One Day I'll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America

by Benjamin C. Waterhouse

Or lose hope in any society-wide efforts to make things better. And I worry that the rest of us will decide that’s OK.

more people work for themselves in poor countries than in rich countries.

younger workers felt the sort of freedom that came from not being invested in the institution itself.

since the rise of industrial society, members of each successive generation have proclaimed that they were living through historic moments of social and technological upheaval.

All of human history, he argued, could be viewed as a series of “waves” rooted in how patterns of work and production shaped social structures.

the rise of industrial society marked an important and historic departure. Among middle- and upper-class families in particular, “work” and “home” became separate spheres—the former was public, profitable, and male; the latter domestic, private, and female.

Instead, the idealized middle-class male was now both a successful professional and an active, involved father who cooked, cleaned, and cared for the kids. His idealized spouse did the same.

When work-for-yourself boosters acknowledged those hardships, they typically did so to praise the individual strength and spirit required to overcome them. Their adulation of scrappy entrepreneurs effectively normalized the unequal and oppressive conditions that pushed many people to business ownership in the first place, reaffirming the conviction that individual risk-taking was the best solution to collective and structural economic problems.

“now every woman can attain wealth, prestige and power by dint of individual rather than collective effort.”26 The struggle for real equality and social progress, it seemed to her, had been sacrificed on the altar of materialism.27

Proposition 22, which undid the new law. The repeal campaign, funded and supported, unsurprisingly, by app-based companies that sought exemptions for their businesses, encouraged Californians to put their love of cheap prices ahead of the well-being of drivers.