Selling a Defective Dream

I met Rick in February 2010 in central Florida while waiting to take a hang gliding lesson. Neither of us had flown before. He had just gotten a divorce. I had recently gotten a tenure-track job. We were both looking to mark a moment with something transcendent.

Rick grabbed the tow ahead of me. A little plane dragged him along the grass, then up, up, two thousand feet. As he was descending, strapped to the lead instructor, he took his wedding ring out of his pocket and flung it thousands of feet down, in the general vicinity of an orange grove.

We flew together often in those early years. I was a slow and nervous learner, whereas Rick (not his real name) quickly became an expert. He could follow a red-tailed hawk up into the dome right under the big clouds. The hang gliding ranch hired him for odd jobs. Between those, he worked security at a nearby shopping mall. He was a supportive and generous friend, if sometimes extravagant and moody. He loved to sing Randy Travis songs and was constantly adding cheerful tattoos to his already covered body.

There was one thing that made our friendship really hard: the business opportunities. They would take over. They started, as I recall, with a video game truck for kids’ parties. He just needed a few thousand to rent the truck, and then the money from the nonstop birthday bookings would come pouring in. A few years later he bought materials for a short-lived online shop selling holistic wellness products; another scheme, if I remember correctly, involved essential oils.

What I do recall clearly is his urgency—how all he needed was an early infusion of cash, then for others to sign up, and soon we’d be raking it in. I say now that I never thought any of it would work, but perhaps that’s the wisdom of hindsight. Rick was hard to turn down. I remember one paycheck from the school where I was teaching that I endorsed right over to him. I still can’t believe I did that.

Eventually I did learn: when Rick took a certain tone of voice, when the vision of escape took hold, I had to fade away. He was terribly convincing, a full-throated spokesperson for whatever bug had bitten him. And I saw how badly he wanted it—how he wanted to break free, as though there were some thermal in the air that would lift him for good and then he’d never have to go back to the suburban mall. But I also didn’t want to be there when the wings came off and he crashed, when the kids’ party truck sat idle in his driveway, the unsold crystals piling up in his living room.

Several of the opportunities that enthralled Rick seemed to come from multilevel marketing companies. Multilevel marketing (MLM) is the elegant-sounding moniker designed to describe a business model in which people who want to make money independently—often called “associates” or “consultants”—earn money by buying products from a centralized hub and then reselling them. MLM participants can add to their earnings by recruiting others to join. In theory money flows from customers to distributors, who earn commissions not only on their own sales but also on what their recruits buy and sell. The promise to these new associates is that, through a combination of sales and recruitment, they can ascend the ladder to the top, earning more as their network grows.

The money in an MLM scheme does flow upward, and with great velocity and force. It doesn’t, however, come from selling goods to consumers. The boxes of Mary Kay retinol eye cream or Amway vitamins are indeed the product, but in a different sense than the associates believe: the goods exist not to be spread on baggy eyes or ingested for better sleep and immune support but to be bought by the associates themselves, who can never quite figure out how to sell them.

Data is hard to come by, but a 2016 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaint against Herbalife—a nutritional and dietary supplement MLM—found that the “overwhelming majority” of its distributors didn’t see profits. One study of 350 MLMs found that 99 percent of the people who joined as distributors lost money.¹ Because a company’s profits increase if sellers buy more inventory to hit purchase thresholds, the business model incentivizes bulk buying. Sellers end up with closets, rooms, or whole garages full of inventory. A traditional Ponzi scheme, we know, tends to collapse spectacularly: the bank vault opens, and the money isn’t there. The innovation of MLMs is that they keep the system as a whole in motion by leaving the individual participants to suffer losses on their own.

As Bridget Read shows in her fast-paced and fascinating Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, there are millions of these small collapses. About one in thirteen Americans has participated at least once in a multilevel marketing scheme. That’s more than the number of people who have served in the military. It’s far more than the number of people who drive cars for Uber or Lyft.

