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Capitalisn’t: What Happened to the American Dream?

• June 06, 2024
• CBR - Capitalisnt
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Is the famed American Dream still attainable for the immigrants and working class of today? What made the United States the land of opportunity—and if it isn’t the same anymore, what happened to it? Joining hosts Bethany McLean  and Luigi Zingales  to discuss these questions is David Leonhardt, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Ours Was the Shining Future . In his book, Leonhardt describes what he calls today’s “rough-and-tumble” capitalism and distinguishes its laissez-faire characteristics from a more bygone, democratic version. Charting shifts in manufacturing, labor power, and the perennial tension between immigration and wages, Leonhardt, Zingales, and McLean deliberate over the ramifications of this story for progressive and populist movements in a tumultuous election year and offer potential pathways to rekindle the promise of prosperity and upward mobility.

Audio Transcript

David Leonhardt: People on the left should stop saying, “Why do those people vote against their economic interest?” What they should do more often is listen to working-class Americans—working-class Americans of all races, who tend to be much less left wing on social issues than Democratic elites are.

Bethany: I’m Bethany McLean.

Phil Donahue: Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed’s a good idea?

Luigi: And I’m Luigi Zingales.

Bernie Sanders: We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.

Bethany: And this is Capitalisn’t , a podcast about what is working in capitalism.

Milton Friedman: First of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed?

Luigi: And, most importantly, what isn’t.

Warren Buffett: We ought to do better by the people that get left behind. I don’t think we should kill the capitalist system in the process.

Luigi: As regular listeners know, here on Capitalisn’t , we’re interested in exploring what’s working in capitalism and what isn’t. Since it’s easier to criticize than to provide alternatives, all too often, we focus on the “isn’t” part. Today, we want to talk about when capitalism works, or at least, when it did work.

Bethany: For this episode of Capitalism Was , we invited David Leonhardt, who is not only a New York Times columnist, but also the author of Ours Was —note the past tense— the Shining Future , a recent book about why the United States was the land of opportunities and why it is not anymore.

Luigi: In the book, David declares himself a strong supporter of the capitalist system. “Capitalism,” he writes, “remains the best system for delivering rising standards to the greatest number of people, but only a certain type of capitalism.”

Bethany: He distinguishes between what he calls rough-and-tumble capitalism, which we would more simply call laissez faire, and a more democratic form of capitalism. “Democratic governance,” he writes, “prevents the excesses of free-market capitalism, while the material gains produced by capitalism foster the faith in society on which democracy depends. As a result, democracy strengthens capitalism, and capitalism strengthens democracy.”

Luigi: David claims that a combination of strong public investment and the prounion policies of the New Deal cemented the great economic success of the post-World War II years. While he recognizes that the post-World War II era was rife with gender and racial discrimination, he claims that it was the ideal form of democratic capitalism, where strong unions ensured that productivity gains were spread to everybody.

Bethany: The book also contains . . . I think Luigi might argue it’s a soft criticism of today’s left. I’d argue it’s not so soft. In David’s view, starting with Mills, Betty Friedan, and Ralph Nader, the left started to become a lot more interested in civil and consumer rights than in workers’ rights. And the left left workers behind. It is actually easier today for a social conservative to become an economic populist than it is for a leftist to create a similar coalition.

Luigi: I think that with this wonderful introduction, it’s time to bring David in.

I want to start from the beginning, and at the beginning, you make a very clear distinction between progressive and populist. We’re talking now about the early part of the 20th century. And unlike most people I know, you actually seem to root for the populists.

David Leonhardt: The progressive movement of the early 20th century really did have some big accomplishments. Child-labor laws, minimum-wage laws, these are huge accomplishments, but it tended to be a pretty elite, top-down movement. It was led by people who hang out at the University of Chicago and other such universities.

The movement that came along with the New Deal and that Roosevelt’s legislation helped make possible in the 1930s and ’40s was much more of a bottom-up movement. It wasn’t simply these benevolent elites bestowing restrictions on working hours or minimum wages on the vulnerable workers. It was workers organizing together and bargaining for higher wages for themselves, and voting for politicians who they thought would represent their interests.

I think it was a very important turn for the American left to go from this more top-down, elite progressive movement, that quite frankly was often skeptical of workers, skeptical of immigrants, skeptical of labor unions, to a movement that was more both bottom up and top down.

Part of the reason it’s relevant—and it’s probably why you’re bringing it up, Luigi—is I think the left today has adopted many, and for its own sake too many, of the habits of the old progressives, what I call the “Brahmin Left” way. It’s a phrase from Thomas Piketty, the economist, and the idea is that the left, not only in the US but across Europe as well, has become increasingly Brahmin, increasingly affluent and elite and highly educated.

Luigi: The turning point, if I understand correctly, of the New Left is the ’70s, and in particular, when the so-called Watergate babies arrive in the House and start to change the order of things in the Democratic Party. What happened that caused this disruption?

David Leonhardt: I agree that the ’70s were an important part of the story, but I actually date the start earlier. I put it much more in the 1960s. A figure whose story I tell in the book is C. Wright Mills. Many people have heard of the sociologist C. Wright Mills. He was quite a character. He was a motorcycle-riding Texan who was a professor at Columbia and loved starting vicious academic fights.

He wrote this letter to the New Left in the early 1960s, and he basically argued that the left was wrong to view the working class as the agents of change, that in fact, the working class could be reactionary. Look at the Soviet Union and Stalin. He basically pointed around the world, and he said, “Look at all these great student movements, the antinuclear movement.”

He pointed to Europe and Japan, and he said: “Look, we don’t need workers. The left can forge a movement using students.” This was a very influential document that Mills wrote, but it was also indicative of a feeling of the intellectuals, the students, the professors, that they are the vanguard, not workers.

The deep, deep problem with that was arithmetic. You can’t build a majority party just with intellectuals. By turning off workers by, for example, denying that crime was rising in the ’60s, which it clearly was, by having Vietnam War protests that were pretty chaotic and turned off a lot of Americans, the New Left really struggled to keep its old base.

Luigi: I grant you that Mills had a lot of influence from an intellectual point of view, but the turning point was probably the Clinton years. In particular, I would like to focus on a moment which is very important, 1999. There is the meeting of the WTO in Seattle. Clinton has to decide whether to sign the deal that basically will open up the United States to competition from all over the world.

There are two sides of the Democratic Party. There is the old left, represented by the unions, saying: “No, no, no, no, we need to have some guarantee that developing countries will put in some protection for labor because otherwise, this is a race to the bottom. Otherwise, it will be a disaster." And then there is the globalist side. Robert Rubin was clearly the leader of that side. They said, “No, no, we should sign it and become global.” Blah, blah, blah.

Eventually, Clinton sides with Rubin and accepts the WTO with no restrictions. I’m cynical, but I wonder to what extent the appeal of what was coming after . . . In 1999, Clinton was about to retire. If he had pissed off the globalist group, he would have been just another friend of the unions that had no future. By embracing the globalists, he could fundraise for the Clinton Global Initiative to become a global player, to give speeches all over the world. To what extent did money associated with the business side play a role in turning some of the Democrats into New Democrats?

David Leonhardt: To some extent, that’s unknowable. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to some of the figures you’re talking about, and I genuinely find them to be genuine. They seem to really be grappling with what’s best for the country.

At the same time, as you’re pointing out, money influences people. What I think is clear is that the neoliberal part of the Democratic Party made a set of predictions and promises. They said: “Look, we’re going to open up, and it’s going to be good for us. It’s going to create more high-paying jobs here. And for people who are left behind, we’re going to retrain them, and we’re going to compensate them, and they’ll be OK. Not only will more trade make us rich, but it will make the rest of the world, and China in particular, free.” That was really the promise.

There’s this amazing clip of Bill Clinton kind of laughing about the idea that China was going to try to control the internet and censor the internet. He said: “It’s like stapling jello to the wall. Good luck.”

Well, 25 years later, apparently the Chinese Communist Party has found a stapler that works for jello. The United States has paid a terrible economic penalty—or at least many communities have—from the series of decisions you talked about. I think corporate America knew it could make huge profits in China. Part of what its executives did was they sold themselves and the country a story about how this was good for America. I’m not even sure whether they actually spent much time thinking about whether it was good for America.

I think it’s an example of how we have a corporate leadership class today that is relatively unpatriotic, relatively uninterested in the effects on their community. They claim otherwise, but their actions suggest they’re not that interested in the condition of the United States or communities within the United States. They’re pretty focused on their own self-interest.

Bethany: How much do you think today the left is the New Left? And if the answer is close to 100 percent, why can today’s left not figure out that this isn’t working and change strategy? Or maybe a different way to ask the question is, do you see signs that anybody is figuring it out?

David Leonhardt: First of all, I think it’s important to start with the story that the left tells itself and tells publicly about why it’s lost workers. That’s a story that overwhelmingly revolves around sort of denigrating workers. The workers don’t vote for the left because workers aren’t smart enough to understand their own interests.

We hear this line all the time, “Why do those people vote against their economic interests?” It’s really such a condescending question. Let’s recognize the fact that a lot of affluent people vote against their economic interests as well. Take a look at the voting patterns in Scarsdale, New York, or Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, or Aspen, Colorado, or the highest-income suburbs north of Chicago. They vote overwhelmingly Democratic, even though, often, Democrats are going to raise their taxes and spend a whole lot of money putting money into Medicaid and you name it.

Or the left will say workers are bigoted. They’re fooled into voting for right-wing parties because they’re just xenophobes or racists. But it is nowhere near the full story. If you were unsure about that a few years ago, the last few years have really made that clear because we’ve seen growing numbers of Asian American, Latino American, and although it’s just a few percentage points, even Black Americans move away from the Democratic Party.

I think what’s ended up happening is the Democratic Party, and particularly the left part of it, which is overrepresented in academia and in media and in the staffs of many Democratic politicians, really is fairly dismissive of the views of working-class people. It’s dismissive of religion. It treats any opposition to high levels of immigration as xenophobic. In fact, nearly all over the world, people are uncomfortable with really high levels of immigration.

