american dream is dead essay

Is the American dream really dead?

Subscribe to global connection, carol graham carol graham senior fellow - economic studies.

June 20, 2017

This piece was originally published on The Guardian on June 20, 2017.

T he United States has a long-held reputation for exceptional tolerance of income inequality, explained by its high levels of social mobility. This combination underpins the American dream – initially conceived of by Thomas Jefferson as each citizen’s right to the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

This dream is not about guaranteed outcomes, of course, but the  pursuit  of opportunities. The dream found a persona in the fictional characters of the 19th-century writer  Horatio Alger Jr  – in which young working-class protagonists go from from rags to riches (or at least become middle class) in part due to entrepreneurial spirit and hard work.

Yet the opportunity to live the American dream is much less widely shared today than it was several decades ago. While 90% of the children born in 1940 ended up in higher ranks of the income distribution than their parents,  only 40% of those born in 1980 have done so .

Attitudes about inequality have also changed. In 2001, a study found the only Americans who reported lower levels of happiness amid greater inequality were left-leaning rich people – with  the poor seeing inequality as a sign of future opportunity . Such optimism has since been substantially tempered: in 2016, only 38% of Americans thought their children would be better off than they are.

In the meantime, the public discussion about inequality has completely by-passed a critical element of the American dream:  luck .

Just as in many of Alger’s stories the main character benefits from the assistance of a generous philanthropist, there are countless real examples of success in the US where different forms of luck have played a major role. And yet, social support for the unlucky – in particular, the poor who cannot stay in full-time employment – has been falling substantially in recent years, and is facing even more threats today. 

In short, from  new research  based on some novel metrics of wellbeing, I find strong evidence that the American dream is in tatters, at least.

White despair, minority hope

My research began by comparing mobility attitudes in the US with those in Latin America, a region long known for high levels of poverty and inequality (although with progress in the past decades). I explored a question in the Gallup world poll, which asks respondents a classic American dream question: “Can an individual who works hard in this country get ahead?”

I found very large gaps between the responses of ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’ in the US (represented by the top and bottom 20% income distributions of the Gallup respondents). This was in stark contrast to Latin America, where there was no significant difference in attitudes across income groups. Poor people in the US were 20 times less likely to believe hard work would get them ahead than were the poor in Latin America, even though the latter are significantly worse off in material terms.

Another question in the poll explores whether or not respondents experience stress on a daily basis. Stress is a marker of poor health, and the kind of stress typically experienced by the poor – usually due to negative shocks that are beyond their control (“bad stress”) – is significantly worse for well being than “good stress”: that which is associated with goal achievement, for those who feel able to focus on their future.

In general, Latin Americans experience significantly less stress – and also smile more – on a daily basis than Americans. The gaps between the poor and rich in the US were significantly wider (by 1.5 times on a 0–1 score) than those in Latin America, with the poor in the US experiencing more stress than either the rich or poor in Latin America.

The gaps between the expectations and sentiments of rich and poor in the US are also greater than in many other countries in east Asia and Europe (the other regions studied). It seems that being poor in a very wealthy and unequal country – which prides itself on being a meritocracy, and eschews social support for those who fall behind – results in especially high levels of stress and desperation.

But my research also yielded some surprises. With the low levels of belief in the value of hard work and high levels of stress among poor respondents in the US as a starting point, I compared optimism about the future across poor respondents of different races. This was based on a question in the US Gallup daily poll that asks respondents where they think they will be five years from now on a 0-10 step life satisfaction ladder.

I found that poor minorities – and particularly black people – were much more optimistic about the future than poor white people. Indeed, poor black respondents were three times as likely to be a point higher up on the optimism ladder than were poor whites, while poor Hispanic people were one and a half times more optimistic than whites. Poor black people were also half as likely as poor whites to experience stress the previous day, while poor Hispanics were only two-thirds as likely as poor whites.

What explains the higher levels of optimism among minorities, who have traditionally faced discrimination and associated challenges? There is no simple answer.

One factor is that poor minorities have stronger informal safety nets and social support, such as families and churches, than do their white counterparts. Psychologists also find that minorities are more resilient and much less likely to report depression or commit suicide than are whites in the face of negative shocks, perhaps due to a longer trajectory of dealing with negative shocks and challenges.

