Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  23. Patrick Kingsley, ‘Participatory democracy in Porto Alegre’, Guardian (10 September 2012).

  24. Serageldin et al., ‘Assessment of Participatory Budgeting in Brazil’.

  25. Michael Touchton and Brian Wampler, ‘Improving Social Well-Being Through New Democratic Institutions’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 47, Issue 10 (2013).

  26. ‘Back to the Polis: Direct Democracy’, The Economist (17 September 1994).

  27. David Van Reybrouck, Against Elections. The Case for Democracy (London, 2016).

  28. ‘Communism’, oxforddictionaries.com.

  29. Graeber, Debt, pp. 94–102.

  30. Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, Vol. 162, Issue 3859 (13 December 1968).

  31. John Noble Wilford, ‘A Tough-minded Ecologist Comes to Defense of Malthus’, New York Times (30 June 1987).

  32. Ian Angus, ‘The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons’, Climate & Capitalism (25 August 2008).

  33. John A. Moore, ‘Science as a Way of Knowing–Human Ecology’, American Zoologist, Vol. 25, Issue 2 (1985), p. 602.

  34. Tim Harford, ‘Do You Believe in Sharing?’ Financial Times (30 August 2013).

  35. Ibid.

  36. Officially: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

  37. Tine de Moor, ‘The Silent Revolution: A New Perspective on the Emergence of Commons, Guilds, and Other Forms of Corporate Collective Action in Western Europe’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 53, Issue S16 (December 2008).

  38. The classic work on this process is Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, 2001). Originally published in 1944.

  39. Tine de Moor, ‘Homo Cooperans. Institutions for collective action and the compassionate society’, Utrecht University Inaugural Lecture (30 August 2013).

  40. See, for example, Paul Mason, Postcapitalism. A Guide to Our Future (London, 2015).

  41. See, for example, Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London, 2019).

  42. Damon Jones and Ioana Elena Marinescu, ‘The Labor Market Impacts of Universal and Permanent Cash Transfers: Evidence from the Alaska Permanent Fund’, NBER Working Paper (February 2018).

  43. I’ve also written about this study in North Carolina and about universal basic income elsewhere. See Utopia for Realists. And How We Can Get There (London, 2017), pp. 51–4. I now prefer the term ‘citizen’s dividend’ over ‘basic income’ to underscore that we’re talking about proceeds from communal property.

  44. Peter Barnes, With Liberty and Dividends For All. How To Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough (Oakland, 2014).

  45. Scott Goldsmith, ‘The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend: An Experiment in Wealth Distribution’, Basic Income European Network (September 2002), p. 7.

  Part 5 The Other Cheek

  1. Michael Garofalo, ‘A Victim Treats His Mugger Right’, NPR Story Corps (28 March 2008).

  2. Matthew 5:46.

  16 Drinking Tea with Terrorists

  1. For a clear overview of Norway’s prison system, see Ryan Berger, ‘Kriminalomsorgen: A Look at the World’s Most Humane Prison System in Norway’, SSRN (11 December 2016).

  2. A guard says this in Michael Moore’s documentary, Where to Invade Next? (2015).

  3. Quoted in Baz Dreizinger, ‘Norway Proves That Treating Prison Inmates As Human Beings Actually Works’, Huffington Post (8 March 2016).

  4. ‘About the Norwegian Correctional Service’, www.kriminalomsorgen.no (visited 17 December 2018).

  5. Dreizinger, ‘Norway Proves That Treating Prison Inmates As Human Beings Actually Works’.

  6. Manudeep Bhuller et al., ‘Incarceration, Recidivism, and Employment’, Institute of Labor Economics (June 2018).

  7. Berger ‘Kriminalomsorgen: A Look at the World’s Most Humane Prison System in Norway’, p. 20.

  8. Erwin James, ‘Bastoy: the Norwegian Prison That Works’, Guardian (4 September 2013).

  9. Genevieve Blatt et al., The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (1967), p. 159.

  10. Ibid., p. 173.

  11. Jessica Benko, ‘The Radical Humaneness of Norway’s Halden Prison’, New York Times (26 March 2015).

  12. Robert Martinson, ‘What Works? Questions and Answers about Prison Reform’, The Public Interest (Spring 1974).

  13. Michelle Brown, The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle (New York, 2009), p. 171.

  14. Robert Martinson, ‘New Findings, New Views: A Note of Caution Regarding Sentencing Reform’, Hofstra Law Review, Vol. 7, Issue 2 (1979).

