E218 - The History of America’s Entrepreneurial Work Ethic w/ Erik Baker

American Prestige

Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

History, Politics, News

4.8 • 705 Ratings

🗓️ 15 July 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Subscribe now to skip the ads and get all of our content! Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps, rise ‘n grind, and find your calling as we welcome historian Erik Baker to the program to talk about his book Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America. The group explores the Protestant work ethic and Jeffersonian yeoman farmer, influential figures like Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor, the seeds of entrepreneurialism in Harvard Business School, how it came to be seen as an American value during the Cold War, “entrepreneurial modernity,” postwar liberalism’s failure to provide meaningful work for the professional-managerial class, self-help writers, and much more. Be sure to check out Issue Fifteen of The Drift, where Erik is a senior editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:53.3	The Hello, Prestige Heads, and welcome to now. I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade, Eric Davidson, and I'm very excited to welcome to the podcast today, my friend, Eric Baker.
	...

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