Another critical issue is the threat and reality of downward mobility for blue-collar whites, particularly in the heartland of the country where manufacturing, mining, and other jobs have hollowed out. Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University finds that poor black and Hispanic people are  much more likely than poor white people  to report that they live better than their parents did. Poor whites are more likely to say they live worse than their parents did; they, in particular, seem to be living the erosion of the American dream.

The American problem

Why does this matter? My research from a decade ago – since confirmed by other studies – found that individuals who were optimistic about their futures tended to have better health and employment outcomes. Those who believe in their futures tend to invest in those futures, while those who are consumed with stress, daily struggles and a lack of hope, not only have less means to make such investments, but also have much less confidence that they will pay off.

The starkest marker of lack of hope in the US is a significant increase in premature mortality in the past decade – driven by an increase in suicides and drug and alcohol poisoning and a stalling of progress against heart disease and lung cancer – primarily but not only among middle-aged uneducated white people. Mortality rates for black and Hispanic people, while higher on average than those for whites, continued to fall during the same time period.

The reasons for this trend are multi-faceted. One is the coincidence of an all-too-readily-available supply of drugs such as opioids, heroin and fentanyl, with the shrinking of blue-collar jobs – and identities – primarily due to technological change. Fifteen per cent of prime age males are out of the labour force today; with that figure projected to increase to 25% by 2050. The identity of the blue-collar worker seems to be stronger for white people than for minorities, meanwhile. While there are now increased employment opportunities in services such as health, white males are far less likely to take them up than are their minority counterparts.

Lack of hope also contributes to rising mortality rates, as evidenced in  my latest research with Sergio Pinto . On average, individuals with lower optimism for the future are more likely to live in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with higher mortality rates for 45- to 54-year-olds.

Desperate people are more likely to die prematurely, but living with a lot of premature death can also erode hope. Higher average levels of optimism in metropolitan areas are also associated with lower premature mortality rates. These same places tend to be more racially diverse, healthier (as gauged by fewer respondents who smoke and more who exercise), and more likely to be urban and economically vibrant.

Technology-driven growth is not unique to the US, and low-skilled workers face challenges in many OECD countries. Yet by contrast, away from the US, they have not had a similar increase in premature mortality. One reason may be stronger social welfare systems – and stronger norms of collective social responsibility for those who fall behind – in Europe.

Ironically, part of the problem may actually  be  the American dream. Blue-collar white people – whose parents lived the American dream and who expected their children to do so as well – are the ones who seem most devastated by its erosion and yet, on average, tend to vote against government programmes. In contrast, minorities, who have been struggling for years and have more experience multi-tasking on the employment front and relying on family and community support when needed – are more resilient and hopeful, precisely because they still see a chance for moving up the ladder.

There are high costs to being poor in America, where winners win big but losers fall hard. Indeed, the dream, with its focus on individual initiative in a meritocracy, has resulted in far less public support than there is in other countries for safety nets, vocational training, and community support for those with disadvantage or bad luck. Such strategies are woefully necessary now, particularly in the heartland where some of Alger’s characters might have come from, but their kind have long since run out of luck.

Related Content

Carol Graham

December 1, 2017

May 27, 2016

Carol Graham, Sergio Pinto

June 8, 2017

Related Books

Luis Felipe López-Calva, Nora Claudia Lustig

May 28, 2010

Nora Claudia Lustig

September 1, 1995

Bradley H. Patterson

November 1, 2001

Economic Security & Mobility

Global Economy and Development

Kristin F. Butcher, Elizabeth Kepner , Kelli Marquardt, Brianna Smith

June 24, 2024

Phillip Levine, Luke Pardue

June 5, 2024

Simon Hodson

May 8, 2024

American Compass

• Compass Point
• The Edgerton Essays

• Globalization
• Financialization
• Understanding America

• Conservative Economics Family, community, and industry provide the foundation for our nation’s liberty and prosperity -->
• Productive Markets Family, community, and industry provide the foundation for our nation’s liberty and prosperity -->
• Supportive Communities Family, community, and industry provide the foundation for our nation’s liberty and prosperity -->
• Responsive Politics Family, community, and industry provide the foundation for our nation’s liberty and prosperity -->

• Annual Report

The American Dream Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Misunderstood

Recommended reading.

