One Day I'll Work for Myself by Benjamin Waterhouse
With One Day I’ll Work for Myself, the UNC Chapel Hill history professor questions some of the thinking behind the push toward self-employment. While by no means an advocate for big corporations, he reminds us that after World War II, those corporations—their avarice hedged by government regulation and union contracts—triggered the unprecedented growth of the middle class and a shrinking gap between the wages of CEOs and assembly-line Joes.
However, the white-and-blue collar society of the 1950s proved unfulfilling for many and faced backlash from the ‘60s counterculture. The ‘70s brought shocks to the economy from oil embargoes, inflation, recession and global competition. The theory constructed by MIT’s David L. Birch that small businesses created 88 percent of all new jobs became ammunition for ideologues, notably Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and glib encouragement for people who dreamed of their own start-ups.
And what of the gig economy? “Most people work for themselves in poor countries,” Waterhouse writes. “If you travel through the developing world, you will see this phenomenon clearly: the poorer a community is, the more you will see hardworking people scraping together odd jobs and running independent operations, both licit and illicit, to make ends meet.”
