One recent study found that 81% of businesses in the United States have zero employees. That is, they are run by sole proprietors, working for and by themselves, The ideal of self-employment has become dominant in our culture, too. More Americans than ever dream of becoming an entrepreneur, an independent owner, a founder.

But for all of its prevalence in our economy and in our imaginations, the origins of this impulse are a bit hazy. When did so many of us begin to idolize self-employment? What might it reveal about broader shifts in the employment landscape in the 20th and 21st centuries? In his new book, One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America, Ben Waterhouse answers precisely those questions. He explains how the rise of self-employment dates back to the economic transformations of the 1970s and intensified during the decades of precarity that followed. In our wide-ranging conversation, we touch on everything from franchise jurisprudence to the gig economy to the surprising story behind the Sam Adams beer company.

Check out the episode here!

Benjamin Waterhouse is a historian of modern America. His scholarly research focuses on the culture and politics of business in the United States, especially since the mid-twentieth century. He supervises graduate students in fields related to business history, labor history, economic culture, and American politics since World War II. At UNC, Waterhouse offers courses in American business history, modern U.S. social and political history, the history of capitalism, and the history of finance and financial crises. His work has appeared in Aeon.co, Financial History, and Jacobin, among other outlets, and he has contributed several book reviews and op-eds to The Washington Post. His first book, Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA (Princeton University Press, 2014) examined the role of large, national business associations—and their lobbyists—in shaping economic policy and conservative politics between the 1960s and the 1990s. His second book, The Land of Enterprise: A Business History of the United States (Simon & Schuster, 2017), provided a synthetic treatment of American business, labor, and politics from the colonial period until the 2008 Financial Crisis.