  15. Quoted in Adam Humphreys, ‘Robert Martinson and the Tragedy of the American Prison’, Ribbonfarm (15 December 2016).

  16. Quoted in Jerome G. Miller, ‘The Debate on Rehabilitating Criminals: Is It True that Nothing Works?’ Washington Post (March 1989).

  17. Richard Bernstein, ‘A Thinker Attuned to Thinking; James Q. Wilson Has Insights, Like Those on Cutting Crime, That Tend To Prove Out’, New York Times (22 August 1998).

  18. ‘James Q. Wilson Obituary’, The Economist (10 March 2012).

  19. James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime (New York, 1975), pp. 172–3.

  20. Quoted in Timothy Crimmins, ‘Incarceration as Incapacitation: An Intellectual History’, American Affairs, Vol. II, Issue 3 (2018).

  21. George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, ‘Broken Windows’, The Atlantic (March 1982).

  22. Gladwell, The Tipping Point, p. 141.

  23. Ibid., p. 142.

  24. Ibid., p. 143.

  25. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr, ‘The Man Who Defined Deviancy Up’, The Wall Street Journal (12 March 2011).

  26. James Q. Wilson, ‘Lock ’Em Up and Other Thoughts on Crime’, New York Times (9 March 1975).

  27. Gladwell, The Tipping Point, p. 145.

  28. Quoted in ibid., p. 146.

  29. ‘New York Crime Rates 1960–2016’, disastercenter.com

  30. Donna Ladd, ‘Inside William Bratton’s NYPD: Broken Windows Policing is Here to Stay’, Guardian (8 June 2015).

  31. Quoted in Jeremy Rozansky and Josh Lerner, ‘The Political Science of James Q. Wilson’, The New Atlantis (Spring 2012).

  32. See Rutger Bregman, Met de kennis van toen. Actuele problemen in het licht van de geschiedenis (Amsterdam, 2012), pp. 238–45.

  33. Anthony A. Braga, Brandon C. Welsh and Cory Schnell, ‘Can Policing Disorder Reduce Crime? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Vol. 52, Issue 4 (2015).

  34. John Eterno and Eli Silverman, ‘Enough Broken Windows Policing. We Need a Community-Oriented Approach’, Guardian (29 June 2015).

  35. P. J. Vogt, ‘#127 The Crime Machine’, Reply All (podcast by Gimlet Media, 11 October 2018).

  36. Dara Lind, ‘Why You Shouldn’t Take Any Crime Stats Seriously’, Vox (24 August 2014). See also Liberty Vittert, ‘Why the US Needs Better Crime Reporting Statistics’, The Conversation (12 October 2018).

  37. Michelle Chen, ‘Want to See How Biased Broken Windows Policing Is? Spend a Day in Court’, The Nation (17 May 2018).

  38. Order itself turns out to be a matter of perception. In 2004, researchers at the University of Chicago asked a series of study subjects how many ‘broken windows’ they saw in a white and a black neighbourhood. Subjects uniformly rated a neighbourhood with more African Americans as more disorderly, even when the prevalence of litter, graffiti and group loitering were the same as in the white neighbourhood. See Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush, ‘Seeing Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of “Broken Windows”’, Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 67, Issue 4 (2004). The sad thing is that Wilson and Kelling already predicted this in 1982 article in The Atlantic, writing: ‘How do we ensure that […] skin color or national origin […] will no
t also become the basis for distinguishing the undesirable from the desirable? How do we ensure, in short, that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry? We can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question.’

  39. See Braga, Welsh, and Schnell, ‘Can Policing Disorder Reduce Crime? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’.

  40. Quoted in Sarah Childress, ‘The Problem with “Broken Windows” Policing’, Frontline (28 June 2016).

  41. Vlad Tarko, Elinor Ostrom. An Intellectual Biography (Lanham, 2017), pp. 32–40.

  42. Arthur A. Jones and Robin Wiseman, ‘Community Policing in Europe. An Overview of Practices in Six Leading Countries’, Los Angeles Community Policing (lacp.org).

  43. Sara Miller Llana, ‘Why Police Don’t Pull Guns in Many Countries’, Christian Science Monitor (28 June 2015).

  44. Quoted in Childress, ‘The Problem with “Broken Windows” Policing’.

  45. Beatrice de Graaf, Theater van de angst. De strijd tegen terrorisme in Nederland, Duitsland, Italië en Amerika (Amsterdam, 2010).

