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Utopia for Realists
- How We Can Build the Ideal World
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 6 hrs and 34 mins
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Publisher's summary
Universal basic income. A 15-hour workweek. Open borders. Does it sound too good to be true? One of Europe's leading young thinkers shows how we can build an ideal world today.
After working all day at jobs we often dislike, we buy things we don't need. Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian, reminds us it needn't be this way - and in some places it isn't.
Rutger Bregman's TED Talk about universal basic income seemed impossibly radical when he delivered it in 2014. A quarter of a million views later, the subject of that video is being seriously considered by leading economists and government leaders all over the world. It's just one of the many utopian ideas that Bregman proves is possible today.
Utopia for Realists is one of those rare books that takes you by surprise and challenges what you think can happen. From a Canadian city that once completely eradicated poverty to Richard Nixon's near implementation of a basic income for millions of Americans, Bregman takes us on a journey through history and beyond the traditional left-right divides as he champions ideas whose time has come.
Every progressive milestone of civilization - from the end of slavery to the beginning of democracy - was once considered a utopian fantasy. Bregman's book, both challenging and bracing, demonstrates that new utopian ideas, like the elimination of poverty and the creation of the 15-hour workweek, can become reality in our lifetime. Being unrealistic and unreasonable can, in fact, make the impossible inevitable, and it is the only way to build the ideal world.
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- By RJW on 05-06-17
By: Tyler Cowen
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Age of Discovery
- Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
- By: Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Age of Discovery explores a world on the brink of a new Renaissance and asks: how do we share more widely the benefits of unprecedented progress? How do we endure the inevitable tumult generated by accelerating change? How do we each thrive through this tangled, uncertain time? From gains in health, education, wealth and technology to crises of conflict, disease and mass migration, the similarities between today's world and that of the 15th century are both striking and prophetic: we have been here before.
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A monotonous text disguised as casual reading.
- By Rob on 07-29-16
By: Ian Goldin, and others
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Plutocrats
- The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
- By: Chrystia Freeland
- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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There has always been some gap between rich and poor in this country, but in the last few decades what it means to be rich has changed dramatically. Alarmingly, the greatest income gap is not between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, but within the wealthiest 1 percent of our nation-as the merely wealthy are left behind by the rapidly expanding fortunes of the new global super-rich. Forget the 1 percent; Plutocrats proves that it is the wealthiest 0.1 percent who are outpacing the rest of us at break-neck speed.
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Good Storytelling but ... analysis is "eh'
- By Susan on 11-04-12
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A Little History of the World
- By: E. H. Gombrich
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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E. H. Gombrich's world history, an international best seller now available in English for the first time, is a text dominated not by dates and facts but by the sweep of experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements, and an acute witness to its frailties.
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an enlightening book; very well read
- By A.B.Oxford on 06-03-06
By: E. H. Gombrich
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How Are You Going to Pay for That?
- Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics
- By: Ryan Cooper
- Narrated by: Ryan Cooper
- Length: 8 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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How Are You Going to Pay for That? is filled with engaging discussions and detailed strategies that policymakers and citizens alike can use to assail even the most entrenched lines of neoliberal logic and start to undo these long-held misconceptions. Equal parts economic theory, history, and political polemic, this is an essential roadmap for winning the key battles to come.
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Yay, Taxes!!!
- By Luvelway on 02-19-24
By: Ryan Cooper
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Arguing with Idiots
- How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government
- By: Glenn Beck
- Narrated by: Glenn Beck, Pat Gray, Steve "Stu" Burguiere
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Idiots can't be identified through voting records, they can be found only by looking for people who hide behind stereotypes, embrace partisanship, and believe that bumper-sticker slogans are a substitute for common sense. If you know someone who fits the bill, then Arguing with Idiots will help you silence them once and for all with the ultimate weapon: the truth.
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Great Book
- By Stacy on 09-22-09
By: Glenn Beck
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Arguing with Socialists
- By: Glenn Beck
- Narrated by: Glenn Beck, Jeremy Lowell
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In Arguing with Socialists, New York Times best-selling author Glenn Beck arms listeners to the teeth with information necessary to debunk the socialist arguments that have once again become popular, and proves that the free market is the only way to go. With his trademark humor, Beck lampoons the resurgence of this bankrupt leftist philosophy with thousands of stories, facts, and arguments for anyone who is willing to ask the hard questions.
