Erik Baker. Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2025. $35, 352pp.
A few months ago my wife and I, pregnant with our first child, found ourselves in need of more money than we had. We weren’t quite on our way to the Marshalsea, but we were in need nonetheless. My instinct was to work. I started scrambling, looking for freelance writing gigs on a plethora of websites and signing up for food delivery apps. Alas, Providence was more powerful than my work ethic so I only needed to do that for a short time before realizing that all we needed was provided for and moved my family to a new home, just in time for the baby.
Coincidentally, I started reading Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America. As I read I found myself in the pages. Medievals reckoned the mirror as a device not only of reflection but of revelation. I found Make Your Own Job to be similar. It revealed myself and the cultural zeitgeist I know so well in its pages. Moreover, in reflecting myself in it, it revealed how much I have bought into its assumptions. I felt like the proverbial fish in that story asking his friend, “What is water?”
Entrepreneurialism is the central concept of the book. Baker frames it as an American work ethic, and the dominant one of the 20th century. He makes a point that it is not the work ethic as many of us might conceptualize it, but one of several. Specifically he frames it against the 19th century ethic of industriousness which advocates working hard, enduring above all else, grinding out the long arduous days without complaint. A perfect ethic for 19th century American industrial production. The beginning of the post-industrial service economy called for more. It demanded an entrepreneurial worker, one who engages his whole mind and body, time and commitment, creative and generative capacities, working unremittingly for the mission of the firm.
The book covers roughly 130 years, from entrepreneurialism’s first articulation in an offshoot of Christian Science called New Thought through the gig economy of the post-pandemic 2020s. Sections of each chapter are rarely longer than 5-10 pages and each covers smaller stories about companies, people, or thought movements (especially those at Harvard Business School) in vignette-like fashion. Baker, a historian, plies his trade masterfully. Each of these small sections is straightforward and well cited. This style does wonders for his historiographical reliability and makes each section feel indisputably correct. Baker’s voice and hand rarely come through clearly. What is his thesis then? That entrepreneurialism exists, indisputable. That it has been dominant for roughly a century, he makes that clear. But each of these seem weak theses for a book with 57 pages of endnotes and citations. There must be more to his thesis but it is not immediately obvious, as he crafts his argument covertly, but occasionally his voice slips through.
In his chapter on New Age entrepreneurialism, Baker profiles Apple and its entrepreneurial cornerstone Steve Jobs. He briefly characterizes Jobs as “The most ruthless entrepreneur to emerge from the…counterculture.” His aggressive description of Jobs only becomes more felt throughout the section crescendoing as he quotes one author who described exploitation of factory workers at Apple as a serpent infiltrating Silicon Valley’s Eden. “But perhaps it is not quite appropriate to depict this unglamorous industrial exploitation as a serpent infiltrating the divine garden from the outside. ‘We are as gods,’ Stewart Brand famously told his readers, ‘and we might as well get good at it.’ Milton’s Lucifer could hardly have put it better himself.” In these couple of sentences Baker’s argumentative voice shines through in a way that it rarely does elsewhere. The industrial exploiters then, the high power entrepreneurial elite, are not covert agents “from the outside” but are themselves as prideful as Lucifer acting “as gods” at others’ expense for their own gain. The folly of the entrepreneurial man is exposed by the fall that accompanies his embrace. That surely is one strong value judgement.
These straightforward value judgements are few and far between. It took stepping back from the book and looking at it as a whole to start seeing Baker’s thesis coalesce. Right in the middle of the book, the chapter ‘Good Works’ follows the rise of New Age entrepreneurialism with companies such as Apple and the Buddhist inspired health-food store Erewhon. The following chapter ‘Family Business’ charts the rise of conservative-led businesses such as McDonalds, Walmart, and Amway. In the former, entrepreneurialism is “a way to become who you are” and in the latter an “avenue of restoring the role of the family in American life.” This is the core of Baker’s argument. He works on this meta-level to show the pervasiveness of this ethic to American life. He places the left and the right, the fruit eating hippies and the family oriented traditionalists, on facing pages, two translations of the same concept. Thus each section ends up commenting on the others for him. He shows clearly that in the development of entrepreneurialism there is no discrimination of ideology, faith or politics.
From its origins in Christian Science to Abraham Maslow to DoorDash, entrepreneurialism is declaimed by those who profit from it to those who struggle to. It is espoused by the profitable owners to the “97 percent of distributors who failed to break even in Amway.” Self-help gurus and con-men make loads pontificating in best-selling tracts on the subject, not selling knowledge but the hope that one can make himself great. Wealthy CEOs use it to justify ruthless policies like the annual entrepreneurial performance reviews Jack Welch instituted at GE wherein the bottom 10% “‘had to go’ in Welch’s words.” It is espoused by those who benefit to those who bear the cost. At each turn it seems Baker points out these trends. Even Maslow, a psychologist, was hired by companies to help them improve through entrepreneurial practices.
That is not to say that the concept is vapid wholesale, but that the American work ethic of entrepreneurialism is in need of scrutiny. In fact, it seems to me that the cure to the work ethic of entrepreneurialism is true entrepreneurship, i.e. true ownership of one’s work. This does not mean that each worker must be his own business owner, nor that each firm must be distributist. Simply, this means that each worker is entitled—by justice—to the fruits of his labor whether in cash or in kind. This is the only way that the virtues of creativity, self motivation and risk taking found in entrepreneurialism can be properly realized.
Thus Baker forms an erratic historical collage into a fine tapestry. He does not need to intervene. He lets the story comment on itself and allows his readers to form their own conclusions. He defines the central image as the American hope for more. The same ethic drives the self-help guru to write a bestselling hit as drives the eager readers to buy it. I think Baker would agree with what I learned not too long ago: neither entrepreneurialism nor any other work ethic will save us. We’d better place our trust in a Power greater than ourselves lest we rely too heavily upon our own work. Truth, not work, will set us free.
Originally published in the spring 2025 Mere Orthodoxy print journal. To become a member and receive future issues, join today.
