This book is good, I just feel like I've already read it. ( )

This was a dense read but I'm so glad I made it all the way through. I was so glad to learn all that I did, and relieved at how certain concepts and topics were explored. Seeing my own experiences reflected back at me, at parts, was a huge relief. I wanted to hug the book at times, but I was reading an ebook so I did not. Several books she recommended, I had already tried to read. They were either boring, dense, or bordered on victim-blaming (eg "if poor people just worked more jobs or went back to school). But I recognized the titles and nodded, and agreed with the points she was making by mentioning them. I hope this is widely read. I did seek out other works of the author after getting through this, but they weren't as engaging. ( )

Among the crazier metaphors of American society is bootstrapping. It refers to leather flaps at the top of tall, tight boots, that were the only way to pull them on. Two hundred years ago, someone used that to refer to succeeding in life. It begat the “self-made man”. And they have jointly become the American ideal and requirement for success. But as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has pointed out, lifting oneself up by the bootstraps is a physical impossibility; “The whole thing is a joke.” No one is self-made.

Nonetheless, pulling oneself up by the bootstraps has become the American answer to failure, injury, persecution, poverty, homelessness and prejudice. It is an excuse as much as it is a prescription. In Alissa Quart’s Bootstrapped, the remarkable sickness this joke has produced is exposed for all its inherent hypocrisy. And she offers a bunch of alternatives that are real, even in the USA.

The hypocrisy of bootstrapping comes in the form of self-promotion, mostly by the very rich. They love to claim they are self-made. That no one helped them at any point, and that they succeeded purely thanks to their own smarts and perseverance. And in spite of life and its obstacles. This, as Quart points out again and again, is total nonsense.

She examines the roles of parents, particularly mothers, in helping form, train and aid the development of these self-made people. They get no credit, to the point of being erased from biographies, she says.

Among the real bootstrappers are the side-hustlers, holding down two and sometimes three jobs, never getting ahead and barely hanging on. Hard work is their lives. Success never arises. America does not want to hear their stories. They want to hear that Kylie Jenner of Kardashian fame is a self-made billionaire at the age of 23; she did it all herself with no help from anyone. Everyone needs to make it on their own like she did. If you don’t, it’s your own fault.

Quart also looks at societal benefits like infrastructure, banking and especially government that permit some people to succeed better than others. One example she does not dwell on is Elon Musk, who is reputed to have received $15.9 billion in loans, grants and subsidies that have helped his firms Tesla and SpaceX survive and thrive. Without that truly massive cash infusion, Musk would be a mundane millionaire, thanks mostly to his beating back the entrepreneurs of the companies he purchased. It’s typical of a bootstrapping story: false.

Unfortunately, Americans don’t just dwell on the positive aspects of bootstrapping. They use it far more to damn and humiliate the poor, the non-white, the handicapped and the different. They inform the poor, destitute and homeless they are simply lazy. Americans take pride in stamping “I need lunch money!” on the arms of children too poor for the school lunch program. An actually free lunch would be a “slow addiction” according to lawmakers. Those in trouble, homeless, ill and unlucky are told to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps because each of them is the master of their own destiny. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the bulk of Quart’s book is a compendium of different examples of the infinite ways America keeps people back and down despite their best efforts.. From government bureaucracy keeping people from anti-poverty programs to unavailable healthcare, bootstrapping is the answer.

There are revealing interviews with self-made men and women, who admit to their luck in business, in they’re being white (and particularly white male), with access to family funds, bank loans, job offers and partnerships that all but guarantee their success. The uneducated, the poor, the unconnected and the nonwhite are far, far less likely to ever achieve the same success, even when they are sharper, more talented, more creative and more inspired. Quart cites Pamela Walker Laird, an economic historian saying in America, if you have succeeded, it is because you are corrupt.

