Earning a living

The enclosure movement in England, which accelerated from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, converted common lands into private property, removing the ability of rural populations to sustain themselves through farming, grazing, and foraging on shared land. Parliamentary enclosure acts, which peaked between 1750 and 1850, formalized the process. Roughly 6.8 million acres of common land in England were enclosed during this period, according to estimates compiled by economic historians. The displaced population migrated to growing industrial towns, where wage labor became the only available means of survival.

This transformation was not universal. In many parts of the world, subsistence economies persisted well into the twentieth century. Karl Polanyi, in his 1944 work The Great Transformation, argued that the creation of a labor market, in which human beings sold their time as a commodity, was one of the most radical social experiments in history. Polanyi pointed out that in pre-market economies, work was embedded in social relationships, kinship obligations, and religious duties. The separation of labor from these relationships, and its treatment as something to be bought and sold, was not natural evolution but deliberate policy.

By the mid-nineteenth century, wage labor had become the dominant form of economic participation in Britain and was spreading rapidly through Europe and North America. The phrase "earning a living" followed the system, becoming the default description of what adults did. In 1800, approximately 80 percent of the American workforce was self-employed. By 1900, more than half worked for someone else. By 1970, the figure exceeded 90 percent, according to data compiled from the Historical Statistics of the United States.