David Graeber

Anthropologist at the London School of Economics, best known in Kyle’s corpus for the “Bullshit Jobs” thesis. Rutger Bregman’s Utopia For Realists builds directly on Graeber’s essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” quoting his analysis that “innumerable people spend their entire working lives doing jobs they consider to be pointless” — telemarketers, HR managers, PR advisors, administrative roles — jobs “even the people doing them admit are, in essence, superfluous.” That thesis anchors Bregman’s value-vs-pay inversion and sits inside the book’s broader argument cluster alongside Automation, The Precariat (Guy Standing), and Universal Basic Income as the policy response.

Graeber also surfaces in Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation, where Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber cite his essay “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit” on the idea that we now build better simulations of the future rather than the future itself — fitting Boom’s stagnation diagnosis.

Context: David Graeber (1961–2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist, a professor at the London School of Economics, and the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. He was an early figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and is often credited with the slogan “We are the 99%.”

Where this appears

• Utopia For Realists — his “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” essay anchors Rutger Bregman’s value-vs-pay argument.
• Bullshit Jobs — the thesis he originated, that a growing share of jobs are pointless even to those doing them.
• The Precariat — part of the same automation / displaced-work argument cluster.
• Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation — cited via “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit” on simulating the future instead of building it.