Rutger Bregman Quotes

Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.

I was born in 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and people of my generation were taught that utopian dreams are dangerous.

Most of Mark Zuckerberg’s income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days.

It’s one of the tragedies of the modern university that it offers little space to generalists.

Since 1963, the University of Delaware‘s Disaster Research Center has conducted nearly 700 field studies on floods and earthquakes, and on-site research reveals the same results every time: the vast majority of people stay calm and help each other.

Since long workdays lead to more errors, shorter workdays could reduce accidents. Overtime is deadly. Tired surgeons have been found to be more prone to slip‘ups, and soldiers who get too little shuteye are more prone to miss targets.

A universal basic income would be the best way to give everyone the opportunity to do more unpaid but incredibly important work, such as caring for children and the elderly.

News reports following a natural disaster are almost always dominated by stories of looting and violence, but in many cases such stories turn out to be unfounded speculations based on rumour.

It’s actually more than 700 case studies that show that, especially in times of crisis, we show our best selves. And we get this explosion of altruism and cooperation. This happens again and again after natural disasters, after earthquakes and after floodings.

Poor people aren’t making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they’re living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.

My life philosophy is that you need a boring private life if you want to have a more exciting public life.

Countries with short workweeks consistently top gender‘ equality rankings. The central issue is achieving a more equitable distribution of work.

Contact is the best medicine against hate, racism and prejudice. It’s something that we should be very wary of, the more segregation we have, the more of a problem that’s going to be.

Societies tend to presume that poor people are unable to handle money. If they had any, people reason, the poor and homeless would probably spend it on fast food and cheap beer, not on fruit or education.

Only the work that generates money is allowed to count toward GDP. Little wonder, then, that we have organized education around feeding as many people as possible in bite-size flexible parcels into the employment establishment.

Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day.

There’s always selfish behavior. There are lots of examples of people hoarding. But we’ve seen in this pandemic that the vast majority of behavior from normal citizens is actually pro-social in nature. People are willing to help their neighbors.

Actually, it is precisely in overworked countries like Japan, England and the US that people watch an absurd amount of television. Up to four hours a day in England, which adds up to nine years over an average lifetime.

I think one of the most important facts of basic income would be that it’s not only a redistribution of income, but also of power. So the cleaners and bin men would have a lot more bargaining power.

It matters so much that from a very early age we encounter different kinds of different people, because that’s what real life should be about as well.

In the past 20 years scientists from very diverse disciplines – anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, psychologists – have all moved to a much more hopeful, optimistic view of human nature.

I am part of a broad social movement. Ten years ago, it would have unimaginable for some random Dutch historian to go viral when talking about taxes. Yet here we are.

The world view of the underdog socialist is encapsulated in the notion that the establishment has mastered the game of reason, judgment and statistics, leaving the left with emotion. Its heart is in the right place.

This is what a crisis does: It makes you question the status quo. That doesn’t mean that after a crisis we move into some kind of utopia. But it is an opportunity for political change.

The first thing we should acknowledge is that poverty is hugely expensive. It varies from country to country, but most of the time it’s around 3, 4 or 5% of GDP. If you look at what it would cost just to top up the income of all the poor people in a country, it would cost about 1% of GDP.

If I say most people are pretty decent that may sound nice and warm but actually it’s really radical and subversive and that’s why, all throughout history, those who have advocated a more hopeful view of human nature – often the anarchists – have been persecuted.

But the underdog socialists’ biggest problem isn’t that they are wrong. They are not. Their biggest problem is that they’re dull. Dull as a doorknob. They’ve got no story to tell; nor even the language to convey it in.

We know from scientific studies that infants as young as six months old can distinguish right from wrong and have a preference for the good over the bad. I think it’s important to design our education and our schools around that insight, to bring out the best in our kids.

What the underdog socialist has forgotten is that the story of the left ought to be a narrative of hope and progress.

If we assume the best in people, we can radically redesign our democracy and welfare states.

Most bayonets throughout history have probably not been used because soldiers just can’t do it, something holds them back… the same goes for shooting the enemy. We’ve got this fascinating evidence from the Second World War, and also from other wars, that most soldiers couldn’t do it.

It’s important to make a distinction between the news and journalism. The news is about recent, incidental and sensational events. It’s mostly about exceptions.

One of my rules for life is: ‘When in doubt, assume the best,’ because in the end, most people are pretty decent.

A lot of great things are going on. In many ways, the past 30 years have been the best in world history. But we can do much better. I prefer the word hope over optimism.

A Dutchman can’t easily get away from cheese. I was dropped into a cauldron of cheese when I was young.

We’ll all remember 2020 as an historic year. And for decades, people will be able to say, remember 2020. Remember when things were really tough. Who did we rely on? I think that could impact a whole generation.

The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things self-appointed experts think they need.

Year after year, politicians have drafted huge piles of legislation on the assumption that most people are not good. And we know the consequences of that policy: inequality, loneliness and mistrust.

From Scotland to India, and from Silicon Valley to Kenya, policymakers all over the world have become interested in basic income as an answer to poverty, unemployment and the bureaucratic behemoth of the modern welfare state.

Well, the news is mostly about things that go wrong, right? It’s about sensationalist incidents that happened today, instead of things that happen every day. So if you watch and follow a lot of the news, at the end of the day, you know exactly how the world is not working.

Believing in the good of humanity is a revolutionary act – it means that we don’t need all those managers and CEO‘s, kings and generals. That we can trust people to govern themselves and make their own decisions.

My hope is that the corona crisis will help bring us into a new age of cooperation and solidarity and a realization that we’re in this together.

Nowadays excessive work and pressure are status symbols. Time to oneself is sooner equated with unemployment and laziness, certainly in countries where the wealth gap has widened.

We like to think that people have to work for their money.

Remember: real politics isn’t about figureheads and seats in parliament. Real politics is about ideas. And there can be no doubt regarding the extreme ideas that have been gaining ground in the Netherlands for decades.