There’s a particularly galling chapter on girlbosses, successful women who have it all and have done it all by themselves. No credit is given to the women they hire to care for their children, or the advisors, consultants and mentors they rely on to keep ahead of the breaking wave. Time and again, it was never a case of pulling themselves up by the bootstraps that got them where they are. It took a very large team of the uncredited.

I don’t know if they do this any more, but several years ago the OECD analyzed student scores in a multitude of subjects and positions. The OECD comprises the top couple of dozen fully modernized nations, the richest and presumably best able to produce valuable human beings. American students did really badly in things like reading, writing, science and arithmetic. But they came in first worldwide in one area: self-esteem. Americans focus above all else on teaching their children they are invincible, that they can achieve anything with hard work and that nothing can stop them from succeeding if they apply themselves. Actual education, experience and talent don’t figure in the equation. Everyone is on their own and self-esteem is key to making it.

This is the dismal “Horatio Alger” syndrome, where underdogs become demi-gods by dint of hard work. Like the pedophile Alger, the lives he portrayed were bogus. Norman Vincent Peale wasn’t far behind, leveraging a positive attitude into a million dollar business on the backs of these who hadn’t reached his heights. It’s a slice of the American Dream, and like the Dream, quite unreal.

In America, Gofundme.com was founded to leverage new creativity in arts, culture and business. This is clearly the opposite of bootstrapping: mass-co-operation and collaboration. But instead, Quart and the site’s founder damn American society for turning it into a healthcare bankruptcy site, where thousands beg for help with insurmountable medical bills. To its founder’s horror, it has become the poster child for inequality instead of creativity. You can’t bootstrap your way out of cancer. But that’s the American attitude; you are on your own.

In a bootstrap society, there isn’t even any trickle down effect – bootstrappers keep it all, Quart says. Benefits not only don’t spread downward, they don’t even spread outward. Quart gives the remarkable stat that billionaires could have paid the $3400 pandemic survival payments to “all 330 million–plus Americans and still be richer than they were at the start of the pandemic: they had had a wealth gain of $1.8 trillion,” she says. But they didn’t help. They kept it all – offshore.

Bootstrapping goes completely against the biologically built-in need for collectivity and collaborative effort. Ayn Rand, once again, was completely wrong, as Quart shows definitively. But she has believers in the millions in America. No society has flourished with this mantra at its core..

Quart comes at this from a lifetime of helping others, including her work at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which she founded. It has opened her eyes to examples of interdependence, by which people help each other to success. There are many flavors of it, such as mutual aid, public budgeting, co-ops, and volunteering. She examines all of them for their positive effects, each different.

We used to call it serfdom, then it was called bootstrapping. Now of course, Americans call it freedom. But serfdom comes closest to the truth. Because the hard truth about bootstrapping is that 60% of wealth in America is inherited, according to Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor. Fortunes beget fortunes. For the rest, God bless.

We know what works for the rest – co-operative communities. Quart nails it in Bootstrapped.

David Wineberg ( )

Bootstrapped by Alissa Quart is an essential read both for those who already at least vaguely understand the issue as well as those who have been privileged enough to think that "lifting oneself up by one's bootstraps" is actually a real possibility.

When you discuss the idea of extreme individualism with an advocate of it, even they have to acknowledge at least some degree of interdependence. Roads and infrastructure upkeep, training and skilled assistance, and other obvious examples. Yet they insist that what they have done, and what every other person can do, on an equal basis no less, is what Quart labels bootstrapping.

This book goes beyond the obvious examples and illustrates the many ways that this mistaken mentality has, and continues, to hurt people as well as our nation. As the examples and illustrations add up it seems like it would be so obvious that this is a counterproductive way of viewing life and success. Yet entitlement and privilege don't give up easy, and many will still, with nothing but stories of the few who appear to embody their belief, cast blame for hardships on those suffering the hardship.

I would recommend this book to everyone but especially those who seem to have this discussion with others on a regular basis. This book offers many talking points that will at least make those willing to engage reconsider the idea of bootstrapping.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )