Rutger Bregman’s Centralized Utopia

Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian and prolific author, is nothing if not imaginative. In his new book, Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference, Bregman lays out his vision to radically transform the world into a technocratic utopia.

His perfect society—let’s call it Rutger-land—is a much colder place (fossil fuels are banned), richer people are poorer (taxed into moral compliance), and poorer people get universal basic income. Rutger-land is tobacco-free, malaria-free, poverty-free, and meat-free. It’s a proudly vegan society: no cows grazing—just fields of kale and solar panels. All energy is renewable, abundant, and basically free, which naturally leads to an end to cancer, suffering, and pain. In Rutger-land, we’ve reached the apex of moral evolution: animal rights are enshrined, meat is history, and tofu reigns supreme. It’s everything good, and nothing bad—at least as Bregman defines those terms.

His approach is resolutely top-down, technocratic, and bureaucratic. He proposes activism, lobbying, policy reform, and nonprofit initiatives as his main vehicles of moral progress. Absent from his blueprint are for-profit businesses, religious institutions, and grassroots, community-led initiatives. Bregman places little faith in the decentralized forces that have historically driven sustainable change, from neighborhood associations to churches to enterprise. For him, meaningful change comes not from the messy, local work of ordinary people but from a centralized cadre of morally ambitious experts wielding policy, data, and urgency like instruments of salvation.

Some aspects of Bregman’s vision are rooted in admirable aims. He is deeply concerned about “the eight million people who die each year from smoke-related causes.” He notes that while “Big Tobacco” is losing customers in developed countries, it makes up for those losses—and even recruits more smokers—in the developing world, where current laws still allow tobacco companies to thrive. In response, Bregman wants to assemble “a squad team of morally ambitious individuals” to crack down on tobacco companies by enacting strict legislation that limits their room to maneuver in these regions. This is a good example of Bregman’s broader approach to change: he seeks to transform the world almost exclusively through legislative change, as well as nonprofit charitable initiatives. Both methods have their merits, but they are often insufficient to sustain the kind of society grounded in economic dynamism, a society marked by liberty, creativity, and social vitality.

A central pillar of Bregman’s vision is his belief that meaningful change must come through formal legislation—laws, mandates, and top-down reforms. One prominent example is his impassioned call to overhaul the tax code to substantially increase taxes on the wealthy. His rhetoric found global resonance during his now-famous outburst at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he exclaimed: “Taxes, taxes, taxes! Everything else is bullshit!” Bregman (whose father was a Protestant minister and whose mother was a special-needs teacher) is especially irritated by wealthy individuals like Steven Spielberg, who—much to Bregman’s dismay—live a lavish lifestyle, with not one but several yachts. He fixates relentlessly on a narrow, highly visible sliver of the wealthy—those who flaunt their lifestyles on social media or red carpets. He is indeed so agitated by their excesses that, in his book, accounts of wealthy individuals appear alongside descriptions of Nazi atrocities, as if both represented comparable forms of moral evil.

Most wealthy Americans really aren’t much like Spielberg, as economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick have documented in their work. Their research and upcoming book, The Stealthy Wealthy, demonstrate that media caricatures of the wealthy are often inaccurate. Zidar and Zwick have analyzed comprehensive IRS and Census data to examine the full spectrum of American wealth, not only the conspicuous ultra-rich. It turned out there is a broader, often overlooked class of successful individuals who deliberately don’t answer surveys and remain out of the public eye. The typical wealthy American is not a celebrity or hedge-fund magnate, but the owner of a medium-sized enterprise in an unglamorous yet socially vital sector: someone who makes machines that rip up carpets in public schools, runs a car dealership, manages a beverage distribution company, or owns a local dental or legal practice. These Americans quietly build wealth by providing tangible value to their communities, prioritizing long-term capital accumulation over status signaling—precisely the kind of success that escapes Bregman’s radar. The “stealthy wealthy” are notoriously difficult to identify in conventional datasets. However, by leveraging rare and granular data, Zidar and Zwick managed to construct a more comprehensive and credible portrait of America’s wealth landscape. Contrary to Bregman’s claims, wealth in America is more often earned than inherited, and more frequently linked to service than to spectacle. In overlooking this quietly industrious segment of American life, Bregman’s fixation on the glamorous elite blinds him to the decentralized, entrepreneurial energies that have long powered America’s real and lasting progress. 

Indeed, Bregman largely ignores empirical economic realities, often invoking a fixed-pie fallacy in his view of the world. Consider this quote: “You have to keep asking yourself why you are so well off, when other people are so poor they don’t even have a few bucks for a mosquito net. Let’s see … Maybe it has something to do with our system of corrupt tax havens, unfair trade agreements, and neo-colonial exploitation by Western multinationals? The question then becomes: how do we get rid of the system?” Bregman’s idealism is sincere, and he has some real moral concerns, but he falls into Karl Marx’s zero-sum view of economics, failing to grasp that prosperity is not extracted from others but generated through innovation, trade, property rights, the rule of law, and economic freedom—precisely the institutions Bregman tends to neglect or vilify. Bregman seems to think that poverty exists today because the rich have unjustly taken too large a slice of a static pie. But this is a dangerous misdiagnosis of how wealth is created—and of what truly lifts people out of poverty.

