A Couple More

Rutger Bregman is an interesting Netherlands guy who has so far given us “Utopia for Realists”, “Humankind” and “Moral Ambition” . Recently he wrote a fascinating article about AI

So. What do we do? Let me start with what we should not do. There is a temptation to look at all of this and conclude: shut it down. Pull the plug. Bring in the Luddites. Smash the machines.. And I get the impulse. When you stack up the scale of risk, the disregard for democracy, the hubris of the people in charge, the cleanest response feels like a moratorium. Just say no. It is, I think, the wrong answer. The reason is brutally simple. It doesn’t work. Stop the data centers in California, and they get built in Texas. Stop them in Texas, and they get built in Abu Dhabi. Stop them in democracies – the places with civil liberties, with judicial review, with a free press, with worker protections – and you hand the future to autocracies.

My point is not, absolutely not, that we have to let AI rip. My point is that abandoning the field is not the same as stopping the technology. This is the left’s version of climate denial. Refusing to engage seriously, on the assumption that if we just shout no loudly enough, the future will go away. It won’t. So what does work? Three things, at minimum.

• One: State capacity. We need way, way more AI expertise and talent inside the government. The UK was early on this. They built an AI Security Institute: a serious arm of the state that actually evaluates frontier models, the way the FDA evaluates new drugs. I think every serious country needs a well-funded institute like that.

• Two: International coordination. We have been here before. In 1949, the United States and the Soviet Union both had nuclear weapons, and humanity briefly looked extinction in the eye. Out of that came treaties. Imperfect, yes, but they bought us decades of survival. We need something equivalent for AI.

• Three: The free world has to build.. The US – with its increasingly fascist government – currently owns 74% of the world’s compute, China has 14%, Europe less than 7% and all other countries combined less than 5%. I’m really worried about the middle powers, and Europe in particular. So far, Europe has been pretty good at regulating AI, but terrible at building it. In fact, all the American giants – Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Alphabet – are individually worth more than the entire German or French stock market.

The good news is that Europe does have more leverage than it often thinks. The company ASML for example is less than an hour from where I am right now in the Netherlands. It makes the lithography machines without which TSMC in Taiwan cannot fabricate the chips, without which Anthropic and OpenAI cannot train their models. The democratic countries, working together, still control significant chokepoints in this supply chain. That is real power. But my fellow progressives in Europe really need to understand that our welfare state, our way of life, is at stake. Just think it through. If AI does much of the work, but the profits flow to a handful of American giants that we barely tax – while European workers lose their jobs – then the tax base that funds our healthcare, our pensions, our unemployment insurance just… evaporates. There’s one thing I can’t emphasize enough: democratic, liberal and humanitarian values are wonderful, but they are worthless if you don’t have the strength to back them up. And in this new world, compute is the new power. So no more NIMBY-ism. We need massive investments and fast permitting of data centers to keep up, or we’ll be digitally colonized. Anyone who’s not at the table will be on the menu. Now, none of this works – none of it – without a positive vision. And this, I think, is where liberals and the left have most badly failed. Twelve years ago, I wrote a book called “Utopia for Realists”. I complained that the left mainly knew what it was against. Against austerity, against the establishment, against homophobia, against racism, against billionaires. But it lacked a positive vision of where it wanted to go. My argument was that we should stop being so timid in our political imagination. I argued for a universal basic income, for the complete eradication of poverty, and I argued for a goal that the brilliant economist John Maynard Keynes laid out almost a century ago, in 1930…the fifteen-hour work week. Keynes thought it was inevitable. He looked at the trajectory of productivity growth and concluded that by 2030 his grandchildren would be working a quarter as much as he did, because the machines would be doing the rest. The strange thing is, he was right about the productivity, but he was wrong about who would benefit. The fifteen-hour work week was technically achievable by the 1980s, but it didn’t happen because the productivity gains were captured. By capital, shareholders, and a rentier class. So wages stagnated, hours rose, and inequality exploded.

