Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Erik Baker
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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In times of economic distress, vulnerable people will often take comfort in the idea of “entrepreneurialism,” Erik Baker, a lecturer in the history of science at Harvard University, tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede, in the third episode in our series on the American experiment.
“The gospel of making your own job has a certain kind of resonance to people experiencing economic insecurity,” says Baker, whose book “Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America,” has just been published by Harvard University Press.
“The gospel of making your own job has a certain kind of resonance to people experiencing economic insecurity.”
Baker’s book charts a history of entrepreneurialism as it gained popularity through the 20th century to become one of the dominant economic ideologies of the modern era, particularly in the United States, where the richest man in the world has recently become part of the government.
Entrepreneurialism was driven in the mid-20th century as much by psychologists as economists, Baker explains. “They describe entrepreneurial work in terms of personality and as a distinctly psychological concept, the sense that there’s something about your psychology that you’re putting into your work and that you’ll reap some kind of psychological reward from doing so,” he says. “This is a very new way in the modern American context of thinking about what makes work worthwhile.”
“There is in some ways a distinctly 20th-century American kind of romance with psychology,” Baker says. “Entrepreneurship is about these personality attributes that are a bit more conceptually novel and have to do with psychological health, personal development, fulfillment.”
This philosophy has been enthusiastically taken up by some of the most powerful figures in the modern United States, says Baker. “Elon Musk talks incessantly about the virtues of entrepreneurship, and especially between entrepreneurship and work ethic,” he says.
But as much as entrepreneurialism gives hope to those seeking work in a fractious economic environment, often the rewards will not be as expected, warns Baker. “This process of constantly creating new work to stay ahead of the market often leaves people bewildered about what the actual purpose or value of the work that they’ve wound up doing is,” he says.
Furthermore, Baker says, corporations frequently have ulterior motives when promoting the entrepreneurial work ethic. “On the one hand, there’s clearly crude financial calculations. [Corporations] don’t have to pay payroll taxes or health insurance, they don’t have to pay people overtime. But on the other hand, there’s also an ideological gambit. If people accept it, and think of themselves as true entrepreneurs, then they won’t organize for legal changes to force the company to make these payments that they’d otherwise have to make for full-time employees.”
Further listening: The American Experiment From Outside and Within — with Hari Kunzru and Faisal Al Yafai
The Decline of the American Empire — with Robert Kaplan and Faisal Al Yafai