When MLM associates fail, it is tempting to see them as tragic sellers in a long line of American dreamers, like Death of a Salesman’s Willy Loman or the gambler in Leonard Cohen’s “The Stranger Song,” seeking the card “so high and wild he’ll never need to deal another.” In this light, they seem like overextended romantics who fail because of their own weaknesses, undone by bad luck and overconfidence. Read dismantles this story. She lays out in meticulous detail how companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife make the failures inevitable. They are, in her account, elegant pyramid schemes designed to avoid legal regulation, to preempt moral censure, and to disguise engineered extraction as personal failure or calamitous accident.

When people join an MLM, they take on an oddly split economic identity. Associates certainly see themselves as sellers, but in the data that Read shares they usually look like exploited buyers. Put another way, they seem to be exploited both as consumers (they were lied to about a product) and as employees (they can’t make money from their labor). They are at once the company’s target audience and the worker, the muscle.

This figure—the worker-consumer—doesn’t fit neatly in the postindustrial division of American economic activity. Naturally, workers are almost always also consumers, and vice versa—but our economic system relies on a clear distinction between the two roles, each of which has its own associated legal categories, moral values, and organizing principles. Labor law was designed to support the wage earner who sells her time to industrial owners, protecting her right to organize and ensuring basic humane treatment. Consumer protection law was developed to shield the buyer who uses his wages to purchase goods, safeguarding him from deceptive advertising and dangerous products.

Separating people into these two roles meant deemphasizing their power as citizens who might exercise some measure of economic agency by shaping the terms of exchange itself. This cordoning off of workers and consumers fed into a more general midcentury trend toward the depoliticization of economic life and the conflation of freedom with consumer “choice.”² The so-called consumer welfare revolution in antitrust law in the 1970s and 1980s insisted that the goals of economic regulation should be cheap prices and efficiency. Questions of power and democratic control were cleanly stripped out. The consumer rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, while more aligned with the left, had championed similar language, popularizing the idea of “voting with your wallet.” This effort, perhaps inadvertently, treated the consumer as the central disciplinary force in the market rather than urging the citizen to push for general democratic accountability and to demand that the government prohibit dangerous business practices.

But this is a blinkered way to see the world. It isn’t just that earners and buyers have a lot in common, or that many of us are both, but that these categories are cramped and limited in their ability to describe the complex range of human needs and desires in the sphere of political economy. The consumer is imagined as wanting cheap goods, the worker as wanting good wages and benefits and stability—but these do not exhaust a person’s possible economic behavior. Recognizing the artificiality of this distinction hardly means that we should abandon labor unions or consumer movements. But we should acknowledge that the separation between the consumer and the worker was a political invention, not a social fact—and that it fragmented the solidarity that once joined fair prices and wages as parts of the same democratic project.

The irony, or perhaps the tragedy, is that the organ that finally succeeded in tearing down the distinction between the consumer and the worker was the corporation—and for its own predatory ends. It is in great part because our economic worldview so starkly distinguishes between consumers and workers that MLMs—along with corporations like Care.com, Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash—slip between the cracks, remaining frustratingly unregulated.

Little Bosses Everywhere moves forward on two tracks, one macro and one micro. Read, a deft magazine journalist, punctuates the book with vignettes from the life of Monique, a thirty-six-year-old air force veteran in Tallahassee. Monique is living on about $1,200 a month when she discovers Mary Kay through what seems like a serendipitous invitation to a party at a place called the Pink Cadi Shack. The initial meeting is both communal and aspirational, with pizza in the kitchen and motivational quotes on the pink and black walls; on display are the ranks, starting with Independent Beauty Consultant and proceeding through Red Jacket and Director in Qualification to Independent Sales Director, through which new members can advance.

It becomes, for Monique, a vision of how she can earn and even excel. She starts by buying a $99 starter kit ($118 with tax and shipping), then puts $2,200 on her credit card for the inventory that her “upline” at Mary Kay—the person who recruited her—tells her will get her off to a strong, confident start. “You can’t sell from an empty wagon,” the woman says.

