A visitor from the Middle Ages would be amazed by how advanced we are. In addition, our understanding of technology is at a point where it seems like we’re living in the future. Smallpox has been eradicated and because fewer people die from disease, life expectancy on the African continent is increasing by four days every week. We’re also safer for example, the murder rate is lower in Western Europe than it was centuries ago. Things are changing so rapidly that the price of solar power has dropped by 99 percent since 1980.īecause of this, in the last 100 years, billions of people have achieved a level of stability and comfort that would have seemed impossible to our predecessors.Īfter years of being hungry, people are now more likely to be obese than starving. There has been an explosion in global wealth since the Industrial Revolution. The average Italian today is 15 times richer than in 1880. In the past, there was a lot of economic growth. This was despite many major inventions and scientific discoveries over those years including Galileo, Newton, the Enlightenment era and printing press. In six centuries’ time after that, they earned about the same amount. People had it bad for centuries until very recently when things started to get better thanks to scientific discoveries and technological advances.Īccording to historians, the average Italian in 1300 made approximately $1,600. Big Idea #1: Today’s world should be a paradise, but it’s leaving us strangely dissatisfied.

We’ll also learn how GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is a fundamentally unhelpful measure of progress and what single policy change could make the world twice as rich. In this article, we’ll learn about why giving people cash is the best way to help them. We need to imagine a new utopia where we change society and the economy in order for everyone’s lives to be better. Millions of people live in poverty, when there’s enough money to end it completely. We are working harder than ever, even though we have more resources and wealth than before. The problem is that we aren’t even asking basic questions. So how do you define your utopia? What do you visualize when you imagine a better life? For example, most people would think of having an iPhone or being able to travel around the country as something great. With this, our standards for what is good and bad are different than they were in the past. Most of us live in a world where we have access to many things that people did not have just a few decades ago. 1-Page Summary of Utopia For Realists Overview

Utopia for the realist