In Medieval Europe, there was an imaginary land called Cockaigne that the common folk would dream about. You arrive at Cockaigne by successfully eating through several miles of rice pudding, and once ushered into this glorious realm, pies and cakes rained down from the heavens, the rivers overflowed with wine, and there was free love, dancing, and leisure for all—from the noble to the clergymen to the serf. Seven hundred years later, we look at Western Europe and we see that the fantasy of Cockaigne has been realized: an overabundance of readily available food, murder rates one-fortieth of what they were in the Middle Ages, parties, and people ready to give and receive free love. Obesity is more likely than starvation.

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman argues in Utopia for Realists that we have realized this Cockaigne that our ancestors would have considered a utopia reserved for their fantasies, but that the dream is starting to go stale. We find ourselves in a historical moment where, once again, we need another Cockaigne: new horizons on which humanity can set its sights. A historical track record gives us reason to believe that dreaming of a better future is not naïve, but the path history has taken time and again. Bregman submits that it’s time to start dreaming again, and he gives us some ideas that could serve as ambitious guideposts to aim for.

One of the early attempts at utopian design sprang from the mind of the Italian artist Tommaso Companella (1568 - 1639). In 1602, Companella wrote a little treatise called The City of the Sun, in which he described a utopian society where everyone is required to love each other, holding private property is illegal, and the state supervises every aspect of private life—even intercourse. The intelligent can only procreate with the unintelligent, and the thin can only mate with the obese, in order to maintain some kind of social equilibrium. In this world, a web of spies reports anyone who violates these communal regulations, and rule breakers are publicly shamed until they beg the community to stone them to death.

To modern ears, this sounds much more dystopic than utopic—even on paper without any attempts at implementing it. Experiences with Nazi fascism, Stalinist Russia, and punitive theocracies in recent history have rightly taught us to be skeptical and concerned when societal plans get too grandiose or granular.

There are a couple ways to approach utopia as a concept: One is the “blueprint model,” like what Tommaso Campanella and others have used. It plans things out with a chilling degree of specificity, but thanks to Hannah Arendt and many other scholars who debunked the totalitarian mindset, looking for blueprints to perfect society is a quest that most have abandoned.

Thankfully, there is another way to think about utopia, even if it’s been virtually forgotten. The model involves asking probing, illuminating questions more than answering questions with unsettling specificity. Asking exploratory questions can help us create a rough sketch or outline of what the future could be like. It gives us signposts to move toward rather than a definitive map to get there.

We need dreamers to think up ideas that our generation considers crazy. Democracy, cars, cell phones, air travel, and vaccines would not exist without people who pushed at the liminal spaces between the known and the unknown. We need people who take bold and passionate stances, but, just as critically, who also know how to laugh at themselves and their personal beliefs.

There’s no question that history has its share of would-be utopias gone frighteningly sideways. But just as it would be shortsighted to reject an entire religion based on the behavior of one violent fringe radical, it would be irresponsible to stop hoping for a better world because some dreamers’ ideas calcified into something ugly. It is possible to stay an idealist without turning into an ideologue.

In 2009, an aid organization in London called Broadway ran an experiment involving 13 homeless men. Between run-ins with the law, legal fees, and damages to property, these street dwellers had cost the city £450,000 annually. When you consider that some of these men had been street-involved for more than four decades, that’s a hefty price tag.

These homeless men were each given £3,000. No trick questions. No hoops to jump through. No strings attached. Each was simply asked, “What do you think you need?” If you’re skeptical, so were the social workers who helped facilitate the experiment. But to their surprise, those given money only spent £800 over the course of the year, on average. One of the subjects had been a heroin addict for two decades, but he began to take gardening classes, sobered up, and learned to take care of himself. In an interview, he described the experience as things clicking for the first time in his life.

In under two years, seven of the 13 homeless individuals had found places to stay, two others were about to move into flats, and all had taken meaningful steps toward putting their lives back together. Some of the steps included attending classes for practical skills, checking into rehab, reconnecting with family, and giving thought to the future.

Not only did this experiment help these homeless individuals tremendously, it actually reduced expenses for the city and aid organizations. Including social worker’s pay, the effort cost £50,000. Compare that to the millions of pounds spent coddling, strong-arming, arresting, and guiding these men through a bureaucratic maze, and it’s not hard to conclude which option is preferable.

