The Self-Made Myth exposes the false claim that business success is the result of heroic individual effort with little or no outside help. Brian Miller and Mike Lapham bust the myth and present profiles of business leaders who recognize the public investments and supports that made their success possible—including Warren Buffett, Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s, New Belgium Brewing CEO Kim Jordan, and others. The book also thoroughly demolishes the claims of supposedly self-made individuals such as Donald Trump and Ross Perot. How we view the creation of wealth and individual success is critical because it shapes our choices on taxes, regulation, public investments in schools and infrastructure, CEO pay, and more. It takes a village to raise a business—it’s time to recognize that fact.
This book challenges a central myth that underlies today’s antigovernment rhetoric: that an individual’s success is the result of gumption and hard work alone. Miller and Lapham clearly show that personal success is closely tied to the supports society provides.
Explanation:
it’s worth mentioning briefly an additional impact that the self-made myth has on our public debates—that of people voting their aspirations. Because the rags-to-riches myth persists, many Americans hold on to the belief, however unlikely, that they too may one day become wealthy. This has at times led to people’s voting their aspirations rather than their reality. As Michael Moore noted in 2003:
After fleecing the American public and destroying the American Dream for most working people, how is it that, instead of being drawn and quartered and hung at dawn at the city gates, the rich got a big wet kiss from Congress in the form of a record tax break, and no one says a word? How can that be? I think it’s because we’re still addicted to the Horatio Alger fantasy drug. Despite all the damage and all the evidence to the contrary, the average American still wants to hang on to this belief that maybe, just maybe, he or she (mostly he) just might make it big after all.35
It is essential that we find a more honest and complete narrative of wealth creation. In chapter 2, we expose the fallacy of the self-made myth by examining the stories of individuals often lifted up as successes in our public dialogues. In examining their stories, we come to better understand that even their business success includes contributions from society, from government, from other individuals, and even luck.
Beyond the moralizing ridiculed by Twain, this individual success myth overlooked a number of key social and environmental factors. The emergence of a clear geography of opportunity showed that there was something about the place where one lived that contributed to one’s success. No matter what personal qualities someone had, if you lived in Appalachia or the South, your chances of ascending the ladder to great wealth were slim. Those who achieved great wealth were almost invariably from the bustling industrial cities of the Northeast. By one estimate, three out of four millionaires in the nineteenth century were from New England, New York, or Pennsylvania.7
Another unique external factor was the opportunity that existed at that time, thanks to expanding frontiers and seemingly unlimited natural resources. The United States was conquering and expropriating land from native people and distributing it to railroads, White homesteaders, and land barons. Most of the major Gilded Age fortunes were tied to cornering a market and exploiting natural resources such as minerals, oil, and timber. Even P. T. Barnum, the celebrated purveyor of individual success aphorisms, had to admit in Art of Money Getting that “in the United States, where we have more land than people, it is not at all difficult for persons in good health to make money.”8
He might have added that it also helped to be male, to be free rather than a slave, and to be White. While free Blacks had some rights in the North, they had little opportunity to achieve the rags-to-riches dream because of both informal and legal discrimination. Even after the Civil War, Blacks, Asians, and others were largely excluded from governmental programs like the Homestead Act that distributed an astounding 10 percent of all US lands—270 million acres—to 1.6 million primarily White homesteaders.9
