Before Walter Mosley became a writer of detective fiction, he spent several years working towards a graduate degree in political philosophy, giving up after coming to the conclusion that the ultimate end for that pursuit was to have a faculty position teaching some obscure and meaningless courses on some obscure subject, which, he realized was not something he wanted for himself.

But after establishing himself as a famous and well compensated fiction writer, he still had ideas from his coursework knocking around in his head, and took the opportunity to write this book to organize and share those ideas.

He introduces the term "untopia" to describe his vision for a more balanced society—rather than striving for an impossible utopian world, he suggests working toward a world that strengthens some "socialist" ideas, such as basic human rights (cf., the UN's Declaration of Human Rights), but adding in some basic universal income supports, government subsidy of basic foodstuffs, free education from K-12 and six additional years of university or trade school, free medical care, and access to decent and cheap public housing. Businesses would be expected to pay significant taxes and have limitations on their ability to export jobs to countries with lower wages, a flat tax would be imposed on everyone, rich or poor, and, simultaneously, budding capitalists would be encouraged to start businesses and protected from attempts by established businesses to crush them through legal means (he uses as an example kids selling candy outside stores selling the same candy for lower prices, or someone selling hot dogs in front of a restaurant).

His view of perfect socialism is some sort of hive species, such as termites, ants, or bees, where each member automatically works together for the good of the community, taking what they need to live and providing labor for whatever need arises, suppressing all individuality. He also defines perfect unfettered capitalism as a machine to produce profits from labor without any concern for the rights or well-being of the people providing that labor—too old or sick to work? Too bad for you. (Arguably, that's pretty close to what we have now, bolstered by the ability of capitalists to use their money and power to bend government policies to their benefit, and the prioritization of profit for the shareholders while ignoring any sort of responsibility for the well-being of employees or the communities where they operate.)

From my perspective, his view of socialism is far too limited and negative, and his ideas about moderating capitalism and the megarich are way too generous. I would hope that it's possible to maintain and even encourage communal ideals _and_ individuality and freedom of expression, but I'm much less sanguine that even his limited capitalism wouldn't continue the corruption and exploitation we see now, even if reforms change some of the specific mechanisms used.

In some ways his vision is similar to the one my friends and I came up with in our naïve way from reading Robert Anton Wilson and progressive science fiction in high school, but I think we posited a much more hopeful world than the one Mosley imagines, one where eliminating the need to work just to get the very basics to survive would give people the freedom to explore more satisfying pursuits.

These days I would lean heavily on Iain (M.) Banks's Culture, a mostly utopian society supported by machine intelligences and access to near unlimited resources. ("Mostly", of course, down to the Culture's interactions with other civilizations with different philosophies, some which are forced by direct conflict and some of which come from the incompatibility between the Culture's values and those of other societies.)

The Culture is fictional, of course, and relies on extrapolated and probably unattainable support systems, but even today many aspects of its world are attainable, if resources were fairly distributed rather than concentrated in the hands of a very few as they are now. Mosley's much lower aim seems to me to settle for much less than we all deserve. ( )

I won my copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway.

I've read most of the books listed in the recommended reading section of this book, along with all of Ayn Rand's books, and a bunch of other political and economic philosophy texts, so I found it a bit hard reading this book without grumbling to myself every few pages. I liked some of this author's ideas for establishing a baseline system of food and shelter for everyone. I did not like the loose, incomplete arguments and undefined terms Mosley uses to describe his ideas and their justification. As a book for the general public this seemed like it might still be too dense and challenging a read, enough that most readers without a background in socioeconomic theory would miss the substance of Mosley's essay. At the same time more well-read readers might be frustrated for reasons similar to my own, because in trying to be more accessible and colloquial, and perhaps poetic, Mosley isn't very convincing in his philosophical arguments.
Straddling a wide readership in philosophy is tough, though, and while I was not very impressed with the philosophical chapters of this book, I'm sure this text could start lots of productive conversations, one of the goals of this book. In that respect than, this is a pretty successful book. And, I would not mind having the option of living in 350 square feet of apartment space for free and being able to buy more basic healthy foods at lower, subsidized prices. ( )