Experiments like this have repeated throughout the Global South, from Mexico to India, with similarly impressive results. One man named Bernard Omondi made two dollars a day at a west Kenyan quarry before he woke up to $500 dropped in his bank account—almost a year’s earnings for him. The money came from GiveDirectly, an organization that has realized the power of no-strings-attached funding to empower the poor. Just a few months later, when reporters went to Bernard’s village to follow up, they found that not only had Bernard’s income almost quadrupled, but his entire village was swimming in cash. Businesses were opening and buildings were finally getting repaired. Far from drinking away his funds as a cynic might expect, he’d made himself and his village far wealthier by purchasing a motorcycle to taxi people around and putting cash into his village’s economy.

This does grate against our intuitions that the poor are lazy, that they can’t handle the responsibility of money, that they’ll blow any surplus capital on booze. But the statistics upend these intuitions. A World Bank study found that, around the world, when the poor get no-strings-attached money, tobacco use and alcohol use go down in 82 percent of cases. More and more, aid organizations are realizing that these “unconditional cash disbursements” are far more useful to the poor, and that they eliminate loads of wasteful bureaucracy. Additionally, they are linked with lower rates of crime, infant mortality, malnutrition, and teenage pregnancy, and with higher test scores and economic growth in impoverished areas.

It turns out the ones who best know what the poor need are the poor themselves. Being poor doesn’t mean you’re stupid; it means, fundamentally, that you don’t have cash. As one economist has quipped, “You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don’t have any bootstraps.” These streamlined, direct disbursements for the poor give them bootstraps to pull up on.

In 1967, 80 percent of Americans were in favor of guaranteed basic income. Even conservative President Richard Nixon was pushing a progressive bill for a modest guaranteed basic income (about $10,000 a year in today’s currency). The bill made it through the House of Representatives twice and choked in the Senate because Democrats wanted more generous disbursements for the poor. Both sides of the aisle agreed that basic income made sense, but disagreed on the amount.

At that same time, Seattle and Denver were facilitating pilot programs for guaranteed basic income, and researchers found that crime went down, health care costs went down, and children performed better in the classroom. There was precedent that justified expanding these efforts to something pan-national.

Despite the heartening developments and a large majority of the American people’s confidence in guaranteed basic income, Nixon lost the plot thanks to a misunderstood case study from England in the 1800s. One of Nixon’s advisors, Martin Anderson, gave Nixon a six-page summary of the Speenhamland experiment. The rural English town of Speenhamland was the setting of a radical experiment begun in 1795. At that time, the French Revolution was well underway and the discontent was fomenting and spreading to other countries. Speenhamland’s leadership decided to alter drastically the way they helped the poor. They guaranteed a basic, subsistence-level income for anyone who was needy, and they effectively removed the line between what is often called the “deserving poor” and “undeserving poor.” They tied the basic income to the price of bread and offered disbursements relative to the size of the family.

More than three decades later, there was a riot among agricultural workers in Speenhamland that led to arrests of thousands and even executions. The British government decided to investigate what this Speenhamland experiment had been about. To sum up the 13,000-page report to the British government, Speenhamland had been an unmitigated failure that had made the poor lazy and entitled. According to the report, once the guaranteed basic income had been stopped, the poor began working harder, became more careful with their money, and moral, social, and even matrimonial decisions improved.

Prominent thinkers on the right and left, from Jeremy Bentham and Alexis de Tocqueville to John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Polanyi agreed that the Speenhamland experiment was a miserable mistake not to be repeated. Polanyi, the economist whom Nixon’s advisor quoted extensively in his brief, was especially influential and vocal about Speendhamland’s failure. Nixon changed his tune when he came across the story of Speenhamland. His pivot turned the tide against unconditional basic income for poor families and altered the course of history.

The tragedy of it all is that the Speenhamland study was a sham—but a sham that has shaped (or debilitated) political will and intellectual discourse for centuries. The research that the Royal Commission Report conducted on Speenhamland was notably the first attempt by a government to rely on organized research efforts to form policy, but the research was shot through with problems. For example, a mere tenth of the surveys sent out were ever filled out, the questions were leading, and the majority of the people who did fill out the surveys were the social and religious elites who were against the experiment from the beginning. Clergy were especially concerned that the experiment would make the poor lazy and unproductive—regardless of the evidence to the contrary. Very few of those who actually benefited from the program were surveyed. Most egregiously, the vast majority of the Royal Commission Report on Speenhamland was written before any data was ever gathered. It would seem that certain interested and influential parties wanted the report to reflect certain conclusions, regardless of what the on-the-ground-reality was.