Japan and South Korea have some of the most restrictive immigration policies there are. Luigi, as you know very well and have written about, Europe has been roiled by high levels of immigration. It’s reasonable for working-class people to say, “Whoa, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this.”

On issue after issue—patriotism, religion, COVID, you name it—the Democratic Party has basically said to working-class people frequently: “You don’t even know what’s good for you. Just listen to us.” It’s hard to be too surprised that working-class people have said, “I’m not sure that’s a party for me.”

I don’t think the left today is 100 percent the New Left. There are figures in the Democratic Party . . . Joe Biden is actually one of them. Barack Obama was one of them. In fact, it’s really hard to get elected president as a Democrat unless you sand off the rough edges of the eliteness of the Democratic Party. Obama, when you look at the numbers, was better at winning working-class voters—working-class white voters, too. He was better at it than either the nominee who came before him, John Kerry, or the nominee who came after him, Hillary Clinton.

Joe Biden has revisited the Democratic Party’s position on trade. He’s become more hawkish toward China. He’s passed bills that not only invest in the country but say we’re going to give priority to American workers. This isn’t the kind of neoliberal Democratic Party of 30 years ago. There really are people in the Democratic Party, not just Biden, but also John Fetterman, Amy Klobuchar, Raphael Warnock . . . I mean, there really are politicians who campaign in a less-elite way, and they tend to do better, particularly when they have to win tough elections.

People now view it as some sort of badge of shame that Barack Obama was against gay marriage. Well, the majority of Americans were against gay marriage when Barack Obama either was against it or pretended to be against it. He basically decided, I am not willing to risk losing the presidency, and all I could do with it to help people, on this one issue of gay marriage. He was basically respectful of where majority opinion is, and it didn’t prevent gay marriage and marriage equality from happening.

I think it’s many of Joe Biden’s instincts. I actually think one of the costs of Joe Biden’s age is not that he’s senile. He’s not. I actually think he has less energy to push back against his own relatively progressive staff because, I think, on many of these issues like immigration, Biden’s instincts are much more working class.

Luigi: Let’s talk about immigration. You start by paying due homage to the economic literature: immigration is great, but we have some social problems. I want to challenge you a bit on the first part. It seems that you almost have to do it because otherwise, if you speak against immigration, you are sort of banned from the right social circles.

Even Leah Boustan, who you cite, was on our podcast, and when I pushed her on immigration, she was very honest. She said, “Look, we don’t have a real test of whether this decreases wages.” Even David Autor, when I pushed on this podcast about the fact that, surprise, surprise, low wages rose during COVID when immigration stopped, he said, “Oh, it might be a factor.”

We know from revealed preferences why doctors don’t want more doctors who are immigrants, because they decrease prices. So, why can’t we say that maybe it is a fact that immigration decreases wages at the low end of the distribution? The correlation you show in the book is stunning. I’m an immigrant myself, and I benefit from this country, so I have to be careful. But can we be a bit more open on this?

David Leonhardt: Yes, thank you, Luigi. Most of the interviews I’ve done about the book have been people saying, “Wait a second, how can you claim there are costs of immigration?” This is one of the few where you’ve criticized me for not being strong enough about talking about those costs, so I really appreciate it.

Yes, first of all, as you noted, we don’t completely know because we can’t run natural experiments in which we admit or don’t admit immigrants and see how things are different. Basically, you can think of a few broad periods of American history over the last 150 years. From the late 19th century until the 1920s, we had high immigration and high and rising inequality. From the 1930s through the 1970s, we had very low immigration, and we had falling inequality. And since the 1970s, we’ve had high immigration and rising inequality. Now, maybe that’s all just one big coincidence, but I agree with you that there’s a whole bunch of research that suggests it’s not a big coincidence.

You mentioned the idea that, of course, doctors understand that a larger supply of doctors would tend to reduce their wages, so they make it really hard for immigrants to come here and practice medicine. It doesn’t matter if you’re a 45-year-old, incredibly accomplished doctor from another country, you have to come here and do a residency. You have to do training in this country. It’s bonkers. It’s just protectionism, because doctors understand it’s in their interest.

But that’s not the only evidence. There really are studies. I’m sure you know them, Luigi. There’s the study of the Mariel boatlift. There’s the study of the 1994 Mexican peso crisis, which found that wages fared worse in regions of the US that received more migrants. There’s a study that looked at nursing and found that regions with more foreign-born nurses had lower wages for the nurses who were already there.

One of the things that I found really interesting is this 2017 National Academy of Sciences 600-plus-page report. It very honestly walks through all of this evidence. It has charts. When you look at the wage effects, almost all the numbers are negative.

But then, in their discussion of it, they use these little words that try to shave it off. They say things like, the wage effects are modest and are focused on lower-income workers. I actually think that’s accurate, but that’s not saying that the wage effects are anywhere near zero for lower-income workers. The average effects are modest.

In fact, there was this interesting little controversy in which George Borjas, the Harvard economist who tends to be more skeptical of immigration, was a member of this National Academy of Sciences committee, and he felt like the committee’s own description of the evidence was a little off. So, he wrote his own PS afterwards that was like: “Hey, here’s the evidence. I don’t think we’re describing it.”

I think, in the end, huge numbers of people both on the laissez-faire right and on the progressive left believe deeply in the idea of immigration for its own sake. They then try to shade how they talk about the evidence to make it sound different.

Luigi: I think it’s also in their interest. They want cheaper waiters and cheaper nannies. Immigration delivers exactly that to them. It’s self-serving. It’s not just a big ideal. It’s very self-serving.

David Leonhardt: You’re too nice to use this word, but I feel like several of your questions, Luigi, have been, “Aren’t you being naive?” Maybe I am.

Look, it is the case that affluent professionals benefit with less-expensive yard work, with less-expensive childcare. I do think that plays a role, but I also think there are lots of people, particularly on the left, who just like the idea America should be able to welcome huge numbers of people, and they deeply want to imagine that that’s a free lunch, that it has no trade-offs. I think there are trade-offs, particularly for lower-income American workers, particularly for recent immigrants, particularly for workers of color.

Bethany: If there isn’t a free lunch, is there a way to make immigration work for everybody? How’s that for a naive question?

David Leonhardt: Look, I am pro-immigration. I think, particularly when you look at the aging of our society, and you look at how many children people who already live in the United States are having—the short answer is not that many—we clearly need immigration.

I also think it’s really important that we remain a beacon for the world, that we let in significant numbers of Ukrainians, that we let in Uyghurs who are being oppressed in China. To me, a better-functioning immigration system would do the following: one, it really would clamp down on illegal immigration. That makes people feel like we are a society without rules. It makes people feel like it’s unfair. Imagine you’re an immigrant who’s been waiting for years for a work permit, and a migrant comes across the border now and gets one within weeks, which is happening. It would make you so angry.

Then, it’s about creating an immigration system that works for our country. I think some of that should be, obviously, letting in people who are fleeing political repression. But being honest about the fact that the number of people who enter the country today and claim political repression, many of them want to move here because we are a richer country than where they come from. They are not actually at risk of political repression at home, and we need to be honest about that.

I also think we should think about admitting more people on the upper end of the income spectrum because that will provide more labor competition for people like us and less labor competition for people who’ve been the victims of inequality.

Luigi: I agree with you, but the litmus test is on the enforcement side. The enforcement side is very simple. You just penalize employers. You’re penalizing us for having nannies that are illegal, not the illegal immigrants. This is not happening, and it’s not happening at a corporate level, but it’s not even happening at the family level. The penalty can be much bigger. If we hire an illegal gardener, then we get penalized a lot, and we don’t see that.

I think my fear is that much of the New Left has retained some of the ideas, the ones that are compatible with the wallet, of the old left, but everything that conflicts with the wallet is actually completely abandoned.

David Leonhardt: Yeah. You know that sign that many progressives hang in their yard. It was popular during COVID. “In this house, we believe . . .” Rick Kahlenberg has pointed out that that sign has absolutely nothing about poverty or inequality. It is in some ways a distillation of what the New Left is. And you’re absolutely right.

Look, Bernie Sanders was part of a very long tradition of progressives who worried about high levels of immigration. The civil-rights leaders of the 20th century worried about this. A. Philip Randolph, one of the heroes of my book for his union organizing, was very tough on the idea of high levels of immigration. Unions were often very tough on it. Barbara Jordan, the congresswoman from Texas, said, “Look, we need borders, and we need to enforce our laws.”

Bernie Sanders was one of those people until he wanted to become the Democratic nominee for president. He basically realized that in today’s Brahmin Left Democratic Party, you can’t have that position on immigration. But relatively recently, I think 2015, Bernie Sanders made a version of the point that you’re making, Luigi. He said, “Why is it that all of these CEOs are in favor of comprehensive immigration reform?” Imagine Bernie saying that in his accent. By which he means high levels of immigration.

Why is it that these CEOs are so in favor of immigration? Bernie said: “I don’t think it’s because of their deep human concern for undocumented workers. It’s because they want to keep wages down.” That is very much a big part of this debate.

Bethany: You’ve described in your book this new version of capitalism, or this different version, as rough-and-tumble capitalism. But when you think about, in light of what you just said about the rise of corporate power and, really, corporatism, is it really so much rough-and-tumble capitalism, or sort of a bastardized form of capitalism in which corporate interests can set the agenda and then make it happen the way they would like?

David Leonhardt: I guess I’m not sure that there’s a pure version of capitalism. I agree with you that corporate America is able to set a whole bunch of rules to help themselves benefit from it. Subsidies . . .

I also think, though, on a basic level, who benefits when you have a laissez-faire version of capitalism or a rough-and-tumble version of capitalism? It tends to be the wealthy. And so, I do think that while we’ve ended up with a version of capitalism in which government works on behalf of the wealthy, yes, we’ve also had deregulation. We’ve also made it harder to say to companies: “You’re too large. We’re going to break you up, or we’re going to forbid this merger.” We’ve basically allowed companies to have a free hand in preventing unions from forming.

