The Work Ethic Was Always a Governance Story

Here's the part of Elizabeth Anderson's argument on The Gray Area that most commentators will probably skip past: Mark Zuckerberg holds a majority of Meta's voting shares, so no board, no shareholder, no institutional pressure can remove him regardless of what decisions he makes. Anderson name-drops this to illustrate how Silicon Valley propagates a "we're liberating you from government hierarchy" ideology while quietly constructing something far less accountable than any government agency.

I cover this structure for a living. It's not an illustration — it's the whole story.

Anderson, a professor of public philosophy at the University of Michigan and the author of Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back, joined Sean Illing's show to trace a long arc: from 17th-century Calvinist theology to the gig economy. Her core claim is that the "Protestant work ethic" — the idea that hard work signals divine grace, and that your moral worth maps onto your output — got captured somewhere around the industrial revolution and retrofitted into an ideology that funnels the gains of labor upward while convincing workers that their poverty is a personal failing.

That story is mostly right. But I've spent enough time watching how it operates at the pitch-deck level to know where the frame gets a little too clean.

The VC version of this is not subtle

When Anderson describes the conservative work ethic as a system that "redistribute[s] income from workers to property owners to the holders of assets," she's describing macroeconomics. What she's also describing, without using the term, is standard venture capital governance.

The dual-class share structure that Zuckerberg uses at Meta — founder holds supervoting shares, ordinary investors hold economically participating but politically inert stock — is not some aberration. It's table stakes for late-stage consumer tech. The founders of Snap, Lyft, and Alphabet all launched with similar arrangements. The board, in these structures, is largely ceremonial. The investors who funded the rocket ship get their pro-rata economics, but they don't get control. And the employees, who were sold equity as deferred wages and a stake in something they were building together? They sit several liquidation preference tranches below the people with actual voting power.

Anderson says this "expresses a desire for authoritarian rule" dressed up as visionary leadership. I'd put it slightly differently: it's the Puritan master craftsman model, except the craftsman owns the shop, the machines, the IP, and also your voting rights. The "we're a family here" pitch that founders use to convince engineers to accept below-market salaries in exchange for options is doing exactly the ideological work Anderson is describing — it recruits workers into internalizing the boss's interests as their own. Y Combinator's entire program, if you wanted to be reductive about it, is twelve weeks of training founders to believe that 80-hour weeks are a competitive moat and that the workers who maintain them are doing something noble. Anderson would recognize that pattern from 1790.

Where I'd push back

Anderson's thesis is most convincing as historical diagnosis. It gets shakier when it arrives at the prescription counter.

Her claim that real wages were "basically flat" through the mid-19th century while capitalists captured industrial gains is attributed to Anderson herself in the conversation — and it deserves that attribution, because it's contested ground. Economic historians have been fighting about Industrial Revolution real wages for decades. Robert Allen's work suggests living standards for English workers stagnated or declined through the early industrial period; Charles Feinstein's widely-cited analysis is significantly more optimistic about wage growth by mid-century. Anderson's telling fits the progressive narrative cleanly, which is exactly when I start wanting footnotes.

The "happiest workers in America are lumberjacks, farmers, and fishers, not professionals" claim gets a similarly easy ride in the conversation. Anderson references a Washington Post piece citing this finding without naming the underlying study. Based on the occupational categories and framing, this likely derives from NORC's General Social Survey data on job satisfaction by occupation — a legitimate source, but one where methodology matters enormously. Self-reported happiness is a notoriously slippery measure; response rates vary by occupation; and the finding is sensitive to how you define "professional." More pressingly: lumberjacks and fishers have extraordinarily high rates of workplace injury and death. Whether the job satisfaction score is capturing meaning, autonomy, or simply the psychological effects of outdoor physical work remains genuinely unclear. I find the claim interesting. I don't find it self-evidently true in the way the conversation treats it.

Her characterization of Edmund Burke — "in an absolute panic about the rising radicalism of propertyless workers and growing welfare rolls" — is also worth flagging as Anderson's interpretive read, not settled Burke scholarship. Burke's actual positions on poor relief were more internally complicated than that framing suggests, and presenting him as the straightforward ideological ancestor of welfare reform rhetoric collapses some real nuance in his thought. That doesn't invalidate Anderson's larger argument, but it's the kind of move where a philosopher sliding into historiography can take shortcuts.

And Germany's student stipend system is not quite the clean parallel to Denmark's that the conversation implies. Denmark's SU grant is universal for students over 18 — no means test, no repayment required. Germany's BAföG is means-tested and structured partly as loans. Both are more generous than the American model, but they're not the same thing, and the elision matters when you're building a policy argument.

The part that's genuinely useful

None of that changes Anderson's most valuable contribution, which is her insistence that the work ethic was contested from the beginning — that there was always a pro-worker reading sitting right next to the anti-worker one, and that which version won depended on organized power, not logic.

"The whole idea was, yeah, you work really hard and then you're entitled to reap the fruits of your labor," she says. "And that means you need decent pay, a living wage. You're entitled to have improving prospects if you fulfill the demands of the work ethic."

That's not a radical claim. By the original Puritan standard she's invoking, it's actually conservative. The Puritans admonished the idle rich as sharply as the idle poor — which is why Anderson notes, with some satisfaction, that "businessmen today just are modern Puritans," except they shed the part where exploitation is a sin. The selective inheritance is where the hijacking happened.

The structural remedies she advocates — unions, co-determination, decoupling healthcare and education from employment — are debated on their merits in the policy literature, and not all of them translate directly from Nordic contexts to the American one. But the diagnosis underneath them holds: if the basic material conditions of your life (healthcare, housing, education) are contingent on keeping a specific job, you cannot freely negotiate the terms of that job. The precarity is the point. A worker who can't afford to quit is a worker who will accept almost anything.

That's not ancient history. That's the leverage calculation every founder and every VC makes when they're deciding how much equity to grant, how long to extend the cliff, whether to reprice options after a down round. The Protestant work ethic, in Anderson's telling, is the story workers tell themselves so that calculation doesn't feel like what it is.

The question worth sitting with: in the current AI-disruption cycle, where the pitch is always "this technology will make everyone's lives dramatically better, and it would be catastrophic if anything slowed us down" — who exactly is that story for?

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Alex Volkov covers startups, venture capital, and the tech business ecosystem for Buzzrag.