  46. Quoted in Quirine Eijkman, ‘Interview met Beatrice de Graaf over haar boek’, Leiden University (25 January 2010).

  47. Quoted in Joyce Roodnat, ‘“Het moest wel leuk blijven”’, NRC Handelsblad (6 April 2006).

  48. Quoted in Jon Henley, ‘How Do You Deradicalise Returning Isis Fighters?’, Guardian (12 November 2014).

  49. Quoted in Hanna Rosin, ‘How A Danish Town Helped Young Muslims Turn Away From ISIS’, NPR Invisibilia (15 June 2016).

  50. Quoted in Richard Orange, ‘“Answer hatred with love”: how Norway tried to cope with the horror of Anders Breivik’, Guardian (15 April 2012).

  51. Prison Policy Initiative, ‘North Dakota Profile’ (prisonpolicy.org, visited 17 December 2018).

  52. Quoted in Dylan Matthews and Byrd Pinkerton, ‘How to Make Prisons More Humane’, Vox (podcast, 17 October 2018).

  53. Dashka Slater, ‘North Dakota’s Norway Experiment’, Mother Jones (July/August 2017).

  54. National Research Council, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States. Exploring Causes and Consequences (Washington DC, 2014), p. 33.

  55. Francis T. Cullen, Cheryl Lero Jonson and Daniel S. Nagin, ‘Prisons Do Not Reduce Recidivism. The High Cost of Ignoring Science’, The Prison Journal, Vol. 91, Issue 3 (2011). See also M. Keith Chen and Jesse M. Shapiro, ‘Do Harsher Prison Conditions Reduce Recidivism? A Discontinuity-based Approach’, American Law and Economics Review, Vol. 9, Issue 1 (2007).

  56. ‘Louis Theroux Goes to the Miami Mega-Jail’, BBC News (20 May 2011).

  57. Quoted in Berger, ‘Kriminalomsorgen: A Look at the World’s Most Humane Prison System in Norway’, p. 23.

  58. Quoted in Slater, ‘North Dakota’s Norway Experiment’.

  59. Cheryl Corley, ‘North Dakota Prison Officials Think Outside The Box To Revamp Solitary Confinement’, NPR (31 July 2018).

  60. Ibid.

  61. Quoted in Slater, ‘North Dakota’s Norway Experiment’.

  17 The Best Remedy for Hate, Injustice and Prejudice

  1. Quoted in John Battersby, ‘Mandela to Factions: Throw Guns Into Sea’, Christian Science Monitor (26 February 1990).

  2. My main source for the story about Constand and Abraham is Dennis Cruywagen’s wonderful book Brothers in War and Peace. Constand and Abraham Viljoen and the Birth of the New South Africa (Cape Town/Johannesburg, 2014).

  3. Ibid., p. 57.

  4. Ibid., p. 62.

  5. Maritza Montero and Christopher C. Sonn (eds), Psychology of Liberation. Theory and Applications (Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009), p. 100.

  6. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York, 1945), p. 81.

  7. Alfred McClung Lee and Norman Daymond Humphrey, Race Riot, Detroit 1943 (Hemel Hempstead, 1968), p. 130.

  8. Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Reading, 1979), p. 277. Originally published in 1954. Researchers asked American soldiers the following question: ‘Some Army divisions have companies which include Negro and white platoons. How would you feel about it if your outfit was set up something like that?’ The share that responded ‘I would dislike it very much’ was 62 per cent in strictly segregated units and 7 per cent among men in companies that included black platoons.

  9. Ira N. Brophy, ‘The Luxury of Anti-Negro Prejudice’, Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 9, Issue 4 (1945).

  10. Richard Evans, Gordon Allport: The Man and His Ideas (New York, 1970).

  11. Gordon Allport, ‘Autobiography’, in Edwin Boring and Gardner Lindzey (eds), History of Psychology in Autobiography (New York, 1967), pp. 3–25.

  12. John Carlin, Invictus. Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation (London, 2009), p. 122.

  13. Quoted in ibid., p. 123.

  14. Ibid., p. 124

  15. Ibid., p. 135.

  16. Cruywagen, Brothers in War and Peace, p. 143.

  17. Quoted in ibid., p. 158.

  18. Quoted in Simon Kuper, ‘What Mandela Taught Us’, Financial Times (5 December 2013).

  19. Quoted in Cruywagen, Brothers in War and Peace, p. 162.

  20. Quoted in Carlin, Invictus, p. 252.

  21. To which Pettigrew responded: ‘Sir, you have paid me the highest honor!’ Quoted in Frances Cherry, ‘Thomas F. Pettigrew: Building on the Scholar-Activist Tradition in Social Psychology’, in Ulrich Wagner et al. (eds), Improving Intergroup Relations: Building on the Legacy of Thomas F. Pettigrew (Oxford, 2008), p. 16.

