The Four Bobs — and the Economic Importance of Self-Starters

W hen I thought of the American Dream as a high-school student in 1980s Indiana, I thought of a family friend named Bob. He was an independent manufacturers’ representative, supplying faucets and other hardware to hotel chains. He and his wife regularly invited my family to poolside cookouts at their home on several wooded acres, and hosted us every summer at their lake house in Michigan. Another family friend, also named Bob, owned an upscale men’s clothing store and often got us and his family together at their home at the end of a long lane. I learned in adulthood that he was the anonymous donor who made possible a high-school European exchange program that my family could not afford. Driving down that lane to thank him years later is an especially fond memory.

Two other Bobs, fathers of classmates of mine, also charted their own paths, one as an insurance broker and another as a purveyor of university sweatshirts and athletic gear. They were early cable-TV adopters, and along with video games, stocked pantries, and an open-door policy, their homes were a kind of teenage equivalent of Cheers — a regular hangout where everyone knew everyone’s name.

All four Bobs went to our church (two mostly because their wives made them), cheered for my teammates and me at Friday-night football games, and gave money to causes whenever asked. They preached the values of independence and hard work and did not hide their contempt for people who got rich the easy way. I remember sitting on the first Bob’s boat one summer as he disparaged the new mansions on the water belonging to “finance guys” and “media-mogul types” who did not earn their prosperity the good old-fashioned American way like he did.

All four Bobs experienced ups and downs and could have quit and taken company jobs when things got hard. But all four stuck to it, worked long hours, took pride in their work, and built something great. Not Silicon Valley great. Just ordinary great.

Today’s political culture does not know what to do with people like the four Bobs. Our resurgent populism does not treat them — sole proprietors, franchise owners, small-business owners, and grassroots entrepreneurs — as either part of the problem or the solution to today’s challenges. We have hardly heard of them in our heated debates over infrastructure, social spending, health care, and taxes. They don’t fit into various dichotomies — CEO vs. worker, elite vs. non-elite, college-educated vs. non-college-educated — that our political class uses to describe the country.

Independent self-starters like the four Bobs are neither elites nor populists. They are relatively affluent yet have mainstream tastes, and they distrust the coastal class without believing that it owes them anything. Merit is everything to them, but they couldn’t care less about the “meritocracy.” They love America but don’t trust its leaders to pick winners and losers.

In other words, they are neither the “millionaires and billionaires” nor the “workers” of today’s unimaginative policy debates. They would find little of use in the Build Back Better plan, and they would resent being lumped together with the opulent class expected to pay for it all. The odd — albeit unacknowledged — agreement, between the progressive Left and the nationalist Right, that America is divided between the one-percenters and the “real” Americans working hourly jobs, has essentially pushed self-starters like the four Bobs off the public stage.

This is a mistake. Self-starters represent an American ideal that is widely admired. They and the people they employ — about 30 percent of the workforce, according to the Pew Research Center — are both a well-established part of our economy and important to our collective psyche. They may not be a majority of the workforce, but their effect reaches far beyond them. Having lots of them starting new ventures at any given time is better for job growth than relying on big companies alone, but their cultural impact may matter more.

Wherever self-starters abound, aspirations also abound and job satisfaction increases. When asked if they have achieved the American Dream, according to survey data from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a greater share of self-employed workers say yes than full-time employees. They are also more likely to say that America’s best days are ahead. Nearly two-thirds of self-employed workers say that anyone can start a successful business, compared with just over half of full-time employees.

Unlike the capitalists of popular imagination, self-starters are not necessarily in it for the money. They are more likely than those who work for others to define the American Dream as making a positive contribution to their community than becoming wealthy. A number of studies have shown that grassroots dynamism and entrepreneurship are based on the nonpecuniary rewards of self-fulfillment that flow from creating, building, and selling new things. Aspirations multiply where self-starters multiply. When the dynamic activity of self-starters wanes, job satisfaction declines for workers and stagnation often follows. Too much dynamism is often blamed for working-class woes, but the truth is likely the other way around.

Two important conclusions follow from identifying and understanding people like the four Bobs. First, grassroots self-starters would give us a better populism. The word “entrepreneur” is loaded, conjuring images of whiz kids PowerPointing their way along Sand Hill Road, but self-starters are much more representative than that. Owners of young businesses span all sectors of the economy, and most rely on savings, family support, or small loans to get started. Less than half of America’s self-starters have a bachelor’s degree, according to a 2017 survey, and most are in their 40s, contrary to our popular fixation on 20-somethings. Such self-starters have historically been more male than female, but women-owned businesses have grown 114 percent the past 20 years. A pro-growth populism that is elite-skeptical if not anti-elite, and yet free of grievance politics, is a natural fit with this crowd.

Second, Middle American confidence in the self-starter ideal is much stronger than the political class recognizes. People in the fourth- and fifth-income quintiles without college degrees — a good proxy for non-elite affluence — are more likely than college-educated Americans in the same income brackets to say anyone can start a successful business, and more likely to believe in the value of hard work, according to AEI survey data. And contrary to the popular narrative, working-class people are more likely than the national average to say anyone can start a successful business in America. Working-class blacks and Hispanics are more likely than affluent whites to say that America’s best days are ahead of us. Working-class Americans may resent the jet-setting arrogance of elites, but it is a mistake to conflate that resentment with economic pessimism, as has been de rigueur in the media the past five years.

This helps explain why — much to the consternation of Democratic pollsters and consultants — Build Back Better agenda items seem popular individually amid low approval numbers for President Biden and a lack of enthusiasm for the policy package as a whole. In the absence of anything serving our upward-mobility ideals, a bloated social-spending policy agenda rings hollow to the very people so many in Washington think they are inspiring. No one who knows people like the four Bobs and their admirers would be surprised by any of this.

Back in 1980s Indiana, none of us would have known that over the next three decades, self-starters like the four Bobs would be a diminishing breed in America. In fact, we had every reason to think American entrepreneurship was alive and well. Between 1976 and 1983, self-employment was increasing in America. But beginning in the mid ’80s, new businesses as a share of all businesses began a decades-long decline. Rather than resisting the slide, policy-makers in Washington have decided, even if unconsciously, that the life of the Bobs is a thing of the past. Wage subsidies, child tax credits, and expanded childcare have become fashionable in a bipartisan political class that has unwittingly concluded that its job is to make unfulfilling employment a bit more endurable.

But what if enough policy-makers awoke to a vision of America that appealed to self-starters and employees alike? Increasing geographic mobility, lowering the cost of housing, eliminating needless permits and licenses, creating more portable and affordable health care and related benefits, removing the rules and practices that require costly lawyers — all of these things, inversely to the Build Back Better plan, are unexciting individually but collectively powerful. And they would have broad appeal, if policy-makers took time to understand what the broad middle of the country cares about.

The four Bobs have begun to fade away. Two have died, one is a widower, and the other went through a tough divorce. But all of them made their mark on people like me, who learned from them what the virtues of prudence, hard work, resilience, and restraint look like in real life. We should all worry that their numbers are in decline these days, not just because of the jobs they are not creating but because of the aspirational stagnation their disappearance leaves behind. We need more of them in the future to make and build great things. Not Silicon Valley great. Just ordinary great.