I think, yes, there are specific policies that benefit corporate America, but it’s also the case that in the absence of government activism, because the wealthy and because corporations tend to have more power than individual workers, more laissez-faire capitalism also inherently tends to lead to higher inequality.

Bethany: I wanted to go back to this incredibly compelling part in your book where you talk about the old culture of business, and you talk about leaders like Paul Hoffmann who deliberately took a lot less money than they could, and they did so in order to keep capitalism strong. You wrote that these CEOs were acting in accordance with the culture by not maximizing their own personal gains.

You also write that in the new culture today, executives have come to believe that there’s no difference between their own personal interests and the national interest. I wonder, can we go back to the old way of being, or has something fundamentally changed? Do we need shame and that broader sense of responsibility to come back into play? Is it cultural rather than policy? And is there a way to get there?

David Leonhardt: I do think culture is really important. What’s hard about it is the question of how we get there. I think there’s a connection between culture and policy here. It wasn’t completely natural for them to take a larger view of the American economy and society. Many of them, including Paul Hoffmann, the CEO of Studebaker, whom you mentioned, were really anti-FDR and anti-New Deal. But they looked around in the 1940s, during the war and then after, and they saw fascism on the march in Europe, and communism on the march, and they were really worried that Americans were going to turn against this capitalist system that we had that had worked so well for these executives. And certainly, it’s the case that the Cold War and the nuclear-arms race focused their minds in the years after World War II. So, there was a great degree of fear here that drove them.

I really do think the culture was different. It was more patriotic. It was more communitarian. To your question, Bethany, about how we get back there, I don’t know. My instinct is it requires, in part, policies that give workers more political power in this country, and then, that basically forces executives to deal with them a little bit more.

Unionization is really connected to the regulation part of the story. If you think about a basic company . . . Bethany, imagine you’re the CEO, and Luigi and I are workers. You have so much more information at your disposal about how much money you should pay us than we do. You have the records of how much you’re paying every single worker at the firm. You might even have some data on how productive we each are. You know what your rivals are doing.

As individual workers, that knowledge largely isn’t available to us. We don’t really know what our market wage is. And also, if you underpay us a little bit, and a few of us quit, well, you’ll probably be OK. But if I think I’m being underpaid and I quit, but I actually wasn’t being underpaid, I’ve got really big problems. I might miss my mortgage payment. I might have problems with my kids.

Without unions, when you just have a corporation and individual workers, wages tend to settle at the low end of what someone might reasonably be paid. It really takes workers coming together to collectively bargain, which is the definition of a union, in order for workers to make a better wage.

Yes, unions can overreach. Yes, unions need to be different from the unions of the past. But on a basic, theoretical level, I believe unions are one of the most important things for raising wages, particularly of lower-income workers in the private sector. But it probably also needs to involve some version of shame, to use your word, and fear about what will happen to our country if we continue on this extremely high-inequality, very angry path that we’re now on.

Luigi: Culture is part of what is produced by the leading elites and our influence. In this culture, you feel ashamed if you are saying something negative about transgender people like JK Rowling, but you don’t feel ashamed if you mismanage Boeing, and more than 300 people die. It seems to me the left is more concerned about the first than the second. This elite feels very happy that the values are the values of the extreme left, and not the values of the majority of people. They don’t see the need for representation, which I may say, is even antidemocrat-ic.

I think that in the ’70s, the biggest victories of the Democratic Party were not obtained at a ballot box. You had the victory against the war in Vietnam, thanks to the Pentagon Papers, you had abortion done at the Supreme Court, and you had the defeat of Nixon that was thanks to the Washington Post . The elite were able to win the battles without any vote.

My impression is that after that, there was a bit of euphoria, with elites saying: “We don’t need the vote of the people. As long as we control the commanding heights, we can do whatever we want.” Then, social media came about, and you have a candidate who bypasses the commanding heights, reaches out to the people, and they don’t know how to react.

David Leonhardt: I think what you said about how, in some ways, it’s antidemocratic is really important. It’s antidemocratic to take Abraham Lincoln’s name off schools because he doesn’t somehow fit the 21st-century version of what it’s like to be a progressive. Abraham Lincoln, right?

You mentioned trans issues. Those are really hard issues, but if you look at the polling, not just a narrow majority, but a very large majority of Americans supports the idea of some restrictions on when children can get medical procedures. I’m not talking about the kinds of bans Republican states have put in, necessarily, but some restrictions. A very large majority of Americans says that in high school, people shouldn’t be able to just decide whether they’re going to play on the girls’ team or the boys’ team.

Now, you can disagree with that, but to basically say that those views are beyond the pale, first of all, I think it’s just really problematic on the facts. Second of all, it’s fundamentally antidemocratic. It’s one of two things. It’s either dooming you to be part of a relatively narrow minority party that represents 20 percent, 25 percent of Americans, or it’s telling Americans that they just have to come along with a party that really doesn’t reflect their views on things, and that just doesn’t work. It’s a recipe for defeat.

I’ve several times mentioned this idea that people on the left should stop saying, “Why do those people vote against their economic interest?” What they should do more often is listen to working-class Americans—working-class Americans of all races, who tend to be much less left wing on social issues than Democratic elites are, and respectfully engage with those issues.

Maybe there are some of them on which the Democratic Party on the left is going to say: “Sorry. This, to us, is a basic issue of decency. Even if public opinion is different, we’re going to call people by the pronouns they want,” which I actually think would be a reasonable thing to do. Hey, that’s basic respect.

But on so many of these issues—immigration, patriotism, COVID precautions a few years ago, transgender issues—I think having a little more humility and a little more small-d democratic spirit and willingness to listen to Americans would be the right thing to do, and it would be a strategically wise thing for the Democratic Party to do.

Bethany: Luigi, what did you think? I thought the book answered a question that I’ve had for a long time. How was it that the left turned away from workers? I thought the history that David offers of how this happened, and why it happened, and what the cost has been, is extraordinary.

I might have said this on this podcast before, but I grew up in an area of northern Minnesota called the Mesabi Iron Range, which is mining country, very heavy on labor unions, very almost socialist. The idea that this part of the country would ever vote for somebody Republican, it never would have happened. But in 2016, it went for Trump.

I remember sitting in New York and having people say: “Well, it’s only racist people who would vote for Trump. The economics, it’s just a cover.” And I thought: “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That’s just not true.”

Luigi: I agree with you. However, there is a lack of an international perspective. I don’t think that you see it in Japan—I’m no expert on Japan—but you see it in every other Westernized country. I think it deserves a bit broader of an explanation than just what happened in the United States.

Of course, race is very important in the United States. Of course, Watergate was very important in the United States. Of course, Mills was very important in the United States. But you got the same phenomenon in Italy; you got the same phenomenon in France; you got the same phenomenon in England.

One of the essential elements is the weakening of the unions, which takes place throughout the world. It not only weakens one part of the left, but it also eliminates an alternative source of social mobility and an alternative source of power.

I was thinking about my youth in Italy, when you had three major sources of power. One was the church, the Catholic Church. The second was the unions/Communist Party. And the third, there was some sort of economic power, but actually not that important. You would have this Catholic leader who made it through the various hierarchies of the Church and the Christian Democratic Party, who would be kind of condescending toward rich people because they were looking, literally, from the top down. And I think you had a lot of labor leaders that were sort of considered equals of the major industrialists.

I don’t see that anywhere in the world today. Tell me a labor leader who feels at ease in speaking at the same level with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Peter Thiel.

Bethany: Well, they might feel at ease. It’s just that they’re not invited to the events, which I think gets at a deeper issue. I have a two-part question for you, in that case. What is that deeper issue? I think it’s too simplistic to say that the labor leader wouldn’t be comfortable. They’d show up in a heartbeat if they were invited, but they’re not invited. They’re not on the stage anymore, and why not?

Then, why is it not different in Europe, given, for instance, in Germany, don’t workers have a position on the boards of companies? Why, given that more egalitarian arrangement, have you still seen the European left become dismissive of workers?

Luigi: There is no doubt that the movement of a lot of manufacturing toward the developing countries has weakened a base of the power of unions, because when you have a lot of people concentrated in one location, it’s much easier to organize them and to become a force. Particularly manufacturing of heavy industry with a lot of economies of scale brought with it a very strong structure of unions, which also had the power of alternative in it.

The second, to me, is that the globalization has really made the returns to be associated on the side of the rich, intellectual elite, extremely profitable. Think about Tony Blair. Tony Blair has, I think, an net worth of $100 million, or something like this. It was really inconceivable that a prime minister stepping down could make that kind of money in the past.

Today you go from Schröder, the former chancellor of Germany, who is actually in bed with Gazprom and Russia, to Aznar, the former premier of Spain—I think he’s on the board of News Corp., owned by Murdoch. Then, of course, you have the former Italian prime minister Renzi, who is actually an advisor to none other than MBS.

Once you have fame, you sell out to the highest bidder, and it would be irrational not to prepare for that moment by being a little bit friendlier when you are in government with people who have money.

Bethany: Yeah, that’s a very cynical but very compelling analysis. I’ve also wondered if there’s also an embedded disrespect for the process of actually making something. I’ve been thinking about this for a lot of years because I remember a source saying to me way back when about Jeff Skilling, the former CEO of Enron, that he was a designer of ditches, not a digger of ditches. He liked other people who are designers of ditches, and they don’t have a lot of respect for the people who actually dig the ditch, the people who make the thing.

That could be part of the worldview that we find ourselves in today, too. Overwhelming appreciation for the idea, perhaps too much appreciation for the idea, and a corresponding disrespect for how the idea actually gets executed.

Luigi: Michael Sandel is actually right. Remember, when he came to our interview, he was saying that one of the costs of having a meritocracy is that the winner feels entitled to have some contempt toward the losers.

