David Rolfe Graeber was born February 12, 1961 in New York. He was an anthropologist, anarchist, author, and a professor at the London School of Economics. He was an outspoken critic of economic and social inequality. He coined the phrase "We are the 99 Percent,' the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement."
He earned his BA in anthropology from State University of New York at Purchase in 1984. He earned his masters and doctorate from the University of Chicago. He did ethnographic research in central Madagascar which he used for his PhD thesis (1997).
He was a prolific author. His books included Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (2013), The Utopia of Rules (2015), Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), and in fall 2021, Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow.
David Graeber died on September 2, 2020 at the age of 59.
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