For seven years Monique attends conventions, pays fees for training materials, and buys inventory. Each new rank demands more orders and recruits and promises ever more tantalizing rewards: to be eligible for prizes like a Roomba vacuum cleaner, Monique has to be a Star Consultant, which means ordering $225 worth of moisturizer and eye shadow every three months. She also calls on her social world to join her. “She sent Facebook messages to friends she had served with overseas and hadn’t spoken to in years,” Read writes.

Monique’s upline is constantly pestering her to pressure her “downline,” asking her, for instance, to instruct her recruit to spend her stimulus check on product. When Monique “fell short and needed to get around the requirements,” in Read’s account, “she simply charged Mary Kay orders for her downline to her own credit card.” Ultimately, she can’t keep up. After repeatedly failing to meet targets, she loses a rank and has to keep buying product to stay connected. She quits only after she finds herself in a hospital recovering from a hysterectomy while her unfeeling upline, who certainly knows about the surgery, texts to nag her about product sales. After the better part of a decade, Monique has earned about $5,000 and lost more than $75,000.

The penalty and debt are not just financial but emotional. MLMs exploit the dreams of human connectedness: friendship, kinship, and care. The women—and it is increasingly women—who sell Mary Kay, Herbalife, and Amway vitamins want freedom from unpaid caregiving burdens, isolating relationships, inflexible waged work, and community roles that leave little space for imagination and growth. They join MLMs and wind up poorer than they were when they started out, embarrassed and secretive about their losses, often still convinced that their own weaknesses caused their failures or ashamed about the people they recruited to join. Realizing that the system was designed for failure all along is small comfort when you are deep in a hole.

How did this scheme, which looks every bit like a dressed-up Ponzi, come to be legal, let alone so widespread? The second track of Read’s book is a history of the precursors from which the modern MLM emerged. Her chronology begins with a scrappy dilettante named Carl Rehnborg. Just as the idea of the “vitamin” was catching on in the 1920s, Rehnborg became obsessed with nutrition, eventually developing an alfalfa concentrate and selling it as VITASOL, which promised relief from all kinds of illnesses. After repeatedly failing to launch the company, in 1939 he changed its name to Nutrilite and started calling himself a doctor and a chemist in his sales pitches.

Rehnborg’s fourth wife recommended he take a sales training seminar inspired by Dale Carnegie’s newly published How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). There he met a desperate and indebted actual doctor, William Casselberry, who joined the Nutrilite sales force. Next a funerary salesman named Lee Mytinger came on board, too. The three of them—the alfalfa gigolo, the unhappy doctor, and the aggressive salesman—joined forces in 1945, at the height of “vitamania,” to create what they called the Plan.

In their program a distributor would become a “sponsor,” who would be incentivized to grow the business. This sponsor would bring in other distributors, who would buy their products from him, becoming his “downline.” What they ordered would become part of his monthly volume. The higher the volume ordered, the higher the discount for the seller. Sellers had two paths to riches: they could spend their own money to purchase inventory from the central company and then resell it, or they could make money by recruiting new people and then getting a percentage of whatever those people sold.

The Plan worked. In fact, it was so successful at generating revenue for its founders that they built up a national network. Within two years of implementing this idea, Casselberry, Mytinger, and Rehnborg were making the equivalent of $6 million a year; within ten years they were making $26 million, the equivalent of nearly $300 million in today’s dollars.

Right off the bat they became the subject of a federal probe. In 1957 the FTC brought a case against Mytinger and Casselberry for making false claims and using restrictive contracts that prohibited people from working for competitors. While the FTC won the case, there were other problems. Less than 2 percent of the people who signed up to distribute Nutrilite were actually moving up the promised ladder (that is, earning or attaining significant rank). Instead of selling vitamins to external customers, many were just selling a defective dream product to recruits.

Despite the scrutiny, Nutrilite-inspired companies that used similar models sprouted up in the 1950s and 1960s. An outfit called Abundavita—whose delicate alfalfa element, according to its chief salesman, had to be harvested between 3:00 AM and 6:00 AM—was started by a Nutrilite defector. In the late 1950s, when Nutrilite started to founder, Abundavita took off, boosted in part by the movements that followed Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). Many of these firms started adopting a quasi-theological self-help rhetoric of “manifesting” dreams and striving upward, which moralized success and foreclosed solidarity.