We have introduced more of a meritocracy throughout the West. People who were more in the upper echelon, especially of the economic system, especially in Europe, used to come more from normal families, come from old money, and now, things have changed.

Everybody wants to be at the top of this hierarchy, and so, there is less of an interest in economic issues and much more of an interest in civil-rights issues, because you can pretend to be leftist because you care about LGBTQ rights and still be paid a fortune. I think that that’s kind of, you have your cake and eat it, too.

But going to today, on the one hand, he is very, to some extent, courageous in taking these positions. For example, on immigration, he has a very nuanced position. I think his analysis is right, but it makes me very depressed because I don’t see an easy solution, precisely because of what we were saying earlier that it’s much easier for a right-winger to put on a little bit of populism and appeal to the masses rather than for somebody on the left to actually change and reach out to the needs of the workers who might be orthogonal to the social needs, because workers might not be as progressive on the social front.

Bethany: Can we pause on the immigration question for a minute? Can I ask you a slightly tangential question that nonetheless is really key?

I’ve read somewhere that economists increasingly believe that the post-pandemic surge in immigration is a key reason the economy has been able to grow steadily without pushing inflation higher, as the new arrivals have helped employers fill roles at levels of pay that have kept a lid on overall price growth.

If that’s the conventional view, that immigration has helped hold wage growth down, how can people possibly say at the same time that immigration doesn’t affect wages at the lower end? Doesn’t that first sentence just admit that the whole thing is not true?

Luigi: I remember I asked that question to Leah Boustan and to David Autor. And you remember how reluctant they were to go down that path. It’s a bit like, if you cross that line, you are immediately labeled as a conservative, and so, you don’t want to cross that line. I think that it’s pretty scary. We are afraid as economists to tell it the way we see it because of this political pressure.

Bethany: I get that, and I know I’ve heard you ask that question before, but now, as I keep reading everywhere that this is what people believe, that this is the reason that inflation is lower, because immigration has held wages in check, I just think, wait, what am I missing? How can you have it both ways?

Luigi: Bernie Sanders says this very clearly. He says: “Why do the heads of industry want to have more immigration? To keep the wages lower.” Do you think they’re so stupid that they don’t understand what’s going on?

Bethany: One of the places where I’ve disagreed with him before, and he’s probably tired of me saying this, but I don’t love his description of rough-and-tumble capitalism as being the way things are now. I think, per the conversations we’ve had on this podcast, it’s not so much rough-and-tumble capitalism as it is a bastardized form of capitalism, in which competition for those who can afford to pay to do so has been blunted.

In other words, if a company hires enough lobbyists so that they don’t get challenged on antitrust grounds, and they can rewrite the antitrust laws so that they can function however they please, is that rough-and-tumble capitalism, or is that some kind of a sick version of capitalism?

The piece that I worked on that brought that home to me was when I wrote about Wells Fargo’s fake-account scandal and the immense amount of pressure that was placed on these entry-level tellers in Wells Fargo branches to commit fraud in order to meet their quotas.

They were the ones who bore the brunt of everything. They lost their jobs if they couldn’t do it; they lost their jobs if they did do it and committed fraud. It was all in the name of helping the very rich people at the top of Wells Fargo make their bonuses. But the very top people bore none of the risk. They just got all the rewards, and the people at the bottom bore all the risk and got none of the rewards. The only reward they got was being able to keep their $25,000- or $30,000-a-year teller job.

That still, to me, summarizes everything that’s gone wrong with capitalism because I, too, like David, still believe it’s the best possible system when it works appropriately, but it has to work so that those who are in the position to make the most money also bear the most risk. Those who are not in a position to ever make very much money should bear very little risk.

We’ve managed to create a system that does the opposite, where those who are in a position to make the most money bear very little risk on any front, either economic or legally, since they’re often insulated legally from the effects of their decisions. Those at the bottom, meanwhile, are the ones who have very little opportunity and yet bear all the risk of the system.

The thing that made me sad about his book, and has left me sad, the feeling of legitimate sadness, is when he talks about these various executives in the 1950s and 1960s who wouldn’t take money that they were given and deliberately took less than they could have taken because that just wasn’t what was done culturally. They had a view that they needed to save capitalism from its worst excesses. I thought, is there anybody who would take less than they think they’re owed today? I can’t even imagine someone doing that.

I do worry, as we discussed with David, that that culture is so far gone that we can never get it back, and we can never get it back in a globalized world where the very wealthy care not what their community thinks about them, but what other very wealthy people think of them and whether they’re able to keep up with the community of the ultra-wealthy.

As a result, we really are screwed because that old-fashioned sense of shame and restraint, and I have enough to live in my community, I have more than enough to live in my community, is just long gone and is never coming back. Without that, I started to think about this idea that capitalism, rough and tumble, whatever it is, doesn’t work without a certain level of morality. It just doesn’t, because there can never be enough rules that can make up for a lack of morality. There has to be something, a moral sense, that coexists with capitalism that makes it function, and it can’t just be rules and regulations.

Luigi: I think you put your finger on the right term, which is community. The fundamental difference is that the CEOs of the past belonged to a local community, and so they referred to their workers, their church, this and that. They didn’t feel the need to have enormous wealth, but also, they felt bound, to some extent, by that community.

Today, the CEOs live in an international community. It’s not even a community across the United States, but it’s an international community that meets in Davos, that meets at all the major events. You are trying to keep up with the Joneses of the places you go. If you go to Davos, you’re bound to be pretty poor by comparison. And so, first of all, you don’t feel embarrassed to take too much. Actually, you feel entitled to ask for more because then, you meet some of the other guys, and they’re not that smart, and you say: “Wait a minute, I’m smarter than X, Y and Z, but I make half or a third as much as him. I should definitely ask for a raise.”

Bethany: I’ve gotten so many tips on all these little stock scams and frauds, and people taking their $5 million and their $10 million here because they think nobody’s looking, and they think that they can.

Jim Chanos talked to us on the podcast about the golden age of fraud, and I worry that we are in this. Instead of the kind of idealistic world that David imagines, where we might return to a world where people say, “No, no, no, I’ve got enough. I’m not going to take that, even though I can,” that we’re actually in a world where everybody is grasping for whatever they can possibly get their hands on because, precisely as you said, they look around, they see the person next to them who isn’t that smart and not that hardworking, and that person’s got tens of millions. So, I need to get mine because I have to be owed that.

I worry that this is spinning toward someplace that gives me a lot to write about but is not particularly healthy. Instead of moving back to the world that David envisions, those innocent times are perhaps lost for good, or more innocent times are lost for good.

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The American dream still possible, but more difficult to achieve, students discover

WUSTL students in an interdisciplinary course this semester called “Economic Realities of the American Dream” were urged to consider the meaning of the American Dream and explored pathways to achieving it, including overall economic growth and rising standards of living, equality of opportunity, economic mobility and the availability and creation of jobs that will adequately provide for individuals and families.

In 1931, James Truslow Adams first defined the “American Dream” by writing that “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” regardless of social status or birth circumstance.

In a modern society struggling to loose the grip of a lengthy economic recession, is this dream really attainable?

The dream may still be possible, though much more difficult to achieve, say a renowned macroeconomist and one of America’s foremost experts on poverty, co-teachers of a course on the American Dream this semester at Washington University in St. Louis.

“The American Dream is really at the heart and soul of this country,” says Mark R. Rank, PhD , the Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare at the Brown School and author of One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All.

“It’s the idea of what we stand for and what we represent — the idea of being able to pursue what you are really passionate about and to have a good life,” he says.

The interdisciplinary course, “Economic Realities of the American Dream,” came out of a long friendship between Rank and his co-teacher Steven Fazzari.

“I’ve read Mark’s books and being an economist they really got me thinking about perspectives on the realities of economic life in this country and how we formulate those ideas into this concept of an American Dream,” says Fazzari, PhD , professor of economics in Arts & Sciences.

He says the class has focused on three main components — the freedom to pursue what people want to do to reach their potential, the ability to have a secure and comfortable life and a sense of hope and optimism about the future.

“Many people think the American Dream is owning a home,” Fazzari says. “That may be one way to reach economic security and a sense of hope for the future but maybe it’s more of a pathway to the dream than a component of the dream itself.”

Students in the course examined the meaning of the American Dream and explored pathways to achieving it, including overall economic growth and rising standards of living, equality of opportunity, economic mobility and the availability and creation of jobs that will adequately provide for individuals and families.

“I decided to take this course because I wanted to experience the interdisciplinary approach that both professors provide,” says Doug Griesenauer, second-year master’s of social work student. “My view of the American Dream changed dramatically throughout the course. When it began, I understood it as more of an ephemeral idea, a concept that everyone really knew but you couldn’t pin down.

“Through discussions with both professors, we have been able to give substance to that idea and really understand what made the American Dream such an aspiring thing.”

Students participated in group projects and discussions from a variety of perspectives, including economics, sociology, social work and others.

“I’ve worked a lot with Professor Fazarri on Keynesian macroeconomics but living in St. Louis has gotten me really interested in issues of poverty and social justice,” says Madeleine Dapp, a junior mathematics and economics major in Arts & Sciences.

“I saw this course as a good opportunity to combine those two perspectives,” she says. “After I graduate, I’m hoping to work in agricultural policy. I think this class has really allowed me to more closely examine the problems that prevent people from accessing the American Dream, whether it’s problems with nutrition or something more economic.”

The interdisciplinary nature of the course has been its strong suit, Rank says.

“We have students from economics, social work and several other social sciences,” he says. “Having that mix in the classroom is really dynamic and provides a lot of interesting feedback, questions and discussions that help advance all of our thinking.”

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Do You Think the American Dream Is Real?

By Jeremy Engle

• Feb. 12, 2019

What does the American dream mean to you? A house with a white picket fence? Lavish wealth? A life better than your parents’?

Do you think you will be able to achieve the American dream?

