Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell ▪ January 21, 2025

Matt and Sam talk to historian Erik Baker about his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America.

This is a fascinating episode that takes up figures 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: 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 the re-election of Donald Trump, entrepreneur?

We take up these questions and many more in this rich conversation.

First Aired on Dissent Magazine’s Know Your Enemy.

Shared via Creative Commons.