A career consists of 2,000 workweeks, and how you spend that time is one of the most important decisions of your life. Still, millions of people are stuck in in mind-numbing, pointless, or just plain harmful jobs.

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There’s an antidote to this waste of talent, and it’s called moral ambition. Moral ambition is the will to be among the best, but with different measures of success. Not a fancy title, fat salary, or corner office, but a career dedicated to the best solutions to the world’s biggest problems— whether that means tackling climate change, making pandemics history or fighting Big Tobacco.

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“Brisk and persuasive… [an] optimist’s manifesto… Bregman’s un-preachy and persuasive writing style makes profound change look easy.”—The Financial Times

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“Vivid and often genuinely inspiring… More than a self-help manual ... [Moral Ambition] offers a bracingly hopeful perspective, insisting on the necessity of doing all you can to allow yourself to be sensitized and resensitized to that which eats away at the dignity not only of humanity but (an important element in Bregman's argument) of the entire living environment.”―The Guardian

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It's a belief that unites the left and right, psychologists and philosophers, writers and historians. It drives the headlines that surround us and the laws that touch our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Dawkins, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we're taught, are by nature selfish and governed by self-interest.

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Humankind makes a new argument: that it is realistic, as well as revolutionary, to assume that people are good. By thinking the worst of others, we bring out the worst in our politics and economics too.

Universal basic income. A 15-hour workweek. Open borders. Utopia for Realists shows how we can build an ideal world today.

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In Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman shows that we can construct a society with visionary ideas that are, in fact, wholly implementable. Every milestone of civilisation – from the end of slavery to the beginning of democracy – was once considered a utopian fantasy. New utopian ideas such as universal basic income and a fifteen-hour work week can become reality in our lifetime.From a Canadian city that once completely eradicated poverty, to Richard Nixon's near implementation of a basic income for millions of Americans, Bregman takes us on a journey through history, beyond the traditional left-right divides, as he introduces ideas whose time has come.

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