Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

An effective way to understand enduring popular attitudes is to look at television. Fads come and go all the time, but ideas that really resonate can rejuvenate themselves and recur. Television is especially good at revealing attitudes toward work, since a job is an ideal setting for a largely self-contained world in which different people interact and respond to new challenges. One of the purest distillations of this concept is the US sitcom The Office (adapted from a much-loved British show of the same name), which ran from 2005 to 2013. Ten years after its final episode aired, it retains the fondness of its original audience and continually attracts new viewers. A major source of its appeal is its unflinching depiction of the office as boring, soul-crushing, and ultimately pointless, while spending nearly the entire screen time within that environment. Set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a former factory town gutted by deindustrialization, the titular office is that of a paper company, and it provides white-collar jobs (at least for the sales personnel) that exist for the sole purpose of serving other white-collar office jobs. The most absurd characters are those who try to find a higher purpose or personal identity in a task that everyone else understands to be a waste of time and energy that will ultimately collapse when the next technological innovation renders the white-collar jobs just as obsolete as the blue-collar ones.

The pleasure of watching The Office comes from seeing the characters preserve a sense of humor and humanity in an environment seemingly designed to break them down. They recognize the absurdity of their situation, and while they cannot easily liberate themselves from it, they can build meaning for themselves based on their connections to one another. Very few characters are from the world outside the office, and thus the staff members develop love and friendship in a way that gradually transforms the culture of the office itself. Fiction speaks to deep longings, and The Office is longing—in comedic form—for what Bregman presents here as policy proposals: a culture that values community over productivity. Abolishing unsatisfying work or establishing a precise correlation between the value of labor and its compensation is impossible, but viewing the workforce as human beings rather than assets is not only possible but beneficial for the workforce culture. Bregman’s observations about the sanitation workers, bankers, and other professionals point to the book theme on The Dangers of Inequality because they contrast the self-imposed importance of some jobs that traditionally generate higher incomes with the societal necessity of other jobs, in which workers must fight for a living wage and benefits. This phenomenon may seem ironic in light of what modern society needs to function, but addressing the gap is crucial to building a better society. This is why Bregman emphasizes the importance of resisting complacency and making meaningful changes in areas like the tax code and education.