His work is very flimsy, and I have been a hater for close to 10 years [1].
I think Bregman skirts close to the "Effective Altruism" movement and his work has similar problems of choosing flashy, exciting, elitist projects over boring, uncomfortable, policy changes.
His enamourment with "AI!!!" (exclamations mandatory) is par for the course. Basically a fantasy that if AI leads to enough layoffs, the rest of society will accept a transition to UBI (against their own interests)
Bregman has been going on about UBI for decades and I've never seen him do the actual maths. In Utopia for Realists he argued the budget deficit can be completely made up by the cost savings of having fewer benefit systems. It's fantasy
[1] https://www.breck-mckye.com/review-utopia-for-realists-rutge...
well if you're unemployed, how many hours are you working
The trend has almost always been to work the same, or more, hours as new technologies come out, and you'll be expected to get more done using the new technologies. Why would AI be any different?
But, yeah, the people who no longer have jobs will be working less, that's true.
After reading the entire article, I agree with the criticisms about Bill Gates funding, receiving large sums of money from Trump supporters, and the organization becoming increasingly elitist.
However, linking AI skepticism with climate change denial is a false equivalence. I'm positive about AI, but I'm also positive about the reality of the climate crisis. Anyway, the article went off track in the middle, but here's my take:
At the core of these social gatherings and moral consciousness, it usually becomes about elitism and networking for elite students who lack connections. I tend to agree with the author's concerns.
Seeing this makes me think about how criticism of the mainstream generally goes as follows:
People usually invoke 'morality' and, in order to raise their own name recognition and reputation, they look for counter-arguments based on morality—safe points of criticism. Issues like 'taxing billionaires' sound very attractive and revolutionary when declaimed at places like Davos, but in reality, they are extremely safe agendas that don't harm the speaker at all. Truly dangerous criticism is strongest when it comes from within one's own world. Bregman's logic is the typical kind that avoids extreme, raw truths, says 'the macro system is the problem,' and lands safely. Bregman simply finds refined answers that the public will like, without threatening his own privileges (fame, network).
Morality is pure. And it is good. But it is also the most convenient way to secure one's own superiority in social competition.
'I have produced something great' can be proven because it's visible right away, but saying 'I am more righteous' is difficult to prove—it cannot be proven.
I'm not saying that moral consciousness is the problem. It's just that morality often becomes the language of status competition.
But is that bad? It's not bad. Everyone desires fame, everyone is driven by greed. The problem is just that her fault is that her hypocrisy was exposed too quickly.
It is the incompetence that got caught before symbolic capital could be converted into real power—that is what makes the author angry.
Bill Gates' money? You can take it. Getting caught with crypto billionaires and the elite reproduction system? That can happen. The real problem is getting caught while selling public lectures and books. If you're going to deceive, you need to be thorough about it.