So let’s take a step back: This Speenhamland report, which has impacted key pieces of legislation and shaped the perceptions of the public for more than 50 years, is a joke. But for more than 150 years, it has calcified the myth of the lazy poor and harmed generations of poor people who could have benefited from the financial support and had a better shot at getting their lives together. The idea that they’d fritter it away on alcohol and drugs is another assumption as bogus as the Speenhamland case study itself—and yet the legacy of the Speenhamland misinformation remains with us, deeply ingrained in our minds and cultural psyche. If we want to be honest, we have to do the hard work of retraining some of our basic intuitions about human nature, about the poor, and about what policies we have been told would never work and never help.

In 1930, world renowned economist John Maynard Keynes delivered an unusual speech “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” to an audience in Madrid. He argued that the standard of living would at least quadruple during the next century, which meant that by 2030, people would only have to work about 15 hours a week. According to Keynes, humanity’s biggest problem would be figuring out how to use leisure time well.

That all might sound absurd at first glance, but Keynes was observing a historical trend of diminishing hours already well underway. During the Industrial Revolution, a 70-hour work week was common (and even necessary) for a poor family to make ends meet. And this was without sick leave, vacation time, or weekends. This was normal for adults and for children. Too much free time for the poor would lead to depravity and pandemonium, according to the nobility.

The first group to establish an eight-hour workday were stone workers in Australia in the 1850s. By the late 1800s, the workweek was down to 60 hours. In 1926, in a meeting of 30 or so American tycoons, Henry Ford was the only business owner who thought reducing hours would help productivity. He proposed a 5-day work week, which everyone else thought was insane at first. But within a decade, everyone was marching to Ford’s drum. Ford found that his company’s productivity increased when his employees worked less. 

In 1933, a bill adopting a 30-hour work week passed in the Senate, but corporate influences mucked up its passage in the House. In 1956, Nixon, who was running for Vice President at the time, enticed voters with talk of four-day work weeks just around the corner. By 1970, sociologists were making prognostications about the coming end of work.

Since the 1980s, trends toward shorter work weeks slowed down, and then reversed. In the ensuing decades, time at work has been on the rise. One Harvard Business School study of professionals found that the hours people are working or near their phone on stand-by to text or email is up to 80 or 90 hours per week. Far from death by boredom or not knowing what to do with leisure, we are working ourselves into early graves.

Keynes’ predictions were off, but he wasn’t crazy. Far from a case of wishful thinking or backlash from reality, there are numerous studies that show the value of leisure and that there isn’t always a 1:1 correlation between hours worked and productivity. Henry Ford found that 60-hour work weeks yielded greater productivity than 40-hour work weeks, but only for the first four weeks, after which productivity dropped significantly. The cornflake tycoon W.K. Kellogg found his workers’ productivity increased when he reduced their workload to six hours a day. He was able to hire hundreds of new employees and dramatically reduce the number of accidents.

More recent studies have called into question whether 40-hour weeks are too much, as well—especially in intellect-heavy fields. Employers need not worry about productivity. Leisure is not only good for their workers’ health (as essential as a healthy diet), but also boosts the quality and quantity of work they do produce. Fewer hours would mean better work, less stress, fewer accidents and mistakes, more employment opportunities, and reduction of economic inequality. A 15-hour work week sounds unfeasible to our ears right now, but we need to start reintroducing a reduction of hours as an important political aspiration.

“Won’t all the extra leisure feed into the problem of excessive amounts of time given to phones and TVs?” This line of reasoning is no different than the nobility’s belief centuries ago that incessant work was a solution to alcoholism. It wasn’t—it seemed to encourage more drinking. Similarly, it’s the most overworked countries that devote obscene amounts of time to television and phones.

Almost 75 percent of the world’s border fences and walls were built after 2000. The existence of these structures is a very recent phenomenon. By sealing off more and more borders in an attempt to protect ourselves, we are essentially creating geographic prisons. This behavior is a rejection of the human penchant for wanderlust in our DNA. We’ve been migrating throughout our history, and surveys find that 700 million people would move to another country if they could.