In “ The American Dream Is Alive and Well ,” Samuel J. Abrams writes:

I am pleased to report that the American dream is alive and well for an overwhelming majority of Americans. This claim might sound far-fetched given the cultural climate in the United States today. Especially since President Trump took office, hardly a day goes by without a fresh tale of economic anxiety, political disunity or social struggle. Opportunities to achieve material success and social mobility through hard, honest work — which many people, including me, have assumed to be the core idea of the American dream — appear to be diminishing. But Americans, it turns out, have something else in mind when they talk about the American dream. And they believe that they are living it. Last year the American Enterprise Institute and I joined forces with the research center NORC at the University of Chicago and surveyed a nationally representative sample of 2,411 Americans about their attitudes toward community and society. The center is renowned for offering “deep” samples of Americans, not just random ones, so that researchers can be confident that they are reaching Americans in all walks of life: rural, urban, exurban and so on. Our findings were released on Tuesday as an American Enterprise Institute report.

What our survey found about the American dream came as a surprise to me. When Americans were asked what makes the American dream a reality, they did not select as essential factors becoming wealthy, owning a home or having a successful career. Instead, 85 percent indicated that “to have freedom of choice in how to live” was essential to achieving the American dream. In addition, 83 percent indicated that “a good family life” was essential. The “traditional” factors (at least as I had understood them) were seen as less important. Only 16 percent said that to achieve the American dream, they believed it was essential to “become wealthy,” only 45 percent said it was essential “to have a better quality of life than your parents,” and just 49 percent said that “having a successful career” was key.

The Opinion piece continues:

The data also show that most Americans believe themselves to be achieving this version of the American dream, with 41 percent reporting that their families are already living the American dream and another 41 percent reporting that they are well on the way to doing so. Only 18 percent took the position that the American dream was out of reach for them

Collectively, 82 percent of Americans said they were optimistic about their future, and there was a fairly uniform positive outlook across the nation. Factors such as region, urbanity, partisanship and housing type (such as a single‐family detached home versus an apartment) barely affected these patterns, with all groups hovering around 80 percent. Even race and ethnicity, which are regularly cited as key factors in thwarting upward mobility, corresponded to no real differences in outlook: Eighty-one percent of non‐Hispanic whites; 80 percent of blacks, Hispanics and those of mixed race; and 85 percent of those with Asian heritage said that they had achieved or were on their way to achieving the American dream.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

— What does the American dream mean to you? Did reading this article change your definition? Do you think your own dreams are different from those of your parents at your age? Your grandparents?

— Do you believe your family has achieved, or is on the way to achieving, the American dream? Why or why not? Do you think you will be able to achieve the American dream when you are older? What leads you to believe this?

— Do you think the American dream is available to all Americans or are there boundaries and obstacles for some? If yes, what are they?

— The article concludes:

What conclusions should we draw from this research? I think the findings suggest that Americans would be well served to focus less intently on the nastiness of our partisan politics and the material temptations of our consumer culture, and to focus more on the communities they are part of and exercising their freedom to live as they wish. After all, that is what most of us seem to think is what really matters — and it’s in reach for almost all of us.

Do you agree? What other conclusions might be drawn? Does this article make you more optimistic about this country and your future?

— Is the American dream a useful concept? Is it helpful in measuring our own or our country’s health and success? Do you believe it is, or has ever been, an ideal worth striving for? Is there any drawback to continuing to use the concept even as its meaning evolves?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

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The American Dream

Edward albee, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Edward Albee's The American Dream . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

The American Dream: Introduction

The american dream: plot summary, the american dream: detailed summary & analysis, the american dream: themes, the american dream: quotes, the american dream: characters, the american dream: symbols, the american dream: theme wheel, brief biography of edward albee.

Historical Context of The American Dream

Other books related to the american dream.

• Full Title: The American Dream
• When Written: Early 1960s
• Where Written: New York, NY
• Literary Period: Postwar/Theatre of the Absurd
• Genre: Drama
• Setting: America
• Climax: Grandma tells Mrs. Barker a horrifying story which reveals that Mommy and Daddy mutilated their adopted child until it died.
• Protagonist/Antagonist: Mommy, Daddy, and Grandma are the play’s main characters, and also one another’s foils and antagonists.

Extra Credit for The American Dream

Mommy Dearest. The key to understanding the dreamlike and convoluted play The American Dream may lie in Albee’s own personal history. Albee is rumored to have based the character of Mommy on his own adoptive mother, the “tall and imposing” Frances Cotter Abee, from whom he was estranged for most of his life.

Repetition. Edward Albee’s 1959 play The Sandbox also features four characters named Mommy, Daddy, Grandma, and The Young Man. The setting is different—the characters rotate around a large pit of sand while directly addressing the audience about the rifts in their family—but the characters’ relationships to one another are much the same, and the play’s absurdist setting and themes were further teased out in The American Dream .

The 'American Dream' has always been elusive. Is it still worth fighting for?

Was the American Dream ever real? Or was it a mirage?

With so many young people burdened by student loan debt and questioning whether they'll ever be able to afford a home, it's a question worth asking. It's a question worth mulling over when older Americans are working longer – not because they’re bored, but because grocery bills are busting their budgets, their children need support deep into adulthood, and the pensions that once knit together a financial safety net are for many a long-ago memory .

A series of stories by USA TODAY reporters reveals how ephemeral and tenuous the so-called American Dream has become, and also how a younger generation is setting its own terms for what constitutes a life of financial stability and fulfillment.

Child care more expensive than college in many states

The realities are stark.

Learn more: Best personal loans

A first-time homebuyer would need an income of roughly $64,500 a year to buy a so-called starter home, according to Redfin. That’s 13% more than what was needed just a year ago, and what's necessary to purchase a smaller property that typically sold for $243,000 in June – a record high.

Among millennials, student loans make up 36% of their debt, the highest of any generation. In 28 states, child care is more expensive than the cost for a student to attend a public college in their home state, according to lending platform NetCredit.com.

And it’s expected to cost a middle-income, married couple, $233,610 to raise a child born in 2015 through their 17 th birthday, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

It’s no wonder 65% of Gen Zers and nearly 3 in 4 millennials say they feel their financial starting point is far behind where previous generations were at the same age, according to an online poll of more than 2,000 U.S. adults conducted exclusively for USA TODAY by The Harris Poll. And two-thirds of Americans agree that younger people are dealing with difficulties that earlier generations didn’t have to.

“They're telling us they can't buy into that American Dream the way that their parents and grandparents thought about it ‒ because it's not attainable,” said The Harris Poll CEO John Gerzema. 

Segregation, urban renewal, made the American Dream hard to attain

Of course, dreams, by their very definition, are aspirational with no assurance they can become reality. They shimmer in the distance, or in our imaginations.

One person may feel they've missed the mark if they don't become a multimillionaire. For others, a comfortable home, a family and a little extra cash in the bank is more than enough.

Whatever the nuances, the American Dream is fundamental to the American identity, and there is little doubt that some iteration of it loomed large for the 967,500 people who became American citizens last fiscal year, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

My mother was an immigrant. Though she grew up in an affluent family in her native Guyana, she says she and her peers would read American magazines, watch Hollywood epics and imagine that the streets here were paved with gold. When she came to the U.S. to attend college and graduate school, brushes with racism tarnished the fantasy. But she, together with my father, forged a good life, and when she officially became a U.S. citizen in the early 1970s, the photos at the celebration show her smiling, triumphant and proud.

Yet the American Dream has always been hazy, its contours in the eye of the beholder. Depending on who you were, and from where you came, the ladder up was often missing a few rungs, and many had to pull themselves up with no ladder at all.

Maybe your piece of the American Dream was bulldozed for a freeway, like the many Black and brown residents whose homes were demolished in the 1950s and ’60s in the name of urban renewal. Maybe it was denied because you loved someone of the same gender and weren’t allowed to marry. Or perhaps your dream languished because pay inequities based on your being a woman or a person of color made it difficult to build and hold onto generational wealth.

Despite the odds, the dream wasn’t impossible. Among Black Americans, 38% owned a home in 1960, though that was far below the 65% of white Americans who had property. But the hurdles that had to be overcome were arduous. Redlining denied loans to those who were trying to buy homes in minority neighborhoods. Segregation and housing discrimination were rampant. Owning the place where you lived, a cornerstone of the American ideal, was a pillar that was hard won.

The Fair Housing Act passed in 1968 made redlining illegal. But still today, lawsuits have found that appraisers assign lower values to homes owned by Black people compared with their white counterparts. The gap between white home-owning households and those that are Black (73% vs. 44%) is greater now than it was in 1960, according to the Urban Institute.    

It's also very hard to get ahead when you don't earn enough. Women are paid 82 cents for every dollar earned on average by a man, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. Black and Hispanic women (70% and 65% respectively) are paid even less.

And while the ability to obtain an abortion legally in the wake of the Roe vs. Wade decision being overturned raised the likelihood of women finishing college by nearly 20%, the Supreme Court decision in June 2022 that took away that federal protection now puts the economic stability and advancement of millions of women in jeopardy.    

Forging a new American Dream

I know from my own conversations with Generation Zers that many resent having to clean up a mess largely caused by their elders. Still, the future belongs to the young.

Maybe a generation that has had to face the grimmest of realities, from a once-in-a-century pandemic to a relentless plague of gun violence to a democracy in stunning decline, no longer has the optimism to dream at all. They are fighting for survival, to reshape a world they did not make, and so they don’t have time to wish and wonder.

Or perhaps they are curating a different sort of dream.

Members of Gen Z save more and also spend more on what they truly care about. That’s a worthy change. Debt, while often necessary, can be suffocating, so if you must take it on, why not make sure it’s for what gives your life purpose and joy?

Buy a house to have an abode to call your own, or a haven that frees you from the whims of a landlord, not just so you can keep up with the proverbial Joneses. Choose college if it’s a building block for your desired career. But if an apprenticeship will get you where you want to go, that should be fine too.