Aside from legislation, Bregman’s other favored tool for ushering us into Rutger-land is nonprofit charitable initiatives. He devotes a large portion of his book to celebrating individuals who have left their “destructive” businesses and quit their “wasteful,” “bullshit” jobs to start yet another nonprofit. He praises such career changes as morally ambitious and redemptive. Yet Bregman’s strong advocacy for charity sits uneasily alongside his deep skepticism toward philanthropy. On the one hand, he urges readers to give until they are nearly destitute: “You have to keep giving until you’re nearly as poor as a refugee from Bangladesh.” On the other hand, he harshly criticizes wealthy philanthropists: “Let me be clear: most rich-guy philanthropy doesn’t amount to much. They generally donate a mere fraction of their net worth, and when they give, it’s mostly for vanity projects, like paying huge sums to stick their name on the wall of an already well-funded university or museum.” This contradiction lies at the heart of Bregman’s model: he elevates nonprofit charity as the preferred engine of moral ambition, while simultaneously distrusting many of the very people who fund such efforts. He dismisses philanthropy that emerges from business success, yet celebrates charitable work only when it’s detached from market-based institutions.

But nonprofit charities alone cannot serve as the foundation for meaningful, large-scale development. I’m not aware of any country that has advanced through charity alone. Consider Haiti, often dubbed the “Republic of NGOs.” Since 2000, it has had over 20,000 registered nonprofits—one of the highest rates of NGOs per capita in the world. Yet Haiti vividly illustrates the limits of charity-driven development. Despite decades of NGO presence, the country remains deeply impoverished, politically unstable, and verging on failed-state status.

By focusing narrowly on legislation change and nonprofit initiatives, Bregman overlooks the broader forces that sustain a flourishing society. There are many key elements absent from Rutger-land. From Bregman, you will never learn about Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” organizing the free market. You will never hear praise of a commercial society creating healthy incentives for innovation and growth. You will rarely see examples of charity and philanthropy working in unison. In Rutger-land, there is no room for Mother Teresa’s vision of a society “in which the rich save the poor, and the poor save the rich.” I also don’t recall Bregman ever mentioning what role churches or other religious organizations have to play in society. Nor does he seem to understand the Christian idea of vocation—that each individual may be called by God to fulfill a meaningful role through their ordinary work, whether in business, education, craftsmanship, or care.

In contrast to Rutger-land, Alexis de Tocqueville (in Democracy in America) celebrates robust local civil societies capable of addressing social issues effectively at the community level. Unlike Bregman, Tocqueville admires the efforts of ordinary individuals engaging in local associations, solving problems through grassroots initiative—neighbors organizing a school, repairing a road, or starting a lending circle. To be clear, Bregman’s book contains innumerable stories of civil rights activists, and, as a professional historian, he is a gifted storyteller. However, it only counts for Bregman when those activists reach the top levels of influence and codify change through legislation, policy, or institutional reform. Tocquevillian civil society—small, voluntary, often faith-based—is, in Bregman’s view, too invisible, too inefficient, and, to use his own phrasing, a waste of talent, a waste of time, and a waste of life. Bregman’s approach is antithetical to Tocqueville’s vision, displaying little regard for decentralized decision-making or local problem-solving.

Likewise, there are deficiencies in Bregman’s reliance on technocratic centralization that become evident in light of Abraham Kuypers’ concept of spheres of sovereignty. Kuyper, along with Johannes Althusius, viewed family, church, business, and government as distinct sovereign spheres and roles, whose interplay promotes a more vibrant society. Bregman, however, promotes just one sphere—his cadre of morally ambitious activists and experts—as superior, entitled to dominate through centralized power and dictate societal outcomes.

Bregman’s world is starkly binary. Society is sharply divided between the morally ambitious and the morally deficient: either you are actively fighting the great injustices of the day or you are complicit, a passive observer whose life is consumed by what he calls “bullshit jobs.” He labels most people (and, thus, his readers) as “noble losers,” and harshly dismisses many productive careers: “To this day, numerous attorneys, consultants, marketeers, programmers, managers, accountants, and bankers are stuck in well-paid but relatively useless or even harmful jobs.” This simplistic worldview not only undermines individual dignity and purpose but also dangerously elevates centralized decision-making by elites—precisely the technocratic mindset that every societal problem can be solved by experts wielding centralized authority supported by data and policy. Bregman is unabashedly technocratic. His solutions exclusively involve top-down interventions and are often underpinned by apocalyptic urgency. For Bregman, climate change, income inequality, and global poverty require immediate, large-scale, government-led solutions.

Yet history is replete with cautionary tales of technocratic ambitions gone awry. Urban renewal projects of the mid-twentieth century in America, driven by an exaggerated sense of urgency over a population explosion (that never materialized at anything close to the projected scale), displaced millions and devastated communities. Like the urban planners of old, Bregman employs similarly urgent rhetoric: “We have to get off fossil fuels and kick the habit of eating animals—now, in a crazy short timespan,” he declares, echoing the language of crisis that has so often been used historically to justify far-reaching power grabs.

In summary, while Bregman’s eloquence and idealism have garnered considerable attention, his technocratic vision is fundamentally flawed. It misunderstands wealth creation, underestimates the importance of decentralized local solutions, and dangerously romanticizes central authority. Genuine social progress and prosperity arise not from technocratic moralism imposed from above but from a vibrant civil society where local participation, economic freedom, and the quiet, dignified work of individuals and communities work in concert.

Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition should be read as a cautionary tale—a stark reminder of the seductive appeal and inherent dangers of technocratic thinking. The true moral ambition needed today lies not in the perilous utopianism of Rutger Bregman but in embracing decentralization, subsidiarity, and the enduring wisdom rooted in civil society.