Dutch historian Rutger Bregman attracted a wide audience at a relatively young age with popular books combining history, philosophy, and economics targeted for general audiences. Bregman earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Utrecht University and a master’s in history from University of California Los Angeles. He began his career as a journalist, writing for major publications in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the US. The publication of Utopia for Realists in 2014 established him as a prominent intellectual who, along with figures such as Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker, offer a more optimistic account of human progress to counter what they regard as a dominant attitude of cynicism. Bregman’s main argument, which he has since elaborated further in books such as Humankind: A Hopeful History (2019), is that most social problems are within humans’ capacity to manage and that old attitudes and entrenched interests reinforce the idea that things are as they must always be—or that they are bound to grow worse.

Bregman reached new heights of his fame in January 2019, when he attended the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where the rich, famous, and powerful come together to discuss plans for solving the world’s most pressing problems.