And while raising a family can give you contentment that’s hard to convey, if you don’t want a spouse and 2.5 kids, it’s too significant a responsibility to take on just because society says you should.      

In a piece written by USA TODAY reporters Bailey Schulz and Kathleen Wong, Matt Marino, a 27-year-old teacher in New York City said that while his peers see owning their own house as “impossible,’’ they would also prefer to have “more freedom,’’ such as being able to do work that they love. 

How liberating it must be to care less about status than about having a life where you have the bandwidth to truly enjoy the fruits of your labor.

How gratifying that the ability to breathe fresh air and preserve the Earth means more to many young adults than a bottomless pile of material possessions. 

Whatever version of the American Dream you aspire to, if that vision is to be preserved, all of us, across generations, must commit to making it a real possibility for all.

Is the American Dream still possible? How younger workers are redefining success

How much does it cost to raise a child? College may no longer be the biggest expense.

That’s not easy when too many continue to view financial insecurity as a mark of personal failure. It’s a tall task when some believe certain Americans, based on their gender, race, sexual identity, or immigration status, are less worthy of opportunity, comfort and freedom, than others.

But one can dream.  

Essays About The American Dream: 7 Interesting Topics to Discuss

American Dream has main themes: hard work and equal opportunity create a better life over time. Discover essays about the American dream topics in this article.

The concept of the American dream includes many ideas, including those outlined in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Professional writers, high school students, and many people have worked to outline the meaning of the American dream in essays and research papers.

Many United States citizens operate under the assumption that working hard can elevate their financial and social status. Many people in American society grapple with whether the idea of the American dream is an attainable reality for those born into less-fortunate circumstances. While some argue that social mobility—meaning changes in social class based on effort and hard work—are at the core of the American dream, others argue that those who are born into a preferable situation may have an easier time achieving the dream, disputing the notion of an equal playing field.

Here, we’ll discuss 7 interesting essay topics on the American Dream that you can use in your next essay.

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1. Is The American Dream Still Alive?

2. the american dream is still alive: these people are proof, 3. the american dream defined, 4. the american dream in literature, 5. what does the american dream look like for immigrants, 6. how has the american dream changed over time, the final word on essays about the american dream, what literary works discuss the american dream, what should be considered when writing an essay on the american dream’s existence.

A topic of much debate, it can be tough to figure out whether the American Dream continues to exist as it did half a century ago. Many people question whether the American Dream is a reality for that outside of the American family depicted in 1950s television and print ads—largely white, upper-middle-class families.

Suppose you decide to write about whether the American Dream still exists. In that case, you’ll want to consider the inflation of the cost of a college education that has made it impossible for many students to work and pay their way through college, resulting in debt that feels impossible upon graduation. Rather than a fresh start in life, many graduates face low-paying jobs that make it difficult to handle daily living costs while also paying back high-interest student loans.

As you write about why the American Dream is currently a struggle for many, include success stories that show how the American Dream is still being achieved by many. You may want to touch on how the traditional idea of the American dream is changing with time. You can do this by highlighting studies that explain how successful Americans today feel regarding the American Dream and how the tenants of a successful life are changing for many people. 

Want to show your audience that the American Dream is still alive and well? Highlighting the stories of people who have achieved success in their lives can be a great way to convey proof of the existence of the American Dream to others. 

As you write your essay, it’s important to share how the definition of the American dream has changed over time. Today, many people feel that the American dream has more to do with a sense of belonging and community than making a certain amount of money or living in a certain type of home. Research shows that across the United States of America, people generally shared a positive feeling about the possibility of achieving the American dream. Most felt that they either had achieved the dream or were on their way to achieving it.

As you write your essay on proof of the existence of the American Dream, be sure to highlight people from different backgrounds, sharing the different challenges they’ve faced throughout their lives. You’ll want to show how Americans achieve success despite challenges and different starting points and how they’ve enjoyed their success (despite having different definitions of what it means to achieve the American Dream).

In years past, the definition of the American Dream was clear: rising above circumstances, developing a successful financial portfolio, owning a home, and having kids in a successful marriage. Today, however, many people define the American Dream differently. In an essay on defining the American dream, it’s important to consider viewpoints from different cultures and how a person’s socioeconomic starting point affects their view of what it means to have “made it” in America. 

When defining the American Dream, you may want to touch on how social and economic issues in America have made the American Dream a more realistic possibility for some groups than others. Social programs, discrimination, and civil rights issues have made it tougher for some minority groups to climb above the standing they were born into, making it harder to achieve financial stability and other aspects of the American dream.

In your essay about defining the American Dream, you may also want to touch on the importance of being able to take risks. This can be easier for people whose parents and other relatives can provide a safety net. People who are dependent on their savings to support new business ventures may find it harder to take risks, making it more difficult to achieve the American dream. 

When defining the American Dream, be sure to touch on how the Dream can be different for different people and how one person’s financial stability might not be the same as someone else’s. If possible, include anecdotal quotes and stories to help your reader connect to the way you’re defining the American Dream.

Many pieces of classic American literature work to show what the American Dream means to various groups of people. In writing an essay about the American Dream in literature, you’ll want to discuss several different classic works, including The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. 

When discussing the theme of the American Dream in literature, there are a few different approaches that you can take to show your readers how the American Dream has changed in novels over time. You may want to work through a timeline showing how the American Dream has changed or talk about how real-life social and economic issues have been reflected in the way that authors discuss the American Dream. 

When writing about the American Dream, you may also want to touch on how each author’s social standing affected their view of the American Dream and whether the achievement of the Dream was feasible at the time. Authors born into difficult circumstances may have a different view of the American Dream than authors born into a more affluent lifestyle. 

Growing student debt, a lack of high-paying jobs, and increasing living costs have made it difficult for people to keep their faith in the American dream. Economic research shows that many first- and second-generation Americans experience economic mobility upward in immigrant families, but this mobility eventually stalls in future generations. According to some researchers, t’s possible that first- and second-generation immigrants feel more of a push to be a success story in an attempt to erase the negative connotations that some American citizens have with the word “immigrant.”

People who are new to the United States face different challenges than people who have lived in the country for their entire lives. Writing an essay about how the American Dream is different for people born in other countries can enlighten many of your readers about how the Dream is different for people in different circumstances.

The American Dream has not remained stagnant over the years, and what people once believed to be the American Dream is something that many Americans no longer want. Writing an essay about how the American dream has changed over time can be an interesting way to explore how the ideals of America have changed over the years. 

The wealth gap has changed over time in the United States, making it increasingly difficult for people born into a lower socioeconomic status to build their wealth and achieve the American dream. Research shows that more than 40% of people born into the lowest part of the income ladder in the United States stay there as adults. Talking about how economic challenges in the United States have made it difficult for many people to go through college or start businesses can be a jumping-off point to discussing changes in the American Dream. 

For many people, the ideals associated with the American dream—marriage, family, kids, a job that provides financial stability—are no longer as desirable. Some people don’t desire to get married, and it’s more acceptable in society to stay single. Some people have no desire to have kids, and some people prefer to work in the gig economy rather than going to a 9-5 job every day. Discussing these changes in American society and how they relate to changes in the American Dream can help your reader see how the Dream has changed over time.

In the eyes of many, the American dream is often associated with homeownership. Skyrocketing mortgage rates in the U.S. make it hard for many people to afford a home, relegating them to rent or living with family members. If you decide to talk about the difficulties of becoming a homeowner in today’s economy, do your research on the latest mortgage news. Many people who once qualified for mortgages struggle to get approved due to skyrocketing interest rates. Including recent financial news can help help your readers connect recent events with the reality of the American Dream.

Opinions on the American dream differ, and when writing about the topic, it’s important to keep your audience in mind. While some people have experienced at least part of the American dream, others have struggled despite hard work due to an unequal playing field from the start.

FAQs About Essays About The American Dream

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller is well-known for their takes on the American dream.

When writing a persuasive or argumentive essay on the American dream, it’s important to consider social mobility, interest rates, homeownership rates, the cost of education, and other factors that contribute to creating a lucrative financial life.

If you’re still stuck, check out our general resource of essay writing topics .

Amanda has an M.S.Ed degree from the University of Pennsylvania in School and Mental Health Counseling and is a National Academy of Sports Medicine Certified Personal Trainer. She has experience writing magazine articles, newspaper articles, SEO-friendly web copy, and blog posts.

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Is the American Dream still achievable?

Is it still possible to pursue a happy life with a stable job, a family, and wealth or success in life?

 “The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” ― James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America. The American dream, to some families, might mean pursuing a happy life with a stable job, a family, and wealth or success in life. The American dream is made possible due to equal opportunity to all. To some people, this dream isn’t possible, it is just a dream. Although it’s not easy to achieve the American dream, with passion, hard work and dedication, it is very possible to achieve.

The American dream is the ideal that every us citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative. The term was first used in 1932 by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America, but even before the 1930’s, the mindset of the American dream was active. The Declaration of Independence only extended the American dream to white property owners. After time, laws were added to extend these rights to women, non property owners, and slaves. In this way, the American Dream changed the course of America itself. In the 1920s, the American Dream started morphing from the right to create a better life to the desire to acquire material things. From that point, the American dream adapted throughout time, making the next generation better than the one before.

There are a lot of Americans that do not believe in the American dream, or believe that it became unachievable. These people lacking faith, believe that factors such as discrimination and unequal opportunities provide barriers to one's chance of reaching this "American dream". While others believe anything is possible with determination and overcoming obstacles. Some believe that coming from nothing and becoming insanely successful is only a myth, many have lived it, one of them is Oprah Winfrey, one of the richest women in the world. Winfrey was an orphan raised by her grandma with little money. She has overcome child abuse, rape, weight gain, depression, failed romance, and other hardships to attain her success. Oprah Winfrey symbolizes the individual who by such means rises above the torment to become one of the wealthiest and most recognized public figures in the world.