  22. Thomas F. Pettigrew, ‘Contact in South Africa’, Dialogue, Vol. 21, Issue 2 (2006), pp. 8–9.

  23. Thomas F. Pettigrew and Linda R. Tropp, ‘A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 90, Issue 5 (2006).

  24. Sylvie Graf, Stefania Paolini and Mark Rubin, ‘Negative intergroup contact is more influential, but positive intergroup contact is more common: Assessing contact prominence and contact prevalence in five Central European countries’, European Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 44, Issue 6 (2014).

  25. Erica Chenoweth, ‘The Origins of the NAVCO Data Project (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Take Nonviolent Conflict Seriously)’, Rational Insurgent (7 May 2014).

  26. Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, ‘How The World is Proving Martin Luther King Right About Nonviolence’, Washington Post (18 January 2016). See also Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, ‘Why Civil Resistance Works. The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict’, International Security, Vol. 33, Issue 1 (2008), pp. 7–44.

  27. Quoted in Penny Andersen et al., At Home in the World. The Peace Corps Story (Peace Corps, 1996), p. vi.

  28. Carlin, Invictus, p. 84.

  29. Ibid., p. 252.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Quoted in Thomas F. Pettigrew, ‘Social Psychological Perspectives on Trump Supporters’, Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Vol. 5, Issue 1 (2017).

  32. Ibid.

  33. Chris Lawton and Robert Ackrill, ‘Hard Evidence: How Areas with Low Immigration Voted Mainly for Brexit’, The Conversation (8 July 2016). See also Rose Meleady, Charles Seger and Marieke Vermue, ‘Examining the Role of Positive and Negative Intergroup Contact and Anti-Immigrant Prejudice in Brexit’, British Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 56, Issue 4 (2017).

  34. Michael Savelkoul et al., ‘Anti-Muslim Attitudes in The Netherlands: Tests of Contradictory Hypotheses Derived from Ethnic Competition Theory and Intergroup Contact Theory’, European Sociological Review, Vol. 27, Issue 6 (2011).

  35. Jared Nai, ‘People in More Racially Diverse Neighborhoods Are More Prosocial’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 114, Issue 4 (2018), pp. 497–515.

  36. Miles Hewstone, ‘Consequences of Diversity for Social Cohesion and Prejudice: The Missing Dimension of Intergroup Contact’, Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 71, Issue 2 (2015).

  37. Matthew Goodwin and Caitlin Milazzo, ‘Taking Back Control? Investigating the Role of Immigration in the 2016 Vote for Brexit’,
British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol. 19, Issue 3 (2017).

  38. Quoted in Diane Hoekstra, ‘De felle tegenstanders van toen gaan het azc in Overvecht missen’, Algemeen Dagblad (29 September 2018). See also Marjon Bolwijn, ‘In Beverwaard was woede om azc het grootst, maar daar is niets meer van te zien: “We hebben elkaar gek gemaakt”’, De Volkskrant (1 February 2018).

  39. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress (1869).

  40. Rupert Brown, James Vivian and Miles Hewstone, ‘Changing Attitudes through Intergroup Contact: the Effects of Group Membership Salience’, European Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 29, Issue 5–6 (21 June 1999).

  41. Gordon W. Allport, ‘Prejudice in Modern Perspective’, The Twelfth Hoernlé Memorial Lecture (17 July 1956).

  18 When the Soldiers Came Out of the Trenches

  1. This phrase was coined by the historian George F. Kennan in the introduction to his book The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations 1875–1890 (Princeton, 1979).

  2. Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton, Christmas Truce. The Western Front December 1914 (London, 2014), p. 68. Originally published in 1984.

  3. Ibid., p. 71.

  4. Ibid., p. 73.

  5. Ibid., pp. 76–7

  6. Malcolm Brown, Peace in No Man’s Land (BBC documentary from 1981).

  7. Luke Harding, ‘A Cry of: Waiter! And the Fighting Stopped’, Guardian (1 November 2003).

  8. Brown and Seaton, Christmas Truce, p. 111.

  9. Ibid., p. 115.

  10. Quoted in Simon Kuper, ‘Soccer in the Trenches: Remembering the WWI Christmas Truce’, espn.com (25 December 2014).

  11. Modern historians point out that although the Germans certainly committed war crimes in 1914, they were heavily embellished in British propaganda. Just how disastrous the effects of such fake news can be would not become fully apparent until twenty-five years later. When in the Second World War reports began coming in of Germans committing the most horrifying atrocities on a massive scale, a sizeable share of people in the UK and US doubted their veracity. Given how the press had exaggerated matters during the First World War, it seemed to make sense to take the stories about gas chambers with a grain of salt. See Jo Fox, ‘Atrocity propaganda’, British Library (29 January 2014).