#412 — Better Things & Better People
Episode
26 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Personal Finance, Investing, Fundraising & VC
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Historical Progress Pattern: All major metrics including GDP growth, poverty decline, and carbon emissions show hockey stick curves starting in 1750, suggesting humanity is approaching a climactic moment where outcomes could range from catastrophic collapse to utopian breakthrough across the galaxy.
- ✓Effective Altruism Critique: While effective altruists demonstrate admirable moral seriousness through kidney donations and substantial giving, their guilt-based approach using drowning child thought experiments functions as moral blackmail rather than inspiring broader participation from people motivated by multiple values including enthusiasm and status.
- ✓Tax Fairness Framework: Billionaires globally maintain lower effective tax rates than working and middle class populations, a problem that was successfully addressed in the 1950s-60s when higher taxation coincided with stronger economic growth rates, providing a historical model for contemporary reform.
- ✓Countercultural Elite Movements: Historical periods of extreme inequality and immorality, from the Gilded Age to eighteenth century Britain, were overcome by elite-led movements that made doing good fashionable, exemplified by figures like Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, and Alva Vanderbilt redirecting wealth toward systemic change.
What It Covers
Historian Rutger Bregman discusses his book Moral Ambition, arguing for a countercultural elite movement to address inequality and global challenges through enthusiasm rather than guilt-based philanthropy, drawing parallels to British abolitionists and Progressive Era reformers.
Key Questions Answered
- •Historical Progress Pattern: All major metrics including GDP growth, poverty decline, and carbon emissions show hockey stick curves starting in 1750, suggesting humanity is approaching a climactic moment where outcomes could range from catastrophic collapse to utopian breakthrough across the galaxy.
- •Effective Altruism Critique: While effective altruists demonstrate admirable moral seriousness through kidney donations and substantial giving, their guilt-based approach using drowning child thought experiments functions as moral blackmail rather than inspiring broader participation from people motivated by multiple values including enthusiasm and status.
- •Tax Fairness Framework: Billionaires globally maintain lower effective tax rates than working and middle class populations, a problem that was successfully addressed in the 1950s-60s when higher taxation coincided with stronger economic growth rates, providing a historical model for contemporary reform.
- •Countercultural Elite Movements: Historical periods of extreme inequality and immorality, from the Gilded Age to eighteenth century Britain, were overcome by elite-led movements that made doing good fashionable, exemplified by figures like Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, and Alva Vanderbilt redirecting wealth toward systemic change.
Notable Moment
Bregman recounts confronting Davos billionaires about 1500 private jets flying to the conference while attendees cried watching environmental documentaries, highlighting the disconnect between elite concern and personal behavior that sparked his call for a new movement grounded in moral ambition.
Episode Transcript
Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So, if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Rutger Bregman. Rutger, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Sam. Yes. Nice to finally connect with you. I've been seeing your stuff for a while and, just read your book, your newest book, which is Moral Ambition, which is a little bit of a departure in tone, but you've also written Utopia for Realists and Humankind. This is much more of a call to action and I want to talk about the call. You've also started the the School for Moral Ambition, which I wanna talk about. But before we jump into the book, how would you summarize your focus as a historian and, just as as as someone who comes to all these topics we're going to talk about. So my whole career I've been fascinated by history. I studied history at Utrecht University in The Netherlands, and initially I was a bit frustrated by academia. You know, it seemed so insulated. I had this dream once of becoming a professor and then maybe when I was 50 or 60 I would finally be allowed to write about the big interesting questions of history like why have we conquered the globe, why did the industrial revolution start in in England, in the West, Why not in India or China, for example? Those were the kind of books that I really loved, you know? Jared Diamond, for example, Germs, Germs, and Steel. But it started to dawn on me that I would probably have to, you know, specialize first and, you know, write spend four years of my life writing a PhD, which on the one hand seemed really interesting. But then on the other hand, I looked at all the PhDs that had recently been published at Utrecht University and I found all of them really boring. So I I thought, you know what? Let's go into journalism. But then I found that to be quite frustrating as well. You know, the the relentless focus on breaking news, on what happens today instead of what happens every day. And then when I was when I was 25, I got my lucky break. It was a new journalism platform that was founded in The Netherlands called The Correspondent. And, these guys, the founders, had a bit of a different news philosophy. They wanted to unbreak the news, and they, …
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by Rutger Bregman
“Historian Rutger Bregman discusses his book Moral Ambition, arguing for a countercultural elite movement to address inequality and global challenges through enthusiasm rather than guilt-based philanthropy.”
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