Rashbrooke was born in
Wellington in 1980, where he attended Muritai Primary School and Petone College. At Petone College he received the highest New Zealand score in the 1997 Australasian Schools English Competition. He attended
Victoria University of Wellington where he was the editor of student magazine
Salient and graduated in 2001 with a BA (Honours) in English literature. In 2024, Rashbrooke, along with two co-founders, launched the Institute for Democratic and Economic Analysis (IDEA), an independent public policy think-tank. Rashbrooke's works include four books on inequality in New Zealand published between 2013 and 2021. News website
Stuff has said his first book "both coincided with and helped to motivate a national debate about the widening gap between rich and poor". and held the 2020 J.D. Stout Research Fellowship at Victoria University. ==Selected works==