Erik Baker

So policy is a big part of it.

And then the book, I show how the 1960s, the war on poverty, and later Richard Nixon's advocacy of

what he called black capitalism, and into the 90s, the Clinton era, to welfare as we know it.

And a lot of these policy initiatives were framed as correcting perverse incentives that told especially black workers to turn to the welfare state or to government policy to redress inequality instead of making their own jobs.

Coming up... You know, they may say, okay, yeah, sure, you know, I recognize that this is a scam or this isn't necessarily pleasant.

It would be nice if there was another approach, but, you know, I don't see it.

So I'm going to have to see what I can do because I have bills to pay.

Yeah, so if you think about it, there's something almost egalitarian about the idea that economic value comes from your ability to make useful stuff and provide useful services.

This was a staple of the rhetoric of the labor movement going back to the 19th century.

Workers took a lot of pride in the fact that they were doing something every day that was ultimately making or providing something useful.

This rhetorical shift that, again, is related to this increasing preoccupation with international competition that, as mentioned earlier, the sense that value really actually comes from not just making the useful thing but continually coming up with new things, staying one step ahead of the curve.

The people who are creating value are the ones who are running this race the fastest.

And so that gives employers, again, a kind of logic that they can use to impose punitive conditions on the workers who are deemed to not be really driving corporate innovation forward.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, it's not enough to just set the intention to change our mindsets.

But

We need other ways of responding to the needs the entrepreneurial work ethic is promising to supply, whether that's changes in social policy or strengthening unions, giving people more security at work.

I think that the downsides are...

numerous.

First is the sense of depletion and burnout that a lot of people experience.