Everything else flows seamlessly across borders—from information to technologies to cargo—but not people. Worldwide elimination of tariffs and other trade barriers to this cargo would generate $65 billion. But if Harvard economist Lant Pritchett’s estimates are correct, we are leaving a thousand times that on the table by rejecting open borders for people. That’s right: Saying no to open borders means saying no to $65 trillion. To put that enormous number into perspective, open borders would double the “gross world product.”

The common m.o. of governments and philanthropists is not to open their arms to refugees, but to open their purse strings and support them from afar. But the sad truth is that aid to developing countries is often misallocated. According to the World Bank, 85 percent of all Western foreign aid during the 20th century ended up being used “different[ly] than intended.” That means that of the $5 trillion spent on alleviating poverty over the past 50 years, the vast majority ended up somewhere else. That’s almost $4,000 in foreign aid down the toilet every second.

When funds do reach their intended targets, it is difficult to determine how effectively they alleviate poverty. “Unclear” is probably the kindest way to describe the results of research. Instead of trying to bring money to the poor where they are, why don’t we allow the poor to come to the Lands of Plenty where the money originated? It is less of an economic strain on wealthy countries to allow people to come and work in the Lands of Plenty than constantly tossing out money that rarely makes it to the poor. Moreover, research from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development indicates that for every dollar poor countries get in foreign aid, they lose three dollars in tax evasion. Why not allow people the opportunity to leave countries where corruption runs this rampant?

The stock rebuttals against open borders don’t hold up against the data. One of the most careless arguments against immigration is that they’re all terrorists or criminals. But research from the University of Warwick on migration patterns between 145 countries found a connection between immigration and declining rates of terrorist activity. People who immigrate to the United States hoping for a new life are less likely to commit crimes or end up incarcerated than US citizens—and so are the children of immigrants. Though illegal immigration to the United States tripled between 1990 and 2013, the nation’s crime rate dropped significantly during that same period of time. Other arguments against open borders reflect a fear of losing social cohesion. Sociologist Robert Putnam’s famous 2007 study that ingrained this fear in the hearts of Americans has been thoroughly falsified by 90 studies that found no correlation at all between diversity and social cohesion.

“But they’ll take all our jobs!” is another common refrain. Yet studies find that immigration increases the number of opportunities available for everyone. A larger workforce leads to greater consumption, which leads to higher demand, and more jobs. It’s not a game of musical chairs, where we have more people and not enough seats. New arrivals are coming, but they’re bringing their own chairs to the party.

Yet another stubborn myth is that they will never leave. But ironically, opening up borders is the best way to ensure that people will not just freely come, but also freely go. In the 1960s, millions of Mexicans came to the United States, but 85 percent returned to Mexico. Since the United States has clamped down on border security in the past several decades, that percentage is down to just 7 percent. 

The movement toward open borders doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing enterprise. It would be absurd to open up everything all at once, but it is even more absurd to continue putting a stranglehold on the flow of human beings across borders—especially given the economic benefits that it would bring to not just immigrants but to the nations taking them in. Migration might rattle status quos and shock some systems, but historically, it has been among the great catalysts for progress.

Many people have heard of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. What most people don’t know is that Hayek and Friedman were part of an influential society of 40 or so neoliberal economists, historians, and philosophers known as the Mont Pèlerin Society (per their inaugural meeting in the tiny town of Mont Pèlerin, Switzerland in 1947). Hayek was the society’s first president, and he appointed Friedman to the presidency in 1970. Out of this small society came at least eight Nobel Prize recipients, and ideas that have altered the world in which we live. The members came together as a group decidedly outside the intellectual mainstream in which socialism was gaining ground. At the time, Hayek went so far as to remark that, “There are…very few people left today who are not socialist.”

However strongly you agree or disagree with Hayek’s or Friedman’s ideas, there is no question that they prove the power of ideas. Politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the shift toward policies and a society that are decidedly free-market-friendly are all downstream from this small fringe group of intellectuals. The irony is that the Mont Pèlerin Society’s movement started almost a century ago—so avant-garde at the time—has stopped moving and become the old guard, vigilantly snuffing out any ideas that could disturb the pro-capitalism status quo.

The Mont Pèlerin Society shows us what having the courage to hold to a dissenting opinion can achieve. The Society’s ideas once seemed crazy, but now they’re commonplace. It’s time to hoist the sails once again and find what’s politically unlikely now so that it will become increasingly tenable later. Unconditional basic income, open borders, and 15-hour work weeks sound insane to many right now—just like Hayek’s and Friedman’s ideas did almost a century ago.

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