The Precariat

In Kyle’s notes, “the precariat” is the term coined by British economist Guy Standing for “a growing class in low-wage, temporary work with no political voice.” It enters the corpus through Utopia For Realists, where Rutger Bregman quotes Standing’s prediction of “the emergence of a new, dangerous ‘precariat’ — a surging social class of people in low-wage, temporary jobs and with no political voice.”

The concept sits inside the book’s broader argument cluster — Automation and the Second Machine Age displacing workers (Wassily Leontief’s “humans as horses displaced by tractors”), Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber), and Universal Basic Income as the policy response. The precariat names the human cost that this argument is built to address: the population stranded by precarious, low-status work that the post-scarcity and basic-income proposals aim to make obsolete.

Context: Guy Standing’s 2011 book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class popularized the term, a portmanteau of “precarious” and “proletariat,” describing workers lacking stable employment, occupational identity, and labor protections.

Where this appears

• Utopia For Realists — Rutger Bregman quotes Guy Standing’s warning of a “surging,” voiceless precariat, within his case for UBI and post-scarcity policy.
• Guy Standing — the economist who coined the term; one-line page anchored to this concept.