Quotes from Rutger Bregman

Employees have been worrying about the rising tide of automation for 200 years now, and for 200 years employers have been assuring them that new jobs will naturally materialize to take their place.

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.

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.

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.

Instead of a universal basic income, we could have a basic income guarantee. Or, as economists prefer to call it, a negative income tax.

Private companies mostly manufacture medications that resemble what we've already got. They get it patented and, with a hefty dose of marketing, a legion of lawyers, and a strong lobby, can live off the profits for years.

History will tell you that borders are not inevitable, they hardly existed at the end of the 19th century.

Since the 70s and the 80s you see the rise of neoliberalism. The central dogma of neoliberalism was that most people are selfish. So, we started designing our institutions around that idea, our schools, our workplaces, our democracies. The government became less and less important.

People are always yearning for a bigger story to be part of, it's not enough to live our own private lives.

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

The greatest sin of the academic left is that it has become fundamentally aristocratic, writing in bizarre jargon that makes cliches seem abstruse. If you can't explain your ideal to a fairly intelligent 12-year-old, it's probably your own fault.

Literally every single sliver of technology that makes the iPhone a smartphone instead of a stupidphone - internet, GPS, touchscreen, battery, hard drive, voice recognition - was developed by researchers on the government payroll.

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.

I've solved my phone addiction by deleting all the apps I was addicted to - email, browser - and getting my wife to add parental controls, to limit access even further.

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.

The most daunting challenges of our times, from climate change to the ageing population, demand an entrepreneurial state unafraid to take a gamble.

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.

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.

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

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.

Most people would say the meaning of life is to make the world a little more beautiful, or nicer, or more interesting. But how? These days, our main answer to that is: through work.

I know that there are many excellent arguments for a universal form of basic income. Since everyone would get it, it would remove the stigma that dogs recipients of assistance and 'entitlements'.

A universal basic income means not only that millions of people would receive unconditional cash payments, but also that millions of people would have to cough up thousands more in taxes to fund it. This will make basic income politically a harder sell.