If we let AI play out the same way, this is what we’ll get: a handful of trillionaires who will own the tools that do most of the world’s productive labor. Everyone else will be redundant – not in the dignified, retire-early-and-take-up-gardening sense, but in the cruel, anxious, gig-economy sense. Universal poverty in a world of unimaginable abundance. And yet, I believe there’s another path. The path some of the greatest thinkers actually promised us. Benjamin Franklin predicted that four hours of work a day would eventually be enough. John Stuart Mill thought technology should be used to shorten the workweek as much as possible. Karl Marx imagined a world where we could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and discuss philosophy after dinner. And Oscar Wilde looked forward to the day when intelligent machines would become, in his words, “the property of all.” The whole point of building the most productive economy in history was that we would no longer have to spend our lives doing work that bored us, just to put food on the table. So I think we should demand much more than just AI safety. We should demand AI that’s built to help us flourish. That dream, the real dream of modernity, is finally within reach. Universal basic wealth: every citizen with an automatic stake in the productive infrastructure of their society. Full unemployment, in the original meaning of that phrase: freedom from forced labour. The zero-hour work week, finally. That was the promise. But none of it happens automatically. Remember: the eight-hour workday was not given to us, we took it from the robber barons. Twenty years ago, Al Gore stood on his scissor lift and showed us a line that went off the chart. The world he warned us about did arrive, but the political response was so weak and so half-hearted, that we are now living with consequences. We are about to make the same mistake, perhaps even worse, because this timeline is shorter. In 2005, climate denial was a problem of the right, and the left rolled its eyes. In 2026, AI denial is a problem of the left, and the oligarchs are laughing. So I want to be very direct, especially with the people who think of themselves as my political family. Stop the denial. Stop pretending this is hype. Stop calling it a lumbering stochastic pattern-matching parrot. Wake up and pay attention. Vote for politicians who aren’t in the pockets of big tech. Build state capacity. Push your governments into international coalitions that actually have leverage. Demand transparency. Demand safety standards. Demand a share of the wealth. And dare to fight for a wildly better future.

What is Economics For? - rethinking a discipline in crisis is an excellent book by 
Richard Murphy (2026)

Economics is supposed to explain how the world works. It does not. Or rather, it explains how a particular version of the world works, which is one that suits those who benefit most from the arrangements it describes and defends. This book is an attempt to do something different. Over the past fifty years, since I first sat down to study economics as an undergraduate, I have been wrestling with a discipline that seemed to me, even then, to be asking the wrong questions in the wrong way for the wrong reasons. The intervening decades have not changed that view. If anything, they have confirmed it.

What I have done here is return to the questions that economics should always have been asking but largely has not. I have done so by taking fifty thinkers economists, philosophers, historians, scientists, and moral reformers, who have in come way influenced by own thinking for better or worse over that time and asked what the most important question raised by each of them might be, and what answering it honestly would require of us today. These are not comfortable questions. They are questions about justice, power, money, democracy, and the limits of the planet we inhabit. They are questions about why;

• we tolerate poverty in wealthy societies,

• why we allow finance to destabilise the lives of ordinary people,

• why we pretend that the household budget of a currency-issuing

government is the same as a family trying to make ends meet at the end of

the month, and

• why we have built a global economy that is consuming the conditions of its

own survival.

The thinkers gathered here span millennia and traditions. Some are celebrated insiders; others spent their careers as awkward voices that mainstream economics found it convenient to ignore. Some I agree with almost entirely; others I have included precisely because I believe their errors are instructive. All of them, in their different ways, illuminate something that the dominant economics of our age prefers to leave in the dark.

The book is organised as a journey — from the moral foundations of economics, through its origins as a discipline, through the realities of capitalism and the failures of the frameworks designed to manage it, to the thinkers who have tried to imagine something better. It ends with me. That was not my original intention. It was suggested by colleagues whose judgment I trust, and I have accepted their case, not out of vanity, but because this series, in the end, is about where fifty years of thinking has led, and it seemed honest to say so. Each chapter asks a question. I believe these are the questions that matter most. Whether economics, as currently practised, can answer them is another matter. My view, which will become clear enough as you read, is that it mostly cannot — not because the questions are too hard, but because answering them honestly would require the discipline to confront the interests it has spent too long serving. That is what this book is for.