Some people believe the American Dream is dead and the game is rigged against them.

That isn’t my mindset or attitude. In order to fulfill your dreams, you must aspire to be what you desire. That is the American Dream, to me. And I think some people don’t understand what fulfilling that American Dream can take. 

I live in Washington, D.C., and am surrounded by ambitious people aspiring to be politicians, writers, and journalists. Many of them are immigrants that came from repressive places where the government decides what your fate will be. In America, you’re not forced to work, you can choose to hold a cup panhandling or you can take risks and start a business. Trust me, I know people who have done both. 

Part of the problem is that too many equate the American Dream with doing well—making money, the big house, the nice cars. Too many Americans suffer from a sense of entitlement, wanting instant gratification, rather than paying their dues. They envy someone running a business, who has two cars and a trophy wife. You don’t see the behind-the-scenes work it took to get there. You don’t know how someone may have started his business, working in his garage, may have spent days in the soup line and was mocked for thinking outside of the box.

Ten years ago I came to Washington, D.C., with $10 dollars, broke and homeless. I was unemployed and unemployable. I hadn’t bathed in weeks and the only prospect I had was to beg or sell a newspaper written and sold by the homeless, Street Sense . If anyone had a reason to give up, it was me. Many had and they have passed away. Being proud and competitive, I refused to be a beggar and charity case and saw that selling papers was better than panhandling. 

Make sure your dreams are your own, not others’ expectations. Dreams start with plans and come down to choices. If you let others set your expectations for you, you’re letting them make your plans for you. Do I become a comfortable slave or do I take risks by becoming someone who is independent? 

Sometimes that means marching to the beat of your own drum. It also means having a positive mindset. If you go into something with the mindset that your task is impossible, you’ll find yourself just wasting another day in bed dreaming. America will give you an opportunity, but you have to be the one to take action. 

When it comes to solutions for those facing poverty, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. There isn’t one factor or stereotype. I was lucky to find organizations such as Street Sense, S.O.M.E. (So Others May Eat), Miriam’s Kitchen, and Bread for the City. Being addicted, I never went to rehabilitation, but found a sponsor at AA meetings and haven’t taken a drink in 12 years. Instead of complaining about my first job, which wasn’t great, I used it as a resume-builder. I focused on staying away from negative people and looking at the big picture.

Following those dreams, being able to call your own shots and defining your own meaning of success, also means not taking rejection personally. I always say to myself, I’m sure the Apostles Paul, Peter, and Timothy were rejected, but eventually, they found the right audience to hear their message. Some of the greatest books in history, such as Gone With The Wind and Lord of the Flies have been rejected. It’s one thing to dream but don’t complain about America if you are not willing to fight, get knocked down, and pick yourself back up again.

Lastly, despite what you read or hear, America is still the land of opportunity. But at the same time, you must be realistic. I’m 5’11” and can’t jump or dribble, so I don’t think the NBA will be calling anytime soon. Again—the Dream isn’t about having the most or being the best. It’s about wanting to make the most of yourself without anyone telling you what you need to be doing.

As you can see, I’m an optimist. I define success as living my life on my terms. I’ve worked in companies that paid me handsomely and wanted to jump off a bridge. I was miserable living off the pressures of living by someone else’s definition of success. I was happier homeless than having the government, politicians, or corporate bosses imposing themselves on what I can or cannot do.

Follow your dreams and you will find success in America. It might not be success as you think of it right now. The American Dream isn’t about getting rich. It’s about living life the way you want to, and that is something we still have the freedom to choose every single day.

Edgerton Essays feature the perspectives of working-class Americans on the challenges facing their communities and families and the debates central to the nation’s politics. If you or someone you know might be interested in contributing to the series, click here for more information.

Recommended Reading

A Dream Achieved—Through Mere Luck

My American Dream feels stolen, like I purchased it with the blood of brothers and enemies.

COVID’s Toll on the American Dream

The American Dream—people have hung on to those three little words for decades, passed them down for generations. But it’s hard to see how we can believe in the dream right now.

American Scream

American Compass’s Wells King reviews Michael Strain’s new book The American Dream Is Not Dead (But Populism Could Kill It).

Join our mailing list to receive our latest research, news, and commentary.

Subscribe to receive updates, previews, and more.

