The beginning of Dutch author Rutger Bregman’s bestselling book, Utopia for Realists, is peppered with the kind of platitudes you might hear from a motivational speaker wielding a laser pointer at a powerpoint presentation.

"This book isn’t an attempt to predict the future, it’s an attempt to unlock the future.”

"Today, sadly enough, our dreams can’t even begin before we are woken up.”

"It’s time to return to Utopian thinking.”

The ideas Rutger Bregman puts forward haven’t fallen on deaf ears: they’ve earned the 28-year-old a booming international following and sparked a radical social movement.

His proposed solutions for the world’s problems - and plan for humankind to find Utopia - sound suspiciously simple.

Hand out free money, he argues, to empower the vulnerable and end global poverty.

Work for fifteen hours a week, he says, because a frightening number of jobs are useless and unpaid work in our society is grossly undervalued.

Open up our borders, because the fear of immigrants “stealing jobs” is unfounded.

Is all of it just far-fetched enough to work?

Meet Rutger Bregman

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Rutger Bregman is fond of an idea that Hack, we have to admit, isn’t: don’t pay too much attention to the news.

“The news is always about exceptions, about things that go wrong - corruption, crises, terrorism,” Rutger told Hack.

“So if you watch a lot of the news, at the end of the day you know exactly how the world isn’t working.

“You never see a headline that says, ‘child mortality declined by 0.000001% today’, because that’s happening every day. We’ve seen a decline of child mortality in the past 20, 30 years of about 50 per cent.

It’s the most awesome development in world history probably, but you never hear about it.”

This argument is key to Rutger Bregman’s big thinking. Compared to the rest of history, the world right now is pretty damn good, he points out. Life expectancy is climbing, extreme poverty is dropping, as is crime; we’re getting smarter, and technology is moving so quickly that we’re on the cusp of driverless cars and 3D printing dramatically changing how we go about our daily lives.

That’s not to say that we’ve got everything. But if someone in the 18th Century time-traveled to 2017, they’d think we really were living in Utopia (or, at least, living in a world where we’re extremely likely to live over the age of 5, and where we don’t tend to spend breakfast worrying about smallpox killing our whole family.)

“The big problem of today is not so much that we don’t have it good, but that we have no vision of where we want to go next,” Rutger told Hack.

“If you just think about it, every milestone of civilisation - the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women - they were all a utopian fantasy once.

“The problem is, we have no new utopian visions, and that’s why I wrote the book.”

Radical idea #1: let’s work less

One of the ideas Rutger Bregman is most passionate about is work - and how employees should be doing less of it, not more.

It goes against election-winning phrases like ‘jobs and growth’, and it’s totally incongruous with the kind of culture that sees companies celebrate employees who are so over-worked, they give birth on the job.

In the 2017 workforce, there’s a cavernous hole of meaningless jobs that don’t actually need to exist, Rutger argues.

“One of the biggest taboos of today is that a huge amount of the jobs that we’ve got right now are actually useless.

Politicians to the left and right say we want more jobs, we want more employment. But a huge amount of people are working at jobs that don’t need to exist.”

But before you defend your work as being irreplaceable and crucial, he’s not talking about every kind of job.

“Now I’m not talking about the teachers, the care workers or the garbage men here. If they stopped working we’re all going to be in trouble.

“I’m talking about consultants, corporate lawyers and bankers - if they go on strike, maybe that’s not going to be a very big problem.”

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Will someone please think of the farmers and tradies?

Rutger’s ideas for a shorter working week didn’t convince a lot of triple j listeners.

“I’m a tradie and self employed. My company has an apprentice and we turn over on average $15-20 K a week. Who will hire me at $500 per hour??,” someone wrote to the triple j textline.

“You can come and pay my bills mate. How do you suggest people survive, the cost of everything continues to rise,” someone else said.

“If farmers worked 15 hours a week we'd all starve,” another pointed out.

And someone else said that Rutger’s idea assumes that everyone hates what they do: “I work 70 hours a week and I love my job.”

But Rutger Bregman argues that working less (however we actually figure out how to do that) could be in everyone’s best interests.

If you look at the countries with the shortest working weeks right now, they’re also the countries with the highest social capital, where people go to the theatre, volunteers work and participate.

“If we have the time to live the good life, then we’ll be able to do so. In countries with the longest working weeks, people there watch the most amount of television. [They] don’t have the energy to something really valuable.”

Radical idea #2: give everyone free money

Seriously.

Rutger Bregman has championed the idea of a universal basic income. The idea is simple: instead of pouring money into frontline services the help society’s most vulnerable (the homeless population, for example), just give them money instead, and let them decide how they’ll spend it.

“What’s really exciting right now is that the idea of a universal basic income to just completely eradicate poverty by giving everyone the means to decide for themselves what they should do with their lives,” Rutger told Hack.

“That idea is really conquering the world. I first wrote about it four or five years ago - and no one knew what I was talking about. And now Finland is going to do an experiment, Canada is interested in the idea. Around the globe people are thinking about it and that makes me really helpful.”

I think [universal basic incomes] will give everyone the freedom to decide for themselves what to make of their lives, and how to contribute to the common good.”

You can read more about universal basic income here. Do you think Rutger Bregman’s ideas are too good to be true? Would they ever work? Let us know in the comments.