The can-do spirit that undermines American workers
Review by
[Becca Rothfeld](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/becca-rothfeld/)How can dissatisfaction with work shade so easily into a craving for more of it? In “[Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America](https://amzn.to/3BJopGa),” the historian Erik Baker explains that we have been tricked into regarding personal resilience as the solution to structural injustice. There is plenty of discussion of the “work ethic” in circulation, but Baker’s thesis is rousingly novel and ingeniously fine-grained. He disaggregates America’s workaholism into phases, demonstrating that “the entrepreneurial work ethic” was preceded by “the industrious work ethic,” a cultural paradigm that “emphasizes duty and the virtue of persevering without questioning assigned tasks or expecting much reward.” This ideology kept factory workers toiling at the assembly line.
The entrepreneurial ethic, in contrast, is distinguished by its veneration of “people who create work for themselves — as opposed to merely executing, however dutifully, the work assigned to them by others or by circumstance.” Work takes on a moral valence in the entrepreneurial era, and those who do more of it are celebrated as paragons of virtue. For this reason, by the late 20th century, “the relationship between class and work had become inverted,” Baker insightfully observes. “American cultural and political discourse increasingly represented the ‘working’ class as a class without work, while the rich went to ever-greater lengths to demonstrate that they were anything but idle.” “Welfare queens” are lambasted as lazy; Elon Musk, poster child of American industry, brags about working 120 hours a week (while somehow finding the time to incessantly post inanities on X, the social media platform he owns and seems determined to mismanage into oblivion).
Baker is a lecturer at Harvard, but “Make Your Own Job” is not dry, insular or detached from everyday concerns. Although it is thoroughly researched and rigorously conceived, it is also gripping. This is history with urgent stakes and real consequences. Is the way to “escape,” as that desperate Reddit user hoped to do, to work harder? To “lean in” further? To wake up earlier and muster more “positive thinking”?
Or does our salvation lie in leaning out for once?
Baker’s book is a history of three related but distinct aspects of the entrepreneurial phenomenon. It chronicles the different forms that American entrepreneurialism has taken over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries; the hazy justifications for its ascendance that have been proffered by hucksters of many stripes, from New Age gurus to nominally respectable proponents of “positive psychology” at prestigious business schools; and the material conditions that make the entrepreneurial ethic so invaluable to the capitalist enterprise.
Baker begins by arguing that entrepreneurialism began to supplant its industrialist predecessor after the Depression, when the direct-selling industry took off. “Companies that sold goods directly to consumers” were generally more robust than those that dealt with other companies, he writes. Enter the California Perfume Company — and its famous Avon product line, distributed by the iconic “Avon Ladies,” who went from door to door with suitcases of cosmetics in tow. The California Perfume Company took pains to present its sellers as the face of American resourcefulness: The firm’s monthly magazine, Avon Outlook, touted the fortitude and resolve of the saleswomen. From the first, Baker writes, the independent-contractor model served to foster the illusion of “equal status, a level playing field on which sellers could approach CPC executives as co-creators of the firm’s success.”
Direct selling was one of the earliest iterations of what is now called gig work, an arrangement that allows a company to profit from the grueling efforts of its laborers while disclaiming any responsibility for their failures (or their well-being). The tactics pioneered by the California Perfume Company were later aped by American folk heroes like Ray Kroc, the businessman who made McDonald’s ubiquitous, and whose wildly lucrative franchise model held the manager of each store accountable for its fate. Now, companies like Uber have taken the Avon approach to its logical extreme, declining to classify their workers as “employees” so as to head off unionization efforts and avoid coughing up benefits.
Why have workers accepted — and occasionally even embraced — such demoralizing treatment? Entrepreneurialism’s apologists, a motley crew of thinkers and charlatans intent on framing exploitative conditions as empowering, bear much of the blame. Baker traces the American fetishization of the can-do attitude back to the New Thought movement, which swept the nation in the early 1900s. The fad’s practitioners held that “the material realm was not something separate from the realm of the mind” and urged their followers “to use the power of their minds to overcome all forms of distress, disease, and deprivation,” including poverty. Ralph Waldo Trine, a favorite of Henry Ford, explained that “creative, spiritually effervescent personalities would be able to conjure up new work opportunities even in the most challenging circumstances.” In other words, unemployment was a product of laziness, not a dearth of jobs — a notion that proved especially useful to executives like Ford in the wake of the Depression.
New Thought was zany and metaphysically extravagant, but many of its central claims acquired the veneer of legitimacy when they were taken up by scholars and intellectuals, especially those with perches at renowned business schools. By mid-century, attempts at inducing growth by making technical fixes, popular in the late 1800s, were out; the idea that a company’s prospects hinged on the charisma of its leaders — and the related idea that anyone who tried hard enough could make it — was in. Unfortunately, we have yet to kick it back out: As recently as 2023, Entrepreneur magazine was running articles on how “positive psychology can make you a multimillionaire.”
All this publicity served (and still serves) a nefarious purpose. Baker reminds us that the entrepreneurial ethic emerged, not coincidentally, in “an economic landscape in which full-time jobs with regular pay were not merely toilsome but persistently, structurally scarce.” Beginning in the 1910s and 1920s, joblessness was no longer an aberration but “a side effect of irreversible changes to the technical structure of American industry.”
The ultimate function of the entrepreneurial ethic was (and is) to reconcile workers to precarity. “One of the core promises of the idea of entrepreneurship, in American culture, has been to transcend the distinction between capitalist and worker,” Baker writes. Anyone with enough gumption can succeed — so it follows that those who fail are not victims of an increasingly punishing labor market but idlers with an inadequate stock of initiative. In the end, the entrepreneurial economy yields “two antipodal figures,” per Baker: “the tech billionaire,” lionized in the media, and his inverse, “the gig worker using that billionaire’s app to scrape out an income.”
In truth, of course, the former depends on the exploitation of the latter. The carefully cultivated myth of the maverick — of the hometown hero who practices positive psychology fervently enough to become a millionaire — obscures the cruel truth that the outsize wealth of Uber’s executives is produced by underpaid drivers.
And this, Baker acknowledges, explains the enduring appeal of the entrepreneurial ideal. An old adage has it that “antisemitism is the socialism of fools” — a misguided response to a real predicament. The fantasies of entrepreneurial triumph that occasionally surface on the anti-work subreddit are much the same. The forum’s users may be wrong that simple entrepreneurial spirit could solve all their problems, but they are right to despair over their dictatorial and mercurial bosses, their inconsistent employment opportunities, and their general lack of control over the circumstances of their own lives.
But buried in all the upbeat prattle about grit and hustle is a tentative reason for optimism: The entrepreneurial ethic, Baker proposes, is a form of “resistance to work-as-usual.” Entrepreneurialism encourages us to strike out on our own, but the collective frustrations simmering beneath the surface may eventually unite us. At last, something to think positively about! And if all this hope won’t make us millionaires, it may yet do something better: make us willing to fight for one another.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”
Make Your Own Job
How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America
By Erik Baker
Harvard University Press. 337 pp. $35
A note to our readers
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