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Its great...whatever
- By Jon on 04-08-20
By: Glenn Beck
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American Dreams
- Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone
- By: Marco Rubio
- Narrated by: Ricardo Suri
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Marco Rubio's parents came to the United States in 1956. The country they found was truly a land of opportunity, where hardworking people with grade school educations could afford a home, a car, and college for their kids. A country where maids and bartenders could raise doctors, lawyers, small-business owners, and maybe even a US senator. That was the American Dream - our country's central promise to its people.
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Comprehensive and compelling path for renewal.
- By gary on 06-03-15
By: Marco Rubio
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Grand Pursuit
- The Story of Economic Genius
- By: Sylvia Nasar
- Narrated by: John Bedford Lloyd, Anne Twomey
- Length: 20 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In a sweeping narrative, the author of the mega-bestseller A Beautiful Mind takes us on a journey through modern history with the men and women who changed the lives of every single person on the planet. It’s the epic story of the making of modern economics, and of how it rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation by placing its material fate in its own hands rather than in Fate. Nasar’s account begins with Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew observing and publishing the condition of the poor majority in mid nineteenth-century London, the richest and most glittering place in the world.
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A Beautiful Grand Pursuit
- By Joshua Kim on 05-06-12
By: Sylvia Nasar
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The Battle
- How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America's Future
- By: Arthur C. Brooks
- Narrated by: Arthur C. Brooks
- Length: 3 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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America faces a new culture war. It is not a war about guns, abortions, or gays; rather it is a war against the creeping changes to our entrepreneurial culture, the true bedrock of who we are as a people. The new culture war is a battle between free enterprise and social democracy. Many Americans have forgotten the evils of socialism and the predations of the American Great Society's welfare-state programs.
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Right wing
- By John on 12-22-10
By: Arthur C. Brooks
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The Up Side of Down
- Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success
- By: Megan McArdle
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Most new products fail. So do most small businesses. And most of us, if we are honest, have experienced a major setback in our personal or professional lives. So what determines who will bounce back and follow up with a home run? If you want to succeed in business and in life, Megan McArdle argues in this hugely thought-provoking book, you have to learn how to harness the power of failure. McArdle has been one of our most popular business bloggers for more than a decade, covering the rise and fall of some the world' s top companies and challenging us to think differently about how we live, learn, and work.
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Good Book
- By Ray on 05-21-14
By: Megan McArdle
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He’s correct but he misrepresented the data
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Liberal whine-fest rather than serious discussion
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Incredibly disappointing...
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He’s correct but he misrepresented the data
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Give People Money
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Liberal whine-fest rather than serious discussion
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I Would Vote For Him
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Bullshit Jobs
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Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”. It went viral. After a million online views in 17 different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.
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Incredibly disappointing...
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The Econocracy
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A century ago, the idea of 'the economy' didn't exist. Now economics is the supreme ideology of our time, with its own rules and language. The trouble is most of us can't speak it. This is damaging democracy. Dangerous agendas are hidden inside mathematical wrappers; controversial policies are presented as 'proven' by the models of economic 'science'. Government is being turned over to a publicly unaccountable technocratic elite. The Econocracy reveals that economics is too important to be left to the economists
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Great book!
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Super Digestible
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SACKS IS AN ABSOLUTE JOY !!
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Economics is the mother tongue of public policy. It dominates our decision-making for the future, guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times. Pity then, or more like disaster, that its fundamental ideas are centuries out of date yet are still taught in college courses worldwide and still used to address critical issues in government and business alike. That's why it is time, says renegade economist Kate Raworth, to revise our economic thinking for the 21st century. In Doughnut Economics, she sets out seven key ways to fundamentally reframe our understanding of what economics is and does. Along the way, she points out how we can break our addiction to growth; redesign money, finance, and business to be in service to people; and create economies that are regenerative and distributive by design.
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Economic romanticizing, not economic thinking
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By: Kate Raworth
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Moralische Ambition
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- By: Rutger Bregman, Ulrich Faure - Übersetzer
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Dieses Buch handelt von Pionieren. Es erzählt die Geschichte von Menschen, die vor moralischer Ambition nur so strotzten: Abolitionisten, Suffragetten, Helden des Widerstands und Bürgerrechtlerinnen, von Menschen, die nicht nur Ideale hatten, sondern ihre Karrieren auch nach diesen Idealen ausrichteten – und den Lauf der Welt veränderten.
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Poor Economics
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Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this and their 15 years of research from Chile to India, Kenya to Indonesia, they have identified wholly new aspects of the behavior of poor people, their needs, and the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work defies certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning....