Far fewer Americans say “becoming wealthy” is essential to the American dream than say the same about personal freedom and a good family life. Overall, 36% of U.S. adults say their family has achieved the American dream, while another 46% say they are “on their way” to achieving it, according to an August survey by Pew Research Center. People who say they have already achieved the American dream are generally older, and better-educated than those who say they are on their way to achieving the American dream and those who say it’s out of reach.

Whites (41%) are more likely than blacks (17%) or Hispanics (32%) to say they have achieved the American dream. But more blacks (62%) and Hispanics (51%) than whites (42%) say they are on their way to achieving it. Notably, there are no significant racial or ethnic differences in the shares who say the American dream is out of reach for their families. Millennials are wrong about the American dream, it’s not dead. Though fate, chance, and luck have a lot to do with one's success, so does willpower, the control of one’s behavior. It is in one's hands to shape life, seize opportunities, get an education, resist failure, set goals and ultimately become somebody.

The American dream is a dream made possible due to equal opportunity to all. If kids once living in poverty and in slums can becomes lawyers or doctors, if an immigrant can become California's governor, if handicapped kids can play basketball, if ordinary people can become extraordinary people, then the American Dream is possible.  

• Written by Rosemarie P.
• From Highland School
• In New York
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103 American Dream Essay Topics & Examples

If you’re in need of American dream topics for an essay, research paper, or discussion, this article is for you. Our experts have prepared some ideas and writing tips that you will find below.

📃 10 Tips for Writing American Dream Essays

🏆 best american dream essay topics & essay examples, 👍 catchy american dream topics, ❓ american dream research questions.

The American dream is an interesting topic that one can discuss from various perspectives. If you need to write an essay on the American dream, you should understand this concept clearly.

You can choose to present the American dream as a miracle that one cannot reach or depict a free and wealthy nation. In any case, the American dream essay is a good opportunity to reflect on the concept and learn more about it.

There are many topics you can choose from while writing your essay. Here are some examples of the American dream essay topics we can suggest:

• The true meaning of the American dream
• The image of the American dream in the Great Gatsby
• Is the American dream still relevant in today’s society?
• The role of the American dream: Discussion
• Americans’ beliefs and values: The American dream
• Can we achieve the American dream?
• The American dream in today’s world and society

Remember that you do not have to select one of the American dream essay titles and can come up with your own one. Once you have selected the topic, start working on your essay. Here are ten useful tips that will help you to write an outstanding paper:

• Start working on your essay ahead of time. You will need some time to study the issue, write the paper, and correct possible errors.
• Do preliminary research on the issue you want to discuss. The more information you know about the question, the better. We advise you to rely on credible sources exclusively and avoid using Wikipedia or similar websites.
• Check out the American dream essay examples online if you are not sure that the selected problem is relevant. Avoid copying the information you will find and only use it as guidance.
• Write an outline for your essay. Think of how you can organize your paper and choose titles for each of the sections. Remember that you should include an introductory paragraph and a concluding section along with body paragraphs.
• Remember that you should present the American dream essay thesis clearly. You can put it in the last sentence of your introductory paragraph.
• Your essay should be engaging for the audience. Help your reader to know something new about the issue and include some interesting facts that may not know about. Avoid overly complex sentences and structures.
• Make your essay personal, if it is possible. Do not focus on your opinion solely but provide your perspectives on the issue or discuss your concern about it. You can talk about your experiences with the American dream, too.
• Provide statistical data if you can. For example, you can find the results of surveys about people’s perspectives on the American dream.
• The concluding paragraph is an important section of the paper. Present the thesis and all of your arguments once again and provide recommendations, if necessary. Remember that this paragraph should not include new information or in-text citations.
• Do not send your paper to your professor right away. Check it several times to make sure that there are no grammatical mistakes in it. If you have time, you can put the paper away for several days and revise it later with “fresh” eyes.

Feel free to find an essay sample in our collection and get some ideas for your outstanding paper!