In 1959 Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel, who had begun as Nutrilite distributors, founded the company Amway. Initially it sold laundry products, then branched out into other household cleaners, personal care items, and nutritional supplements. Amway copied the Nutrilite model but adjusted it by allowing people to buy in at very low levels. The company grew quickly, ballooning from $4 million a year in sales in 1964 to $100 million by 1970.

It also attached itself to a political vision. In the 1960s and 1970s DeVos traveled the country on a “Selling America” tour, hosting a series of rallies that blended church talk with sermons on capitalism and the glories of free enterprise. On the circuit DeVos crossed paths with Ronald Reagan, then running for governor of California, who was delivering similar exhortations—albeit not attached to MLMs. They saw each other as prophets of a similar faith and remained close.

Originally many such Rehnborg-inspired firms called their model a “plan” or “opportunity,” but over time the companies rebranded as “multilevel marketing” to distinguish themselves from the scammy-sounding pyramid scheme. (In 1972 former distributors did go to the top of the pyramid, when Amway acquired a 51 percent stake in Nutrilite.) The Direct Selling Association, a trade group founded in the 1910s to connect door-to-door salesmen and protect their reputation, was reborn under Amway’s direction. By the 1970s it was pushing a Manichaean story about good, respectable MLMs and the bad apples who gave honest networkers a bad name. The DSA and its member companies argued for a bright line between legitimate direct selling and illegal pyramids, claiming that recruiter rewards were just a modernized update to the long American tradition of door-to-door sales.

In the 1970s, Read shows, DeVos and Van Andel leaned heavily into their ideological and political project, fusing Amway’s specific business with a general gospel of free enterprise and a vitriolic opposition to the regulatory state writ large. At Amway-hosted events across the country, executives warned that both the individual and the state were at risk of falling into stagnation and positioned Amway distributors as the front line in the war between freedom and bureaucratic control. The company and its founders did not shy away from politics, helping to seed what would become the New Right’s fusion of Christianity with free market ideology.

DeVos and his wife created the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, which became a major philanthropic backer for conservative, free enterprise causes and would go on to fund groups like the Heritage Foundation, Focus on the Family, and the American Enterprise Institute. In 1972 Amway built the Center of Free Enterprise at its Michigan headquarters, which, Read tells us, “pumped out masses of literature and programming for children,” such as a retelling of the story of the Little Red Hen in which the other barnyard animals call her a capitalist leech for not sharing her bread.

DeVos and Van Andel ensconced themselves in Republican Party circles. The night of Richard Nixon’s resignation, Read reports, they were hosting a dinner party for Gerald Ford. Both founders were also major backers of Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. When he was president, Reagan spoke at an Amway event. Later he campaigned for reelection at an Amway-sponsored Beach Boys concert at the Washington Monument; he invoked direct selling as proof that deregulation unleashed entrepreneurship.

In the 1990s the MLM empire went bipartisan. Amway contributed over $1 million to the GOP in 1997 but also hedged with Democrats. After he won the presidency, Bill Clinton appeared in a video for the DSA, praising members as “part of a global movement that promotes enterprise and rewards individual initiative.” His US trade representative specifically advocated for MLMs as “legitimate operations” that were being unfairly treated by new Chinese rules, while the DSA’s leaders signaled their closeness to the Clinton administration.

In the mid-2000s Herbalife paid millions to former secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s firm; in return she spoke at rallies around the world and recorded a video announcing that “Herbalife is a very democratic company.” In 2013 Clinton accepted $700,000 for a speech at an Amway conference in Japan and partnered with the company’s charitable arm through the Clinton Global Initiative. Herbalife and Amway spent heavily on lobbying, hiring ex-FTC officials to push against proposed regulations.

