lost for those who cannot. While such a global zero-sum perspective can be applied to various technological systems since the Industrial Revolution,[3] it is also implicit in recent critiques of new technologies such as for renewable energy[4], electric vehicles, and digital information processing.[5] This view of advanced technologies implies that they cannot be universalised, any more than the economic affluence with which they are associated.
Bregman’s pervasive focus on “fighting poverty” (73) is contradicted by his observation, in arguing for a universal basic income, that “a system that helps solely the poor only drives a deeper wedge between them and the rest of society” (43). Although fighting poverty is repeatedly presented as an explicit aim, the general benefits of basic income (for everyone) include a range of less tangible advantages such as opportunities for individual self-realisation. Poverty thus plays an ambiguous role in Bregman’s narrative. While he is highly aware of global inequalities (218-221), he seems to think of world poverty simply as a lack of development, much as modernisation theorists did in the 1950s. Missing in his discussion is a structural account of how poverty comes into existence through historical processes such as colonialism, beyond simply being a shortage of money. The possibility that poverty is generated as the flip side of affluence, “the notion that one man’s loss is another man’s gain,” is dismissed as something “early modern economists believed” (68). Without ever mentioning them, Bregman obviously rejects development theories drawing on zero-sum perspectives such as dependency theory, world-system analysis, or unequal exchange.
An underlying message in Bregman’s first bestseller is that ‘we,’ having built paradise, can now afford to distribute its economic and technological blessings more fairly. He asks us to “see that good old progress is still marching along on its merry way,” but also “how much there still is left for us – the richest 10%, 5%, or 1% – to do” (20). At first sight, this message might seem a reasonable appraisal of the modern world by a progressivist concerned with social justice, but it becomes deeply problematic once we consider that ‘our’ modern paradise is continuously being maintained by the low-wage masses of the Global South. In this light, it duplicates the misguided inclination of all elites since Marie Antoinette to envisage poverty relief as charity. It also raises the kind of objections that can be directed at ‘new optimists’ like Steven Pinker, Hans Rosling, and Johan Norberg.[6] While the progressive benefits of industrial civilisation are undeniable, it seems misguided to balance such advances against its obscene inequalities, its blatant unsustainability, and the increasing likelihood of disaster.
Based on assessments of several historical and recent experiments, Bregman convincingly argues that basic income is an immensely good idea. Instead of escalating public spending on bureaucracy devoted to social security and healthcare, it tends to reduce homelessness, crime, domestic violence, child mortality, malnutrition, teenage pregnancy, and the consumption of alcohol and tobacco, while enhancing physical and mental health, individual creativity, school performance, self-respect, and gender equality. All these social, medical, and psychological benefits derive from the large-scale cash handouts that are the essence of conventional notions of basic income. But additional advantages may materialise if basic income is combined with the idea of establishing a complementary currency.[7] Such a combination would make it possible to inscribe global and ecological considerations in the design of the basic income scheme.
As previously pointed out, simply “giving free money to everyone” would not put a spanner in the wheel of globalisation, with all its detrimental economic and ecological consequences. In fact, it would expand the demand for inexpensive products from the Global South, generating even more ecologically unequal exchange,[8] that is, asymmetric transfers of embodied biophysical resources from the South to the North that are obscured by monetary prices. It would not only add to such unequal exchange but also increase transports, thus raising greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. A sustainable and more equitable alternative would be to provide basic income in the form of a complementary currency, issued digitally by the authorities, that can only be used to buy products that to a significant extent derive from within a certain radius (for example, 50 km) from the point of purchase. In terms of practical organisation, the system could use chargeable plastic debit cards, GPS, and bar or QR codes for transport certification.
Basic income paid in such a ‘special purpose’ currency would yield all the benefits listed by Bregman, including saving some public spending, while additionally alleviating unequal trade and ecological degradation. At the local level, it would provide everyone with food security and other basic provisioning, reducing their dependence on wage labour and vulnerability to unemployment, while simultaneously minimising transports, resource use, emissions, and waste of various kinds (such as leakage, losses, and garbage). In generating a substantial new demand for locally sourced goods and services, it would increase economic and agroecological diversity and enhance cohesion and resilience at the community level. In all these ways, the combination of universal basic income (UBI) and complementary currency (CC) would have effects diametrically opposite to those of current globalisation. The synergy between UBI and CC is crucial, combining the universal access of the former with the substantive goal orientation (toward local resilience) of the latter.
As Bregman shows, basic income is a vitally important idea. I propose that it should be paid in a special purpose currency that would generate a more localised social metabolism. This is to acknowledge that using regular money, with its assumption of universal fungibility, would only add to our social and ecological problems. In the interests of both local and global sustainability, we need to redesign the economy by recognising two separate spheres of exchange, representing two different kinds of values.
References
Bregman, Rutger. 2017. Utopia for Realists. London: Bloomsbury.
Couldry, Nick, and Ulises A. Mejias. 2019. The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Crawford, Kate. 2022. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Dorninger, Christian, Alf Hornborg, David J. Abson, Henrik von Wehrden, Anke Schaffartzik, Stefan Giljum, John‑Oliver Engler, Robert L. Feller, Klaus Hubacek, and Hanspeter Wieland. 2021. Global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange: Implications for sustainability in the 21st century. Ecological Economics 179: 106824. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106824
Dunlap, Xander. 2024. This System is Killing Us: Land Grabbing, the Green Economy and Ecological Conflict. London: Pluto Press.
Hornborg, Alf. 2006. Footprints in the cotton fields: The Industrial Revolution as time-space appropriation and environmental load displacement. Ecological Economics 59(1): 74–81. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800905004623
Hornborg, Alf. 2013. Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Fetishism in a Zero‑Sum World. Revised paperback version. London: Routledge.
Hornborg, Alf. 2025. Limiting money: redesigning the artifact that shapes modern people. Sustainability Science 20: 1185-1193. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-024-01489-3
Norberg, Johan. 2016. Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. London: Oneworld Publications.
Pinker, Steven. 2018. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. London: Allen Lane.
Rosling, Hans, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola Rosling. 2018. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World – and Why Things are Better Than You Think. New York: Flatiron Books.
Sovacool, Benjamin K. 2021. Who are the victims of low‑carbon transitions? Towards a political ecology of climate change mitigation. Energy Research & Social Science 73: 101916. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.101916
[1] Bregman 2017.
[2] Hornborg 2006.
[3] Hornborg 2006, 2013.
[4] Sovacool 2021.
[5] Couldry and Mejias 2019; Sovacool 2021; Crawford 2022; Dunlap 2024.
[6] Pinker 2018; Rosling et al. 2018; Norberg 2016.
[7] Hornborg 2025.
[8] Dorninger et al. 2021.