• Essay on the American Dream: Positive and Negative Aspects The American dream is one of the most revered ideals of the nation and it has become a part of the American national identity.
• Michelle Obama American Dream Speech Analysis – Michelle’s purpose was to introduce her husband as man who was more concerned about the common citizens’ concerns and who was willing and able to help everyone to realize his/her American dream because he himself […]
• American Dream: “Fences” by August Wilson The American dream makes it clear through its guarantee of the freedom and equality with the promise of prosperity and success as per the ability or personal achievements of every American citizen.”Fences” reveals the obstacles […]
• The American Dream by Edward Albee Play Analysis The American Dream play is an apologue of how American life has turned awry under the pretext of the American Dream.
• American Dream After World War I People lost vision of what this dream was supposed to mean and it became a dream, not of the vestal and industrious, but of the corrupt coterie, hence corrupting the dream itself.
• American Dream in “The Pursuit of Happiness” Film In America today, there is a general belief that every individual is unique, and should have equal access to the American dream of life “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.
• The Tortilla Curtain: American Dream – Characters, Summary & Analysis The cultural difference between the two families is introduced by the author as a theme describing the role of gender in the community.
• The American Dream in The Great Gatsby After spending some time in this neighborhood, Nick finally attends Gatsby’s exuberant parties only to realize that Gatsby organizes these parties to impress Daisy, Nick’s cousin, and wife to Tom.
• Femininity and the American Dream in Works of Chopin, Gilman, and Williams Even though the general understanding of the American dream was advertised to everyone, the idea was more applicable to the male members of the American society, which is reflected in Chopin’s “The Story of an […]
• The American Dream in Arthur Miller’s Plays Willy has a distorted vision of the American Dream, and he has such blind faith in this inaccurate vision that it leads to his mental disturbance when he is not able to accept how the […]
• Portrayal of the American Dream in the 20th Century Theatre However, different analysts criticized the use of the amelting pot’ in the play to show the pursuit of the American dream terming it as unrealistic in the sense that the term amelting’ creates a picture […]
• Meritocracy and the American Dream In the perception of such people, the American Dream is directly connected to meritocracy, i.e.a judgment on people on their individual abilities rather than the connections of the families, and in that regard such perception […]
• Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’, Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ and the American Dream “The America Dream’ is a longstanding common belief of the American population that in the United States, people are free to realize the full potential of their labor and their talents and every person in […]
• Is the American Dream Still Alive? The American Dream can be defined as a summation of national values entrenched in the culture of the United States. In this regard, the minority groups in the United States are often on the receiving […]
• American Dream and Socialism in the Book “The Jungle” by Sinclair The main idea of the book lies in upholding the Marxist belief of the inevitable collapse of capitalism and the accession of the proletariat, or industrial working class.
• American Dream and Unfulfilling Reality Living the American dream is the ultimate dream for most of the American citizens and those aspiring to acquire American citizenship.
• The American Dream and Its Roots The tension between the ideals of the American Dream as espoused by the Puritans and the realities of American life has been a recurrent theme in American history.
• Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream – Movie Analysis It can be taken as the national ethos of the citizens of the USA. The basis of the American society is broken and it is not united anymore.
• Music Talent Shows and the American Dream Talent search shows, like American Idol and The Voice, have suffered a lot of criticism for different reasons. Stanley says the main reason for this cynicism is the failure of such shows to focus on […]
• Social Status Anxiety and the American Dream The pain of a loss and the status anxiety that came with being inferior to other students at Harvard instigated the urge to revenge and brought a desire to achieve success.
• In Pursuit of the American Dream: An Analysis of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers The experiences of the characters in the novel portray the endeavors of the early immigrants’ pursuit of the American dream. The instinct to forgo the comforts, which a home country offers by default and then […]
• Willy Loman and the American Dream As a result of his boasting, a great deal of what his family knows about Willy is based upon the image he feels he must portray of himself in order to bring himself in line […]
• The Dilemmas of the American Dream in The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby is a story of a young man in the early twentieth century who seems to know what he wants in the way of that dream and what to do to achieve it.
• The American Dream, Social Status and Hierarchies The persistence of social status and hierarchies in modern-day America undermines the possibility of realizing Winthrop’s ideal community as a goal for the current American Dream, considering his argument of wouldivinely ordained’ holds no traction […]
• Tensions in the American Dream The imbalance can lead to debates and discussions about the meaning and purpose of the American Dream, as well as a conflict between the ideals of freedom and agency and the desire for a more […]
• Support of the American Dream Act of 2001 In contrast to many supporters of the American Dream Act, some individuals claim that the policy promotes the entrance of illegal immigrants.
• The Possibility of Realizing the American Dream Thus, according to the author, the American dream is only a fantasy. Returning to the ideas of Krugman, Cox and Alm, and Dalmia, it seems necessary to highlight some aspects.
• Reflection on the American Dream Concept The vision of the American Dream can be different for individuals, and people create their interpretations according to their specific experiences.
• Reaching the American Dream From Scratch For example, the experience of a person coming to the United States from Haiti is one of poverty, under-resourced communities, and a complete disillusion with the promise of a good life.
• The American Dream Based on “Re Jane” by Patricia Park The main difference is that Jane had a chance to live her dreams in New York than in Seoul. Nina is an example of Jane’s friends who want her to succeed and understand the flaws […]
• The American Dream in Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain The personal experience of the characters can be explained by their varying life conditions and, hence, are linked to the notion of the American Dream, which can be achieved by everyone while the efforts differ.
• Whitman, Hughes, and the American Dream Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, two prominent figures of American poetry of the past, are of them.”I Hear America Singing,” “I, Too,” “Harlem,” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” are the emotional responses to the […]
• The Corrupted American Dream and Its Significance in “The Great Gatsby” The development of the American dream and its impact on the society of the United States is a pertinent topic of discussion for various authors.
• Color Adjustment: False Image of American Dream The documentary tells the story of white, well-dressed people advertising the American dream, completely ignoring that the U.S.is not only a country of the white race.
• The American Dream: Franklin’s and Douglass’s Perception The objective of this paper, therefore, is to discuss the topic of the American dream and how both Franklin and Douglass, each exemplify this dream.
• The American Dream and Success One of the most pertinent topics associated with the American Dream is taking the courage to act and seize the opportunity.
• The Concept of American Dream: Examples of Columbus and Bradstreet Bradstreet’s other dream was to be able to secure a position in the ‘New world’ and still be seen as a woman who cares for her family.
• Racial Wealth Gap and the American Dream The speaker evaluates the accumulative wealth of Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites in America and arrives to the conclusion that race plays a role in financial burdens that many people of color experience.
• American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 Although the major idea of the book is a critical one, the author’s intention does not concern analyzing approaches to the American social evolution in order to define the most adequate one.
• History of Achieving the American Dream James Truslow Adams who wrote the book “The Epic of America” defined the American dream as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity […]
• The American Dream in the 21st Century It is the labor of these people that allowed the country to afford to build its industry and set up a base for fulfilling the American Dream.
• American Dream of Early Settlers He did not tell the settlers of the difficulties they were going to face in moving from Europe to the land of honey that is America.
• The American Dream: Defining the Great Society For instance, the Medicare bill was for the elderly and the poor, human rights for the oppressed, and antipoverty laws that set a stage for growth in the society.
• American Literature and the American Dream The difference in how the dream is defined lies in how one sees the shape and color of the concoction, whether the texture is just right for the shape of the taste buds assessing the […]
• American Dream and Reality for Minorities The topic of our concern is the reality that is faced by women, blacks, and war veterans who are associated with the American army.
• Richard Rodriguez’s Opinion on Migration and the American Dream American seems to refer only to the citizen of the United States and does not include the rest of the people in the continent!
• American Dream Is Not a Myth The paper is based on the argument, a simplified definition of the American dream: the American dream can be defined as “the achievement of economic and social advancement through hard work and determination”.
• The Immigrant Experience and the Failure of the American Dream The fates of the heroes of the book amaze with their tragedy, and this is the story of slaves of wage labor.
• Tycoons and Their American Dream The American Dream as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, and others saw it and forged it to be seen by others contributed meaningfully to the values of the American people and the priorities of a nation.
• Theater Exam: American Dream and Family Legacy To start the discussion on the concept of American Dream, I would like to focus on Willy, the main character of the Death of a Salesman.
• Is the American Dream Still Alive? The topic of discussion in this setting would be the American dream and the factors associated with the quest. They would talk about the cost of living, the cost of education, and the fact that […]
• American Dream in Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” The play Death of a salesman is indeed an anatomy of the American dream especially because the plot of the story revolves around some of the basic material gains that individuals in the American society […]
• “American Dream” of English and Chinese Immigrants My family decided to move to the US from England because of the low wages in our town. My intentions were to explore the new opportunities of the West and to earn more money than […]
• The American Dream and Working Conditions In fact, it might be said that it is due to their efforts that the American Dream still exists as a piece of reality.
• American Dream and Equity of Outcome and Opportunity The American dream is one of the most famous declarations of the world and the American subsequent governments have kept the dream alive for the last hundred years.
• Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream This is one of the drawbacks that should be taken into account by the viewers who want to get a better idea about the causes of the problems described in the movie.
• American Dream in Hansberry’s and Miller’s Tragedies Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” and Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” tell the stories about how people can perceive and be affected by the idea of the American Dream, how they choose wrong dreams […]
• Michelle Obama’s Remarks on American Dream She added that the main goal was to secure the blessings of liberty and to bring about the fulfillment of the promise of equality.
• The American Dream’s Concept The American economy is also likely to improve as a result of realizing the American dream 2013 since most of the residents are likely to indulge in productive activities as stipulated in the American dream […]
• The Concept of Progress or the Pursuit of the American Dream The concept of progress or the pursuit of the American Dream since 1930s has been a matter of concern for many immigrants who believe that they can achieve much in the US than in their […]
• The Book American Dream by Jason DeParle From the name of the book, it is clear that the cardinal theme of the book is the American dream. This is contrary to the fact that she was pregnant and in a crack house.
• The Definition of the Great American Dream: Hearing Opportunity Knock Although the concept of the American Dream is very recognizable, its essence is very hard to nail down, since it incorporates a number of social, economical and financial principles; largely, the American Dream is the […]
• The American Dream Negative Sides and Benefits The United States is thought of as the land of opportunity and there are many people who want to live “The American Dream”.
• Role of Money in the American Dream’s Concept Many people lack the meaning of the American dream because they are always looking forward to find opportunity and fail to realize that the opportunity to succeed is always around them in the work they […]
• The Reality of American Dream The government encouraged the immigration of the population whose labor and skills were required in the United States. The housing in the urban was overcrowded with very unsanitary conditions, and some of the immigrants did […]
• Francis Scott Fitzgerald & His American Dream In the novel “Tender is the Night,” Fitzgerald describes the society in Riviera where he and his family had moved to live after his misfortune of late inheritance.
• American Dream: Is It Still There? It is a dream for immigrants from the Middle East to be in America; a country where discrimination is history and where no one will prevent them from achieving their dreams in life.
• The American Dream: Walt Disney’s Cinderella and Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man This is attributed to the fact that the original ideas and the fundamental principals that founded the dream are quickly fading away given the changing fortunes of the average American.
• The Death of the American Dream It is the moral decay that leads to the loss of freedom, the very essence of the founding of the American dream.
• Inequality and the American Dream It is only after the poor workers are assured of their jobs that the American model can be said to be successful.
• A Response to the Article “Inequality and the American Dream” It has drawn my attention that other world countries embrace the “American model” since the super power has enormous wealth and its economic development is marked by up-to-date juggernauts of globalization and technology.
• Fitzgerald’s American Dream in The Great Gatsby & Winter Dreams To my mind, Winter Dream is a perfect example of the American Dream, since the main hero, Dexter, implemented each point of it, he was persistent and very hard-working, he was a very sensible and […]
• How Did Ben Franklin Exemplify the American Dream?
• Does Fitzgerald Condemn the American Dream in “The Great Gatsby”?
• How Do Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass Represent the American Dream?
• Has America Lost Its Potential to Achieve the American Dream?
• How Has Disney’s Social Power Influenced the Vision of the American Dream?
• Does the American Dream Really Exist?
• How Does the Great Gatsby Portray the Death of the American Dream?
• What Does “The Great Gatsby” Have to Say About the Condition of the American Dream in the 1920s?
• How Does One Achieve the American Dream?
• What Are the Greatest Obstacles of Full Access to the American Dream?
• How Has the American Dream Been Translated Into Popular Film?
• What Does the American Dream Mean to an Immigrant?
• How Does Arthur Miller Through “Death of a Salesman” Deal With the Theme of the American Dream?
• What Must Everyone Know About the American Dream?
• How Has the American Dream Changed Over Time?
• What Is Infamous About the American Dream?
• How Does Millar Portray His Views of the American Dream Using Willy Loman?
• When Did American Dream Start?
• How Has the Media Changed the American Dream?
• Who Would Think the American Dream Isn’t Possible?
• How Does Steinbeck Present the American Dream in “Of Mice and Men”?
• Why Will Equal Pay Help Women Achieve the American Dream?
• How Might the Disadvantage of Immigration Affect the Chances of Having That American Dream?
• Why Is the American Dream Equally Given and Registered To All Citizens?
• How Does Extreme Inequality Make the American Dream Inaccessible?
• Why Is the American Dream Still Alive in the United States?
• How Are Millennials Redefining the American Dream?
• Why Is the American Dream Unattainable?
• How Does Society Influence the Idea of the American Dream?
• Why Must the United States Renew Opportunities to Achieve the American Dream to Reform Immigration Policy?
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Home — Essay Samples — Economics — American Dream — Broken Ambition: Why is the American Dream not Attainable

Broken Ambition: Why is The American Dream not Attainable

• Categories: American Dream Reality

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Published: Jan 21, 2020

Words: 1001 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

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American dream essay: hook ideas, american dream essay example.

• The Illusion of Prosperity: Step into a world where dreams are woven into the fabric of the American identity. Join me in unraveling the harsh reality behind the elusive American Dream and why it often remains just that—an unattainable dream.
• An Eye-Opening Quote: As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Let's delve into the societal currents that impede the journey toward the American Dream and keep individuals from reaching their aspirations.
• The Myth of Equal Opportunity: Explore with me the disparities in access to education, wealth, and opportunities that hinder the realization of the American Dream for many. Together, we'll uncover the systemic barriers that persist.
• The Human Cost of Ambition: Delve into the personal stories of those who have chased the American Dream and found themselves disillusioned. Join me in examining the toll that relentless ambition can take on individuals and families.
• Redefining Success: As we question the attainability of the traditional American Dream, consider how we might redefine success and aspirations in a changing society, one that values well-being, equity, and fulfillment over material wealth.

Works Cited

• Autor, D. H. (2014). Skills, education, and the rise of earnings inequality among the “other 99 percent”. Science, 344(6186), 843-851.
• Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Kline, P., & Saez, E. (2014). Where is the land of opportunity? The geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(4), 1553-1623.
• Collins, C., & Ganong, P. (2019). Has rising inequality reduced middle-class income growth? Economic Policy Institute. Retrieved from https://www.epi.org/publication/has-rising-inequality-reduced-middle-class-income-growth/
• Deaton, A., & Case, A. (2015). Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(49), 15078-15083.
• Piketty, T., & Saez, E. (2014). Inequality in the long run. Science, 344(6186), 838-843.
• Stiglitz, J. E. (2012). The price of inequality: How today's divided society endangers our future. WW Norton & Company.
• Temin, P. (2017). The vanishing middle class: Prejudice and power in a dual economy. MIT Press.
• United Nations Development Programme. (2019). Human development indices and indicators 2018 statistical update. Retrieved from http://hdr.undp.org/en/indicators/137506
• Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2018). The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger. Bloomsbury Publishing.
• World Economic Forum. (2020). The global social mobility report 2020. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-report-2020

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