Meanwhile the FTC itself, which took an ad hoc approach toward MLMs in the 1950s and 1960s, opening multiple investigations but declining to stipulate clear rules, began treating the industry more leniently. It was uncertain how to fit recruitment-driven models into existing fraud and pyramid doctrines. In 1975 the agency issued a crucial decision in which it essentially accepted the worldview the DSA had been hawking of bad pyramid schemes and good direct sellers. An illegal pyramid, it concluded, is a business model in which participants pay money for rights to sell a product and to receive rewards for recruiting others. The FTC emphasized that payments or rewards should come from actual sales to actual consumers.

Four years later the FTC concluded that Amway was not a pyramid scheme, reasoning that the company required actual sales, mandated that most product be sold before reordering, and had a buyback policy for unsold inventory. Critics argued that the decision was naive and cowardly—that these safeguards were just paper requirements and effectively created a road map for deceptive firms to appear legitimate while continuing the same exploitative practices. The ruling reflected the agency’s hesitation at a moment of intense political pressure: the FTC was under fire at the time from Congress for “overreach,” and Amway had run national ads attacking it as the “Federal Nanny.”

The result of these decisions was a half-century of hands-off treatment. MLMs, deeply embedded in the fundraising circuits of both parties, had successfully cast themselves as patriotic small businesses whose model was occasionally sullied by con artists. Their genius, as Read shows, lay in transforming a structure of exploitation into a story of freedom, in converting fraud into virtue.

The chair of the FTC from 2021 to early 2025, Lina Khan, had an entirely different approach. At the beginning of her tenure, she singled out multilevel marketing schemes that lured in would-be entrepreneurs with deceptive earnings claims, sometimes with devastating effects. In her first year the FTC sent over 1,100 warning letters to MLMs and other companies that had a history of misleading consumers, and in 2024 it issued a major report on MLM income disclosure statements. In the final days of her tenure, the FTC proposed rules that would strengthen the agency’s power to block deceptive earnings claims in MLM programs. But the incoming chair, the Donald Trump appointee Andrew Ferguson, issued an angry dissent to those rules; under Trump, federal MLM reform is challenging to imagine.

While Read’s book focuses on the individual dreamers conned by predatory companies, Kathleen Thelen’s new study Attention, Shoppers! takes up similar questions from a wider historical view. A distinguished MIT political scientist who has long dissected the inner workings of capitalism across rich democracies, Thelen wants to show how large-scale American retail companies like Amazon and Walmart acquired their power, which is to say how a nation of potential cooperators became a nation of isolated consumers.

Her book begins in the late 1860s, the middle of industrialization, when rural collectives across both the United States and Europe were in shock over the transformation of economic life. New technologies of production and transportation were suddenly changing what work looked like and who controlled its conditions. In both Europe and the US, farmers and workers sought to create associations to counter the rapid centralization of power in industries like railroads and steel.

The best-known associations were, of course, the labor unions, like the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. Then there were cooperatives of farmers and other producers, the groups that the historian Lawrence Goodwyn chronicled in his influential 1978 study The Populist Moment. These organizations called for democratic reforms—such as equal access to shared infrastructure like grain elevators and railroads—and corporate breakups that would give them fair bargaining power.

But Thelen’s focus is on the relatively neglected sphere of consumption. She unearths records of consumer unions, cooperatives of farmers or small merchants in similar lines of business who joined together to negotiate better prices and fairer terms. Associations like the Grange, which organized and protected farmers, and consumer leagues, she shows, recognized that the same people acted both as producers and as consumers. Rural southern farmers, for instance, were producing food and raw materials even as they bought tools, seeds, and clothing, and they were at once exploited and empowered in both roles. This double identity directly shaped their understanding of political economy.

In Europe these consumer cooperatives—often tied to local credit unions—spread broadly, which gave them power as political agents. But in the US, according to Thelen, two forces stymied the growth of similar consumer unions. First there was the regional nature of American politics. Local courts and power brokers blocked cooperative organizing, strangling these associations before they had time to grow. Second, she argues, courts had sympathy for state efforts to use antitrust laws like the Sherman Act against consumer cooperatives, even as they bent over backward to find loopholes in the same laws to relieve large companies and financial powers of liability. Thelen critiques early American antitrust law for how it treated small merchants’, farmers’, and consumers’ coordinated commercial activity as cartelization, while also allowing unlimited coordination within a firm, enabling capital to amass power.

