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Rutger Bregman

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52

first

2020-08-28

most recent

2020-08-28

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1

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podcast

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1. “about human nature because that's always where it had ended up where it ended up that people would say yeah, but what about human nature? Aren't people in the end just selfish? Maybe not like in a weird Nordic country, maybe not in Canada in the 1970s, but on average most people, if you scale these things up, will turn out to be selfish. That's just how it works. That was sort of made me think that I had to go a little bit deeper. Then the second thing that made me want to write this book is that I started to notice that in so many different scientific disciplines, a new view of human nature seemed to be emerging that so many specialists from different disciplines now have a bit more hopeful view of who we are as a species, but they often don't notice what's going on in the field next to theirs. Because academia, as you know, is so specialized these days, is that a psychologist doesn't often doesn't really know what's happening in evolutionary anthropology or in sociology.”

   2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “So I think two things. The first thing was that while I was on a book tour with my previous book Utopia for Realists, I started to get into the same situation time and time again. So the previous book was one of the ideas in there was the notion of a universal basic income. You know, we talked about that. The notion of just giving everyone free money, a monthly grant that's enough to pay for your basic needs to afford food, shelter, clothing, that kind of thing. Six years ago, it was a quite obscure idea. Now it's really moved into the mainstream. So in that book, I tried to show that there's actually a lot of convincing scientific evidence that this could actually work and people don't waste it. On drugs or alcohol or that they'll watch Netflix all day, but they actually find a new job, start a new company. There's good evidence that it might work on a bigger scale. But then again and again or thirty minutes of discussing this evidence with readers, I find myself in a very different debate.”

   2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source