He coined the phrase "We are the 99 percent" and the concept of bullshit jobs.
David Rolfe Graeber was born on February 12, 1961, in New York City. His father, Kenneth, had fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. His mother, Ruth, was a member of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and had been the female lead in the 1930s labor musical Pins and Needles.1
Graeber studied anthropology at the State University of New York at Purchase and earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1996. He taught at Yale from 1998 until the university declined to renew his contract in 2007, a decision he suspected was politically motivated.2
His 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years argued that the standard economic story of barter giving way to money was historically backwards. Credit and debt systems came first. Coins came later, largely as a byproduct of warfare. The book challenged the foundational myths of economics and attracted praise from scholars including Thomas Piketty.3
Graeber played a central role in the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and is widely credited with coining the slogan "We are the 99 percent."4
In 2013, he published an essay titled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" in Strike! Magazine, arguing that a growing share of paid employment was so pointless that even the employees could not justify its existence.5 The essay went viral. He expanded it into a 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, which defined five categories of meaningless work: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters.
Graeber spent his final years at the London School of Economics, where he held the position of professor of anthropology. He died on September 2, 2020, in Venice, at the age of fifty-nine.6 His final book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, coauthored with David Wengrow, was published posthumously in 2021.