Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer - A roadmap to utopia (with Rutger Bregman)

A roadmap to utopia (with Rutger Bregman)

06/25/19 • 48 min

Rutger Bregman, who The Guardian has called “the Dutch wunderkind of new ideas”, joins us this week to daydream a better future. Bregman won international fame by taking on everyone from Tucker Carlson to the wealthy elites at Davos on the topic of income inequality, and here he lays out a positive economic vision using the pillars of his book ‘Utopia for Realists’: a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek.

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian and author. He has published four books on history, philosophy, and economics. His book ‘History of Progress’ was awarded the Belgian Liberales prize for best nonfiction book of 2013, and the Dutch edition of ‘Utopia for Realists’ became a national bestseller and sparked a basic income movement that made international headlines. The book has been translated into 31 languages. Bregman has twice been nominated for the prestigious European Press Prize for his journalism work at The Correspondent.

Twitter: @rcbregman

Previous Episode

Picking up where Darwin left off (LIVE with David Sloan Wilson)

Classical economics argues that the economy is an equilibrium system—that for every winner there must be a loser. In this episode, author and professor David Sloan Wilson joins Nick live on stage at Town Hall Seattle to argue that economies are actually evolutionary systems—and once we shed the winner-take-all philosophy that has dominated Econ 101 classes for a century, we can change economic policy for the better.

David Sloan Wilson is an American evolutionary biologist, a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University, and co-founder of the Evolution Institute. In addition to his latest book ‘This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution’, he has also written ‘Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society’, and ‘Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives’.

Twitter: @David_S_Wilson

Further reading: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/246844/this-view-of-life-by-david-sloan-wilson/9781101870204/

http://evonomics.com/the-new-invisible-hand-david-sloan-wilson/

http://evonomics.com/complexity-economics-shows-us-that-laissez-faire-fail-nickhanauer/

Next Episode

Our full conversation with Governor Jay Inslee

In March of this year, Washington state Governor Jay Inslee announced he is running for president on a platform of combating climate change. He has already succeeded in centering the political conversation around this central crisis of our time. We spoke with the governor for our April episode about the economics of climate change; here is our full unedited conversation.

Jay Inslee first got into public service to fight for a new public high school in his community. He then went on to serve in the state legislature and in 1992 was elected to represent the 4th Congressional District in rural Eastern Washington. He later moved back to the Seattle area and was elected to Congress in 1998 where he served until 2012. In 2012 he was elected Washington's 23rd governor and is currently serving in his second term.

Twitter: @JayInslee

Links:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/5/4/18527458/climate-change-jay-inslee-for-president-2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/us/politics/jay-inslee-on-the-issues.html