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That's kind of conversation to your soul.

That's conversation.

Between your soul and the night. Hello, Hello, Prestige heads, and welcome here, asige. 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. Eric's a lecturer on the history of science at Harvard.

And he's also an associate editor at The Drift, one of those cool, new little magazines that everyone can't stop talking about.

But we invited him to talk about this recently released book, Make Your Own Job, How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America.

Eric, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me on.

So let's start with just a basic question. What is a work ethic? What do you mean by a work ethic?

And how is this something that could actually be traced historically?

So the basic idea of a work ethic is that we, all of us find ourselves doing more work than we, strictly speaking, need to. The kind of economics explanation of why we work

is because we need to satisfy certain needs or we want to get a certain amount of money

that we can then exchange in order to satisfy our wants and needs.

But in reality, we all have the experience, I think,

at one point of another, of working more than we actually do need to by those mechanisms.

So the question is why.

And there are a range of different answers that social theorists have proposed, but an important piece of the puzzle is culture, is ideas.

And in particular, the set of ideas and cultural codes that we call the work ethic.

So in other words, these are scripts or sort of explanations

...