At the same time, proto-big-box stores—think Montgomery Ward, Sears, and other mail-order companies—engaged in antimonopoly politics to brilliant effect, presenting themselves as friends of the small rural customer. I had not known until reading Attention, Shoppers! that Aaron Montgomery Ward, the founder of the company bearing his name, publicly railed against the sugar monopoly and marketed his company as his customers’ ally against local, exploitative suppliers and other national monopolies. In fact Ward was assembling his own monopoly empire, one built on isolated consumer-citizens.

Those rural customers grew dependent on mail-order companies, and while they may have gotten a reasonable deal in the short term, they lost solidarity in the long term. Thelen notes how effectively Montgomery Ward and Sears used postal services to subsidize their businesses, leveraging federal dollars to undermine local power. A similar story, she argues, could be told about Walmart, which owes its rise less to managerial or technological innovation than to “a legal regime uniquely congenial to strategies organized around price-cutting, and a fragmented political landscape that allowed aggressive regulatory arbitrage in the face of countervailing political winds.”

Thelen’s findings lead her to challenge one of the conventional views about how to constrain undue corporate influence: John Kenneth Galbraith’s vision of “countervailing power.” Galbraith, one of the most prominent progressive intellectuals of the postwar period, believed that the answer to runaway corporate power was not to decentralize it but to encourage centralization—and to ensure that the centralized corporate power had checks of equal might. In this view, producers, laborers, and retailers would each check one another’s tendency toward dominance. The problem, Thelen argues persuasively, is that two of the three legs of the imagined stool were monopolistic corporations—and their interests weren’t countervailing so much as aligned. Big retail might occasionally fight big producers, but far more often their joint strength undermined workers and cooperatives.

Thelen is far less persuasive when she downplays the significance of major chain store reforms like the Robinson–Patman Act of 1936, which forbids suppliers from charging different prices to different retailers unless the price difference can be justified by cost. Thelen explains the political fights around the law in riveting detail—describing, for instance, where the antichain grassroots activism was the strongest. She catalogs the “formidable array of opponents” aligned against the populist House representative Wright Patman, including not just the big chains but almost the entire business community (except druggists), the cereal company General Mills, and the National League of Women Voters, which shows up repeatedly as a surprising ally of big business. She concludes that these forces resulted in a watered-down bill that failed to seriously constrain the growth of big-box stores, and may have even hurt the growth of cooperatives.

She’s not wrong that Robinson–Patman could have been stronger, and today there are efforts underway to pass state-level versions with stronger provisions in New York, Rhode Island, and Minnesota as a response to food desert crises. But her account of growing big-box power fails to acknowledge evidence of the law’s success—most notably the astonishing fact that between the 1940s and the 1980s, the crucial period during which the bill was enforced, the share of grocery sales cornered by the big retailers was kept around 25 percent.³ In the late 1970s the FTC and the Justice Department stopped enforcing the law. Robert Bork, among others, ridiculed it as protectionism that hurt the consumer to appease small-minded shopkeepers, and while Reagan’s officials may have been the first to simply stop treating it as a law, they were not the last: the Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations all followed suit. Since then the big retailers have come to dominate about two thirds of grocery sales, while independent grocers’ shares have plunged.

Thelen’s treatment of Robinson–Patman is in some ways emblematic of her book’s curious combination of determinism and contingency. Her broader argument betrays a strain of fatalism, treating consumerism and big-box stores as if they had been baked into American culture and law for 150 years, even as she recounts state-level court fights with a degree of precision that indicates they could have tipped history in another direction. Despite my disagreements, I found her book’s rich volume of detail invigorating and surprising; it invests the history she narrates with a sense of economic and democratic possibility.

