Quote of the day by Rutger Bregman: “We should pose a different question: Which knowledge and skills do we want our children to have in 2030? Instead of….” |

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian and writer who treated as a rock star in the world of big ideas. His ideas blend sharp historical analysis with a fierce optimism about what society could be. Bregman was born in 1988, and grew up in a family with a pastor dad and a special needs teacher mom. He studied history at Utrecht University and UCLA, and went on to become a journalist. He wrote for De Volkskrant and De Correspondent. He’s not the regular dusty, tweed-jacket stereotype of a historian. He is a TED Talk sensation. He is considered as Europe’s top young thinkers from TED itself. The Guardian dubbed him the “Dutch wunderkind of new ideas.” Bregman’s blown up because his books like Utopia for Realists and Humankind have sold like hotcakes-bestsellers across the world and have been translated into 46 languages. He has got this knack for taking complex stuff from history, psych, and econ and making it punchy, relevant, and hopeful in a cynical age.What makes him such a big deal as a historian isn’t just the sales. It is how he flips the script on the “humans are selfish jerks” narrative that’s dominated since Hobbes. Bregman dives into archaeology, anthropology, and psych experiments to argue that we’re wired for kindness, cooperation, and decency. He’s got real cred: in 2025, he delivered the BBC Reith Lectures on “Moral Revolution,” calling out elite frivolity and pushing for small groups of ambitious do-gooders to spark change, like the abolitionists who were mostly savvy businessmen with moral fire. Critics accuse him of cherry-picking or oversimplifying science, but fans love how he uses history to dismantle and explain complicated facts.At the heart of Bregman’s philosophy is this radical hope that humans are good by default, and our institutions suck because we expect the worst, creating self-fulfilling prophecies. In Utopia for Realists, he pitches wild-but-tested fixes like universal basic income (UBI, citing Nixon’s forgotten proposal and Manitoba trials that slashed poverty), a 15-hour workweek (we’re richer than ever but trapped in bullshit jobs), and open borders to unleash global potential. One of his most famous quotes is from Utopia for Realists-“Instead, we should be posing a different question altogether: Which knowledge and skills do we want our children to have in 2030? Then, instead of anticipating and adapting, we’d be focusing on steering and creating. Instead of wondering what we need to do to make a living in this or that bullshit job, we could ponder how we want to make a living.“This is a question no trend watcher can answer. How could they? They only follow the trends, they don’t make them. That part is up to us-it’s pure Bregman, a gut-punch against passive futurism. He’s saying stop obsessing over AI job-killers or gig-economy scraps; that’s reactive, fear-driven crap from consultants chasing the next hype cycle. Picture parents drilling kids in coding or crypto trading because “that’s the future,” or adults grinding through corporate ladders, tweaking resumes for whatever algorithm demands next. Bregman flips it: Look at 2030 not as a trend forecast, but a canvas. Want your kid to master empathy-building, community forging, sustainable inventing? Teach that. Sick of “bullshit jobs” like endless meetings or compliance busywork? Dream up lives of purpose—maybe artisan farming with UBI safety nets, or creative collectives designing moral tech. Trend watchers? Useless parasites, they predict waves but never surf them; real power’s in us, the creators, steering history like those abolitionists or suffragettes Bregman champions in his Reith talks. It’s empowering, almost rebellious: in a world of Davos elites navel-gazing while inequality festers, Bregman hands the wheel to everyday folks. No wonder it resonates—he’s not just theorizing; he’s lived it, from viral takedowns to building his school. By 2030, if we listen, we might not adapt to dystopia; we’ll build utopia, one bold question at a time.