Episode 47
“…Universal advocacy of the entrepreneurial spirit has not brought universal joy. Contemporary American society seems suffused with a general, oppressive tiredness…The media calls it the ‘Great Exhaustion’.”
Baker, 2025 (p. 3)
What are the origins of the “entrepreneurial work ethic” in the United States and how has that evolved — and informed how people view their relationship to their work — in the last century?
Welcome to the CARC Podcast!
We spoke to historian, teacher, and writer Erik Baker.
Erik is currently a lecturer in the History of Science department at Harvard University and oversees the senior thesis program for undergraduates. He is also an associate editor at The Drift, where he’s been involved since its inception. Erik earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2022, and his dissertation won the 2023 Leo P. Ribuffo Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Erik’s research explores the culture of work in the modern United States.
In his forthcoming book from Harvard University Press, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, (to be published in early 2025) he explores how social scientists and management intellectuals reshaped the American work ethic during the history of twentieth-century U.S. capitalism. He has contributed articles on labor, politics, and American history to publications such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, n+1, The Nation, and more.