Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

In 2004, Harvard Professor (and now US Senator) Elizabeth Warren wrote a book along with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, called The Two-Income Trap. The book shows how middle-class families today are underperforming compared to those in previous generations, even though the addition of women to the workplace should have doubled incomes and therefore provided even greater financial security. Bregman notes a similar trend, and his assessment of the causes is mostly cultural. Feminism, for good or ill, created an expectation for women’s employment that shattered the possibility of a shortened work week for families. New technologies have largely eliminated the barriers between work and home, a trend that has vastly accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic, and working from home is a convenience but also a burden to the extent that the home becomes a place of work. Capitalism favors achievement, and thus overwork becomes a sign of status and importance. All of these points are true, but Warren and Tyagi’s book adds further considerations that strengthen Bregman’s overall point. The cost of living has dramatically escalated—and not just because people want to buy more things, as Bregman implies. The real cost of housing and healthcare has grown vastly more than wages. Job security is far more precarious than in the past, and workers are far more likely to have to change careers several times. This, in turn, makes it harder to build the social connections that can help alleviate the stress of working and raising a family, especially for women who experience the social expectation of being both workers and mothers. This is another example in which social values are clearly in tension with economic logic, and social values have thus had to twist themselves into impossible contortions to endure under increasingly forbidding conditions. Bregman’s proposal for a 15-hour work week helps show, at the very least, how social goods are as important, if not more so, than productivity. In addition, his proposal helps illustrate that prioritizing social goods over productivity would impact productivity only slightly, while marginal increases in productivity can wreak havoc on every other aspect of a person’s life. People have been conditioned to believe that inequality is a fact of life, that they must do everything in their power to keep from falling lower on the ladder, and that if they fail it is entirely their fault. Foregrounding the book’s theme on The Dangers of Inequality, Bregman makes the case that inequality itself—rather than “the poor”—should be the subject of critique, and that it is not fantastical to imagine a world in which the interests of everyday workers are at least as important as those of corporate bosses.