Parachute Perplex

Former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel has an interesting essay in The New York Times Book Review about the latest edition of the job-hunting classic What Color Is Your Parachute. A snippet:

The point of a life-changing job hunt is to find work that makes you happy. This idea makes the book not only practical, but intellectually contrarian. [Max] Weber claimed that Protestantism divested work of its earthly delight, making it purely a religious duty, while capitalism destroyed that delight forever.

"What Color Is Your Parachute?" is an extended market-grounded argument that Weber was wrong. A century after "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" was published, the best-selling book about job hunting is an explicitly Protestant guide to finding joy at work.

Whole thing here.