One Day I'll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America
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From side-hustlers to start-ups, freelancers to small business owners, Americans have a special affinity for people who make it on their own. But the dream has a dark side.
“One day I’ll work for myself.” Perhaps you’ve heard some version of that phrase from friends, colleagues, family members—perhaps you’ve said it yourself. If so, you’re not alone. The spirit of entrepreneurship runs deep in American culture and history, in the films we watch and the books we read, in our political rhetoric, and in the music piping through our speakers.
What makes the dream of self-employment so alluring, so pervasive in today’s world? Benjamin C. Waterhouse offers a provocative argument: the modern cult of the hustle is a direct consequence of economic failures—bad jobs, stagnant wages, and inequality—since the 1970s. With original research, Waterhouse traces a new narrative history of business in America, populated with vivid characters—from the activists, academics, and work-from-home gurus who hailed business ownership as our economic salvation to the upstarts who took the plunge. We meet, among others, a consultant who quits his job and launches a wildly popular beer company, a department store saleswoman who founds a plus-size bra business on the Internet, and an Indian immigrant in Texas who flees the corporate world to open a motel. Some flourish; some squeak by. Some fail.
As Waterhouse shows, the go-it-alone movement that began in the 1970s laid the political and cultural groundwork for today’s gig economy and its ethos: everyone should be their own boss. While some people find success in that world, countless others are left bouncing from gig to gig—exploited, underpaid, or conned by get-rich-quick scams. And our politics doesn’t know how to respond.
Accessible, fast-paced, and eye-opening, One Day I’ll Work for Myself offers a fresh, insightful cultural history of the U.S. economy from the perspective of the people within it, asking urgent questions about why we’re clinging to old strategies for progress—and at what cost.
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This sobering chronicle by Waterhouse (Lobbying America), a history professor at the University of North Carolina, explores how the American "conception of work became so individualized and how so many people became convinced that the path to success lay in working for themselves." He traces the glorification of being one's own boss from Thomas Jefferson—who waxed rhapsodic about the moral beauty of self-reliance, despite himself depending on hundreds of enslaved laborers—through the contemporary gig economy, which Waterhouse suggests appeals to workers disillusioned with traditional employers' inability to provide living wages or stability after the 2008 financial crisis. Highlighting how government interventions have reflected attitudes toward employment, he contends that some legislators hoped the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act would revive the "industrial liberty" of small businesses, which had been the norm before the "first true ‘big businesses' " (mostly railroad and steel behemoths) arose in the 1860s. Waterhouse's economical storytelling keeps the history informative yet approachable, and his searing analysis sheds light on how America's boot-strapping mythology has hoodwinked workers. For instance, he posits that the allure of self-employment serves to divert attention away from the inequitable labor practices that make traditional jobs so grueling, encouraging entrepreneurship in lieu of labor organizing. Readers will want to check this out before quitting their day job.