That possibility, needless to say, has yet to be realized. With consumer cooperatives killed in their infancy, Thelen suggests, large chain stores and national brands came to dominate American politics and stifle efforts to reorganize power more broadly, leading to an economy based on low prices and low wages alike. What might have been a democratic identity organized around shared purchasing power—not limited, as we might now imagine it, to the power to buy cheap goods—was displaced first by Montgomery Ward and Sears, then by Walmart, and then, with particular aggressiveness, by Amazon. All of these companies are direct descendants of the nineteenth-century mail-order retailers, consolidating immense power using regulatory arbitrage, predatory pricing, and a political story about their support for the small business owner—or, in Amazon’s case, for its sellers. Jeff Bezos’s prominent appearance at Trump’s inauguration and Amazon’s support for the demolition of the East Wing of the White House serve as a fitting epilogue. Thelen’s story about the formation of American consumer identity helps set the stage for the world that Read describes, where would-be workers are scammed into buying nonexistent jobs.

The ranks of worker-consumers are growing. Ever more Americans are employed as “platform” or “gig” workers, their labor mediated by platforms that also market to them as consumers. Today surveys show a third of Americans have had at least one gig job (this number includes a wide range of independent contracting jobs, from online platform workers to freelance attorneys), and many industry analysts think that within a few years that number will grow to a half.

MLMs are, to be sure, uniquely exploitative, but the work they require bears striking similarities to that of participants in the gig economy. The care provider who signs up for Care.com is at once a customer who pays the platform annual fees and a laborer whose time and presence constitute the app’s real service—and like the Nutrilite seller who bought more alfalfa pills than she could ever sell, many care providers end up subsidizing the very companies that promise to connect them to paying clients.

The Lyft and Uber driver is likewise a worker, paid by the ride, but also a consumer of Uber’s product, which includes the promise of independence, flexibility, and upward mobility. Amazon’s sprawling delivery system, too, increasingly rests on gig arrangements like Amazon Flex and Amazon Relay, which lure workers with similar visions of independence. The effect of these arrangements is to maximize the value the company can extract from workers and minimize its responsibility for their well-being: the gig worker or delivery driver buys her own gas, pays for her own car insurance, and absorbs the company’s risk, just as Mary Kay “consultants” and Herbalife “distributors” buy the very goods they are supposed to sell. She is told she is an entrepreneur, free to choose her hours, yet she remains subject to the wages set—and in many cases regularly changed—by a centralized algorithm. I ask myself now whether my friend Rick was consuming dreams or selling them.

While the MLM associate may have no time for politics, it is politics—the purchase of the Republican and Democratic Parties—that enabled this desperation. Trump, as Read argues at the end of her book, is the ultimate MLM persona. In the 2000s he joined the best-selling author Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad) to cowrite a book that promoted “network marketing.” He was paid millions as the celebrity spokesman for an Internet and phone plan MLM in the Aughts. His family has been involved in the sector for years. He licensed his name to the short-lived MLM Ideal Health, which called its vitamin-selling scheme the Trump Network. Not only did he win the support of the DeVos family during his 2016 run (after their initial support of Marco Rubio), but he also appointed Richard’s daughter-in-law Betsy DeVos as education secretary. He is also, as Read suggests, aligned with MLM’s history in a deeper sense: he builds his politics on a model of endless chains, on a blend of prosperity gospel theology, antiregulatory politics, and infinite business expansion that focuses on his ability to recruit and not on whether what he is saying is true.

The fate of the MLM recruits populating Read’s book is not so different from that of the consumer unions at the center of Thelen’s, choked off by American courts. Both reveal the danger of splitting economic identity into false categories. To avoid that danger, we need a different way of seeing than the one our current political-economic categories tend to offer.

When hang gliding was invented in the middle of the last century, it was often a graveyard. Pilots died in droves, stalling in midair, until the national governing body developed appropriate training, disclosure, and certification requirements. When you are flying and released from the tow, you find yourself in a kind of in-between, holding the bar lightly while focusing intensely on small movements, sounds, and smells that indicate powerful, invisible systems of rising or falling air. You learn to see the world differently than you do on land. You learn that the smell of freshly cut grass at one thousand feet means there is a thermal nearby. You learn to see enough of the signs of air moving that you can almost see the wind itself. This is not unlike what Thelen and Read ask of us: to perceive unseen systems of force and ask how we might use those forces to build a society where citizens, not sellers or shoppers, steer.