Why Utopias Always Fail - New Book Reveals the Hidden Secret - Cheating!

A conversation between Fred Harrison and Peter about the 5,000-year trap we cannot seem to escape

There is a particular kind of cruelty in being shown a vision of how life could be, knowing all the while that nothing is going to change. We have been subjected to it for centuries. Politicians, philosophers, economists and well-meaning idealists of every stripe have offered us their blueprints for a better world, and the world has stubbornly refused to become one.

This is the subject at the heart of a recent conversation between Fred Harrison, economist, author and Research Director of the Land Research Trust, and his interlocutor Peter, a conservationist who has spent decades watching his own well-intentioned ideas get captured and corrupted by the very forces he was trying to overcome. What began as a discussion about utopias became something more interesting: an unflinching examination of why good ideas fail, who ensures they do, and what — if anything — might finally break the cycle.

The Promise That Was Never Kept

To understand where we are, it helps to understand where we were supposed to be.

In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay predicting that by 2030 — a date now only four years away — technological progress would have reduced the working week to fifteen hours. Three days of work, he suggested, would be enough to support a family, leaving the rest of one’s time for culture, leisure and self-development.

We are almost at that horizon. We are working forty hours a week. As Peter observes, we have not even improved on the forty-one hours that people were working when Keynes put his pen to paper. Worse still, where one income once supported a household, it now typically takes two. The productivity gains that Keynes anticipated did materialise. The leisure they were supposed to purchase did not.

Why not? That is the question Fred Harrison has spent his career trying to answer, and which his forthcoming book, Cheating: The Human Project and its Betrayal, attempts to resolve in full.

What Is Wrong with Utopian Thinking

The problem, Fred argues, is not that people dream of a better world. Dreaming is fine. The problem is that they dream without first understanding why the world is the way it is.

Every generation produces its visionaries. They look at the chaos and suffering around them, and they propose remedies. If only we had socialism. If only we had radical capitalism. If only we had religion, or secularism, or the right kind of government, the right kind of education, the right kind of technology. These proposals are, as Fred acknowledges, sincerely meant. But sincerity is not the same as understanding.

“The problem,” he says, “is that they don’t understand why the world is as it is today, and therefore they don’t locate their proposals within a framework where the foundations have been changed.”

Without that, ideas remain in what he calls “the realm of fantasy as opposed to practical proposals for a new way of life.” And fantasy, however appealing, is not a transition mechanism. You cannot dream your way from here to there if you do not understand what is keeping you here.

He is critical of a forthcoming book called Ecoivilization by Jeremy Lent, which he expects will offer a beautiful vision of life after the current system, and which he suspects will be unachievable for exactly this reason. It will not be grounded in today’s reality. It will not offer the mechanism. And so, like so many visions before it, it will remain a map without roads.

The Universal Basic Income Trap

As an illustration of how well-intentioned ideas can make things worse, Fred turns to Universal Basic Income, currently one of the more fashionable proposals in progressive circles.

The idea, on its face, is straightforward and appealing: give everyone a basic income, raise the floor, alleviate poverty, share the proceeds of a productive society more fairly. The problem, Fred argues, lies in the funding. Where does the money come from? The standard answer is to tax wealth. But taxing earned incomes and wealth imposes what he calls a “dead weight cost” on the economy. It reduces employment, suppresses wages, and ultimately harms the very people it was designed to help.

“Instead of proposing ideas today that would actually work,” he says, “what we end up with is fantasy ideas which will actually amplify our problems.”

This is not a comfortable argument, and it is not meant to be. Peter describes introducing these ideas to a highly intelligent student of his, a former doctor turned vet, who had strong democratic instincts and was initially furious to have her assumptions challenged. It took several conversations before she came around to the idea that there exists an efficient way for governments to raise revenue that does not cause harm. She became, as Peter puts it with characteristic lightness, “another convert.”

The point is not that people are stupid. The point is that the correct analysis has been kept out of mainstream discourse, and it therefore takes unusual intellectual courage to even encounter it, let alone accept it.

What the System Is Actually Doing

Fred’s diagnosis, elaborated across decades of writing and now crystallised in Cheating, is both simple and devastating.

Five thousand years ago, humanity made a catastrophic error. The income generated from shared land, what economists call “economic rent,” was appropriated by chiefs and priests rather than being used for everyone’s benefit. Every unfair tax, every preventable death from poverty, every financial crash since can be traced back to that original act of betrayal.

The mechanism is not a secret. Fred is emphatic on this point. There is no mystery about why people are deprived of their aspirations. The mechanism is simply not discussed, because those with the power to suppress it do so. They keep it quiet because if ordinary people understood it, they would demand to know why nothing had been done.

When we buy a house, we pay not only for the bricks and mortar that the vendor built or bought. We also pay for the location, for the schools nearby, the transport links, the hospitals, the parks, all the public amenities that make that location desirable. None of that was created by the vendor. It was created by the community, paid for by taxpayers over generations. But the vendor captures its value and takes it away. The buyer, having paid for access to public services through the inflated price of their home, then also pays for those services again through their taxes.

“We are already paying for all the public services we want,” Fred says. “But instead of paying that money to the public sector for the services that we want, we hand it out to a third party.”

