Episode description

This is a fascinating episode that takes up thinkers that the podcast has covered before—the Koch brothers, Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and others—but from a different angle: that of the entrepreneurial work ethic. Historian Erik Baker's superb book on the topic, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, offers a genuinely absorbing tour of this most American of ideologies, one that has emerged again and again, in various guises and in different circumstances, to reconcile workers to the contradictions of the U.S. economy, especially the shortage of jobs that has come with its many "innovations" and changes. What are the historical and even spiritual sources of the entrepreneurial work ethic, and what ideological needs does it serve for bosses and managers? Why is it so seductive to Americans? How does it relate to deeply American impulses relating to responsibility, guilt, and shame? In what ways did the entrepreneurial work ethic serve U.S. aims during the Cold War? And how has it endured in our age of Silicon Valley tech overlords and Donald Trump, entrepreneur, being re-elected? We take up these questions and many more in this rich conversation.

Sources:

Erik Baker, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (2025)

— "Fairytale in the Supermarket," The Baffler, Jan 14, 2025

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking  (1952)

Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, (2021)

Listen again:

"Bomb Power" (w/ Erik Baker), Dec 19, 2023

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