Power to Truth: The Case for Moral Ambition

• Bregman challenges traditional definitions of success, urging people to value impact over prestige.
• He argues that too much top talent disappears into the “Bermuda Triangle of talent” where high-status jobs create little social value.
• Moral ambition calls for directing skills and energy toward society’s most urgent problems.
• He and Admati warn that technological innovation without moral ambition risks deepening harm rather than advancing progress.
• Ultimately, moral ambition reframes success as a question of responsibility: What are you doing with the talent you’ve been given?

What would the world look like if even a fraction of society’s best and brightest dedicated their minds and focused their efforts on solving the world’s most urgent problems? In the latest episode of the web series, Power to Truth, Stanford GSB professor Anat Admati spoke with Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman about his latest book, Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference.  

Bregman is widely recognized for challenging the status quo. His earlier works, Humankind: A Hopeful History and Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World, became international bestsellers. Both he and Admati share the view that addressing the many problems we face as a society requires that more talented people direct their attention to what is important.  

As Bregman explained, too often talent is wasted as bright, ambitious college graduates funnel into what he calls the “Bermuda Triangle of talent,” where they are trained for careers in consulting, finance, and corporate law. Others, he noted, end up in tech ventures that function more like new forms of addiction, such as gambling. While not all of this work is useless, he insists, the imbalance is hard to ignore.

“We’ve got to change that,” he said. “We need some of these really talented people to work on the most pressing issues that we actually face as a species.”

Admati turned to one of the core questions in Moral Ambition: how can talented people recognize societal problems and be motivated to choose work that meaningfully addresses them? She recalled how her own awareness grew after the 2007–2009 financial crisis, when she “fell into this enormous rabbit hole” of jargon, obfuscation, and claims in the banking world. Simple corrective measures were routinely missed, she noted, and even basic transparency proved difficult.

“Getting the truth and empowering the truth was, sort of, impossible,” she said.

Bregman agreed, arguing that pointless complexity is often created to preserve existing power structures. Finance, he said, does not need to be so complex; entire industries simply profited from making it that way, whether through financial engineering or the sprawling ecosystem of tax evasion and avoidance. In artificially complex environments, progress often depends on those he calls radical nerds, people capable of navigating the technical terrain and exposing what others can’t see. He pointed to the political activism of consumer advocate, lawyer and author Ralph Nader in the late 1960s and 1970s.

“He was able to recruit an enormous amount of very talented Ivy League graduates. At some point, a third of Harvard Law School applied to work with him. And he convinced them not to go and work for one of these boring law firms but instead go and work for him in Washington.”

Bregman credited Nader and his group with having their “fingerprints” on more than two dozen pieces of federal legislation, including the Consumer Product Safety Act and the Freedom of Information Act.  Nader’s work, he said, inspired the School for Moral Ambition, which Bregman co-founded in 2024.

Admati pointed to the German CumEx tax fraud scandal as an example of how large-scale misconduct can hide in broad daylight when few people are watching. For more than a decade, the massive and fraudulent stock-trading scheme unfolded largely out of public view. A network of bankers, investors, and lawyers colluded in what became “a plain robbing of taxpayers” across Europe, costing governments more than $55 billion. The German prosecutor who pursued the cases eventually resigned in 2024, citing political pressure to back off.

For Admati, the episode underscored a recurring problem: public awareness lagged, accountability stalled, and those in power discouraged scrutiny. The result, she suggested, was a political climate shaped by diffuse frustration rather than focused action. Bregman agreed, arguing that outrage alone wasn’t enough.

“We need the righteous anger,” he said, “but then we also need the actual skill set, the expertise to fix these kind of things.”

He noted that on issues like tax fairness, the public already shares broad consensus across the political spectrum, that the system is broken with illegal evasion, aggressive avoidance, and structural advantages for capital over labor. Recognizing injustice is the easy part; the hard part is figuring out how to reform the system. In every case, awareness is only the first step; without organized expertise and sustained moral ambition, simple awareness rarely brings about the needed changes.

Before their discussion, Bregman joined Stanford GSB students for lunch, and Admati circled back to the questions they raised. Some wondered whether a “boring consulting job” might actually help them understand how organizations function. Others asked how much impact an individual could have on their own versus as part of a coordinated group. Beneath these questions was a deeper dilemma: how do people organize themselves to take on problems at a meaningful scale? Bregman acknowledged that early-career choices rarely come with obvious answers. He offered two pieces of advice.

“First, really think carefully about the people you surround yourself with and ask, who are your peers? Find yourself a radical group of do-gooders or a safe space of do-gooders, people who continuously remind you who you are,” he said. “The second thing is to make a public pledge, a pledge of what you're going to do with your capital.”

He defined capital broadly as financial, cultural, and human, and suggested committing a portion of future income to meaningful causes or promising that time in a consulting role is temporary before making “the jump to impact.” Several people in his own community, he noted, had already done exactly that.

Admati added that meaningful work does not always have to come through one’s primary job; many people earn a living in one role while pursuing their real passions through volunteer work or parallel projects. She offered it as another way students might think about impact, especially early in their careers.

Bregman linked this idea to the long-standing concept of “earning to give,” noting that even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used a version of it. Engels worked in his family's cotton mill in Manchester to pay the bills while Marx wrote Das Kapital. Bregman said he had become increasingly interested in this approach, not because impact should always be relegated to the margins, but because the alternative isn’t sustainable.

Admati observed that a cultural shift and change of values is needed on the university level. Morally ambitious faculty, she noted, often receive little career reward for work that crosses disciplines or engages with the world beyond academia, even though tenured scholars are uniquely positioned to do both. Instead, siloed fields and limited collaboration with non-academics leave significant talent and insight untapped, an inefficiency she believes academics can help correct, especially if nudged toward broader engagement.

Bregman agreed that the norms we need require a deeper “honor code” that shapes what academia considers prestigious. Publishing in top journals and pursuing ever narrower debates has produced extraordinary knowledge, he said and he acknowledged that his own books rest on decades of such scholarship. But he recalled feeling frustrated as a young scholar after the financial crisis, when economists struggled to explain what had happened and historians were locked in disputes “that maybe 10 or 20 people cared about in the whole world.” That disconnect ultimately led him to leave academia rather than pursue a PhD.

“I would say that the academic honor code can be updated a little bit to include more moral ambition,” he said. “But I also want to be respectful of that search for knowledge.”

In his view, the challenge is creating an environment where curiosity-driven work and work aimed at pressing societal questions both feel valued and part of the same intellectual ecosystem.

If more people were supported, encouraged, and expected to pursue genuinely meaningful work, Bregman feels the impact could be transformative. The question is no longer whether such a shift is necessary, but how quickly we may be willing to make it.