“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” is a common scolding to admonish someone to use their own resources, hard work, personal sacrifice and grit to rise from rags to riches.
The problem is it’s literally ridiculous. And figuratively it’s didactic, unreasonable and enables contempt for those who are poor.
Martin Luther King Jr. noted this when he said, “It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
The phrase harkens back to the gilded age fiction of author Horatio Alger who turned out 128 novels with stories of impoverished but earnest young boys who used wit, perseverance and an industrious nature to find upward mobility.
Alger’s works express that anyone in America could find success if they would stop feeling sorry for themselves, employ a “can-do spirit” and put their “nose to the grindstone,” which is another tortured cliché meant to convey hard work, but the expression initially implied punishment or abusive management, meaning forcing the worker into intense work. It was later adapted to forcing oneself into similarly intense effort.
Certainly no one expects anyone else to defy the laws of gravity and be able to lift oneself off the ground by their own bootstraps, even so the expression still falls short of practical advice. Bootstrapping sums up a failed narrative that an individual can alone find economic abundance without help, handouts, subsidies or cooperation.
In business, “bootstrapping” describes a situation in which an entrepreneur starts a company with little capital, relying on money other than outside investments. An individual is said to be bootstrapping when they attempt to found and build a company from personal finances or the operating revenues of the new company.
Many of the wealthiest “self-made” people of the age have embraced this origin story without mentioning they benefited greatly from wealthy parents and government subsidies—not to mention they are winners of the genetic lottery with high intelligence, good health and access to a quality education. For instance, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, likes to tell the story about how he started out— sleeping in an office while computer programming. He’s not keen on explaining he was born into a wealthy family in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971. His mother, Maye, is a Canadian model, while his father, Errol, is an engineer, who was a half-owner of a Zambian emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika.
In addition, Musk rarely mentions that his companies benefit from government help. Tesla and SpaceX have received more than $7 billion in government contracts alone and billions more in tax breaks, loans and other subsidies.
Musk deserves credit for his accomplishments. Many others are born to parents with much more wealth than the Musks. Nevertheless, he was not a child of homeless parents who employed the power of his unbreakable will to “lift himself by his bootstraps.”
A new book by Alissa Quart called “Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream,” looks at why narratives of self-reliance are so hard to shake. And she proposes more community-minded alternatives that could improve educational equity.
Guest: Alyssa Quart: Author of Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream.
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*This interview will be recorded on Monday, March 13.