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Excellent for non-economists
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By: Abhijit V. Banerjee, and others
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Technofeudalism
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Technofeudalism says Yanis Varoufakis, is the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world, and is the greatest current threat to the liberal individual, to our efforts to avert climate catastrophe—and to democracy itself. It also lies behind the new geopolitical tensions, especially the New Cold War between the United States and China. Drawing on stories from Greek myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power, and, ultimately, what it will take overthrow it.
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Read this book if you want a competent explanation of how we got where we are financially
- By chloe kelly on 11-01-24
By: Yanis Varoufakis
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Enlightenment Now
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Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West but worldwide.
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We live in the best of all times
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Catastrophe 1914
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From the acclaimed military historian, a new history of the outbreak of World War I: the dramatic stretch from the breakdown of diplomacy to the battles - the Marne, Ypres, Tannenberg - that marked the frenzied first year before the war bogged down in the trenches. In Catastrophe 1914, Max Hastings gives us a conflict different from the familiar one of barbed wire, mud, and futility.
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I thought I knew the battle of the frontiers
- By Anonymous User on 04-02-21
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Capital in the Twenty-First Century
- By: Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer - translator
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
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- Unabridged
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What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories.
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The Financial Times' Critique Doesn't Detract
- By Madeleine on 05-22-14
By: Thomas Piketty, and others
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How the World Really Works
- The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going
- By: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Stephen Perring
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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We have never had so much information at our fingertips and yet most of us don’t know how the world really works. This book explains seven of the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity. From energy and food production, through our material world and its globalization, to risks, our environment and its future, How the World Really Works offers a much-needed reality check—because before we can tackle problems effectively, we must understand the facts.
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Let me save you a credit: progress is hard
- By Dalton on 06-06-22
By: Vaclav Smil
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Debt - Updated and Expanded
- The First 5,000 Years
- By: David Graeber
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 17 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods - that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
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Transformative to the point of being revolutionary
- By James C. Samans on 08-14-16
By: David Graeber
What listeners say about Utopia for Realists
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-23-20
We need a utopia
I loved this book so much, it made much of what had previously come to realize to fruition through the authors hard work and research over the years.
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- Steve
- 04-28-19
Wow
I’ve had discussions so many times hitting on all of these topics and the way Rutger lays them out is phenomenal.
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- jakesentertainment
- 08-20-19
Awesome Social Experiments Talk About
Told me about successful social experiments I'v never heard of! If you want learn something that isn't talked about regularly, listen to this book... The logic is sound but being backed by experiments is hopeful!
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- Bandersnatch
- 04-23-19
Eye opening
The author presents a very convincing argument for ideas I would have rejected out of hand before listening to the evidence he offers. I am still not sure he is correct but I am open to wait for the next shoe to drop
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- YunusTheOptimist
- 03-16-19
Ideas Are the Future
it is a WONDERFUL book with great ideas in it. strongly eecommend ti every one
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- Christine McCallum-Randalls
- 01-01-22
Perfect blend of hope and fact
Utopia for Realists delivers. Bregman provides vital data with powerful storytelling of examples. You'll better understand what utopia actually looks like and how to achieve it. You'll also understand yourself better as well as those similar to you, and, most importantly, those you are opposed to. It doesn't mean utopia is a place without conflict. It does mean there's a lot to understand to get there.
Believe big lasting impactful positive change is impossible? This book is for you.
Believe big lasting impactful positive change is possible? This book is for you.
Hopeful for the future? This book is for you.
Wishing you could be hopeful for the future? This book is for you.
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- Kerrie M James
- 10-12-17
Brilliant
Intelligent, inspiring and surprising, Bregman has captured the history of ideas and current social and economic dilemmas superbly. His is a radical view and one that needs to be taken seriously if the world and it's populations are to survive.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 12-19-17
FINALLY!!!
...Someone else who GETS it!!! The TRUTH & REALITY of the poverty and it's affects. A mandatory listen/read for EVERY single human on the planet.
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6 people found this helpful
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Overall
- tariqk
- 03-08-19
great book and a must read for apologetic liberals
great job of articulating why dreaming big and expecting best from us and society is a worthwhile endeavour
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- Omar
- 04-12-19
An idea whose time has come.
Required reading for those who would like to participate in making the world a better place for all humanity. This book moves the “Overton Window” of what the media and politicians assert as acceptable to openly discuss. This shift makes it permissible to entertain the vision of improving the quality of life of everyone in the “land of plenty” and across the globe. Not just pie in the sky ideas, Rutger’s book contains rational recommendations for bringing about a worthwhile re-imagining of what it means to care for our fellow man. This work will awaken an understanding in the reader that the journey towards Utopia is within our power today and a worthy endeavor for the future.
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