The result is a vicious cycle. Governments, starved of the revenue that should flow to them from land, are forced to tax earned incomes instead. This suppresses wages, reduces employment, and degrades public services, which in turn increases pressure for higher taxes, which suppresses the economy further. The system is “constantly degrading.”

The solution, which Fred has advocated throughout his career and which forms the fiscal backbone of Cheating, is to replace taxes on labour with what he calls Annual Ground Rents: a charge on the rental value of land, collected by the state and used to fund public services. This is not a new idea. It has been in the economic literature for centuries, advocated by thinkers from Thomas Paine to Henry George. The reason it has not been implemented, Fred argues, is not because it does not work, but because those who benefit from the current arrangement have systematically ensured it remains outside the frame of respectable political debate.

A Revolution of the Mind

Fred is not, by his own admission, much of a dreamer. He has spent his working life wrestling with this world rather than imagining the next one, and he is candid that he does not have endless time left for visions he cannot yet make real. What motivates him is not the utopia itself but the mechanism that might make it reachable.

Peter is more openly romantic. He talks of wildlife scampering across rewilded land, of clean rivers and clean seas, of children with the best education, of a world where he could spend his time writing books, making model planes, repairing guitars, exploring his talents rather than commuting to work. He describes the vision with obvious warmth, and then adds, with equal conviction, that he believes following Fred’s prescription would actually produce it.

“I genuinely think that if we do follow your prescription,” he says, “the world will be a utopia. When we’ve seen it enacted in other societies throughout history it has literally transformed society so quickly.”

Peter himself has watched one version of this dynamic play out in his own field. When he began his career as a conservationist and ecologist, he was talking about rewilding before the word was common currency. Over thirty years, what had been heresy became received wisdom. The ideas he espoused are now, as he puts it, “the dogma.” But his dream, he says, has been partially captured. Land owners have found ways to profit from rewilding subsidies, to take taxpayer money not for restoring nature but for enriching themselves. The rewilding revolution, like the economic revolution that preceded it, has been captured by the monopolists and the renters.

“We’ve come back full circle to the actual cause of the exploitation of the natural environment,” Fred says. Which is why, for him, the environmental crisis and the economic crisis are not separate problems. They are the same problem wearing different faces.

The 5,000-Year Trap

What Fred is attempting in Cheating: The Human Project and its Betrayal is something more ambitious than a policy pamphlet. He wants to locate the problem in what he calls “the grand narrative”: the 5,000-year history of a civilisation that has consistently thwarted its own best impulses.

“We’ve been in a trap for the last 5,000 bloody years,” he says, with the controlled exasperation of a man who has spent decades saying so. “It began in antiquity. And until our politicians can understand that, they will not come to terms with the depth of the control over our lives that this evil system has on us.”

Drawing on evolutionary science, economic history and his own track record of accurate prediction, including his forecast of the 2008 financial crisis, Fred argues that five major crises are converging around 2028: political gridlock, environmental collapse, mass migration, authoritarianism, and uncontrolled artificial intelligence. The evidence-based case he makes for tax reform is not, in this light, a technocratic adjustment. It is an attempt to prevent the next collapse.

He is under no illusion that change will happen overnight. “It has to be done incrementally,” he says, “in a managed way, in certain parts of the world that may choose to forge ahead and act as an example for the rest.” What matters is that the transition mechanism exists, that it is real, that it is grounded, and that enough people come to understand it to force politicians to take it seriously.

“What I don’t want,” he says, “is to do what Keynes did: to hold out the prospect of a fifteen-hour week and instead it’s a forty-hour week that we’re working.”

Dream, But Do Not Let Dreams Be Your Master

Peter closes with a line from Kipling that seems to capture the spirit of the conversation as well as anything: dream, but do not let dreams be your master.

We need utopian thinking. The vision matters. Without it there is no direction, no aspiration, no reason to change anything. But vision without mechanism is cruelty in slow motion, holding out a future that cannot be reached because the path to it has been blocked, obscured, or simply never drawn.

Fred Harrison has spent his life drawing that path. Cheating: The Human Project and its Betrayal is his most complete attempt to do so, and it is, as Peter says, “a life’s work put into place.”

Nobody likes to feel they are cheating. But as Fred observes, more or less all of us are now engaged in a systematic method of cheating ourselves, not merely others. We are cheating ourselves of the kind of lives we could otherwise be enjoying. The capital gains on a house are not real wealth. They are, in the most precise sense, a privatisation of the commons. And we participate in the system willingly, because no one has ever explained to us that we have a choice.

That explanation is what this book attempts to provide.

---

Cheating: The Human Project and its Betrayal by Fred Harrison is published by Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd, ISBN 9781916517233. It is available to pre-order now in hardback directly from the publisher at https://shepheardwalwyn.com/product/cheating-the-human-project-and-its-betrayal/

Fred Harrison is a British author, economist and Research Director of the Land Research Trust. A graduate of Oxford and the University of London, he is best known for developing the 18-year property cycle and correctly predicting the major economic crashes of 1990 and 2008. He has advised governments, think-tanks and international organisations on fiscal reform and land value taxation for over four decades.

Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd, 20 Mortlake High Street, London SW14 8JN. Over 50 years of independent publishing.