• Work & Careers
• Life & Arts

Is the American dream really dead?

Try unlimited access only $1 for 4 weeks.

Then $75 per month. Complete digital access to quality FT journalism on any device. Cancel anytime during your trial.

• Global news & analysis
• Expert opinion
• Special features
• FirstFT newsletter
• Videos & Podcasts
• Android & iOS app
• FT Edit app
• 10 gift articles per month

Explore more offers.

Standard digital.

• FT Digital Edition

Premium Digital

Print + premium digital, ft professional, weekend print + standard digital, weekend print + premium digital.

Essential digital access to quality FT journalism on any device. Pay a year upfront and save 20%.

• Global news & analysis
• Exclusive FT analysis
• FT App on Android & iOS
• FirstFT: the day's biggest stories
• 20+ curated newsletters
• Follow topics & set alerts with myFT
• FT Videos & Podcasts
• 20 monthly gift articles to share
• Lex: FT's flagship investment column
• 15+ Premium newsletters by leading experts
• FT Digital Edition: our digitised print edition
• Weekday Print Edition
• Videos & Podcasts
• Premium newsletters
• 10 additional gift articles per month
• FT Weekend Print delivery
• Everything in Standard Digital
• Everything in Premium Digital

Complete digital access to quality FT journalism with expert analysis from industry leaders. Pay a year upfront and save 20%.

• 10 monthly gift articles to share
• Everything in Print
• Make and share highlights
• FT Workspace
• Markets data widget
• Subscription Manager
• Workflow integrations
• Occasional readers go free
• Volume discount

Billed Quarterly at $199. Complete digital access plus the FT newspaper delivered Monday-Saturday.

Terms & Conditions apply

Explore our full range of subscriptions.

Why the ft.

See why over a million readers pay to read the Financial Times.

• Starting a Business
• Growing a Business
• Small Business Guide
• Business News
• Science & Technology
• Money & Finance
• For Subscribers
• Write for Entrepreneur
• Tips White Papers
• Entrepreneur Store
• United States
• Asia Pacific
• Middle East
• South Africa

Copyright © 2024 Entrepreneur Media, LLC All rights reserved. Entrepreneur® and its related marks are registered trademarks of Entrepreneur Media LLC

Why the American Dream is Dead Rising costs. Increased credit card debt. Wealth disparity is at an all-time high, and the division continues growing. The American dream is dead.

By Solo Ceesay Edited by Micah Zimmerman Mar 2, 2023

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The United States of America was built on one main principle: one's inherited socioeconomic status is nothing more than a circumstance of the past that is to be rectified by their true destiny. The U.S. used this simple ideology to propel itself as one of the five great power nations of the world socially, economically and politically. This principle attracted countless immigrants who fled their countries of origin to escape a predestined fate.

It might be incomprehensible to those born into America's idealistic regime, but on other continents such as Asia or Africa , it's pretty common for a person's future to be relegated to that of their ancestors. This is not an accident but a product bred out of extreme centralization and the elite pushing self-serving agendas. As a testament to this activity globally, Author Vasuki Shastry eloquently demonstrates: "Asia's billionaire class is a toxic addition to this mix. There is strong evidence in developing Asia that the political and business class often collude at the expense of public interest, aggravating already rising inequality and low social mobility, such as India's tendering of major infrastructure projects to favored business groups."

Centuries of strategic American propaganda have done an inconceivably good job at luring immigrants with the promise of a lucrative life built upon the foundations of hope and opportunity. I posit that it's becoming increasingly difficult for the vast majority to achieve Thomas Jefferson's American dream, underpinned by a person's right to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

Related: Is the American Dream Dead?

'The rent is too damn high!'

It's no secret that the cost of living in America has been exorbitant for quite a while now, and the pace at which this has been increasing is historic. In 2021, we saw YoY inflation jump from 1.4% in 2020 to a blistering 7% — the steepest increase in YoY inflation since 1950, when we saw a delta of 8%. A year later, 2022 YoY inflation held strong at 6.5%, signaling a slight improvement. Concurrently, house prices increased by a record 16.9% in 2021.

To put things into perspective at a micro level, the price of eggs rose a staggering 60% in 2022. Considering the rising cost of basic necessities, a reflected increase in wages would be expected. However, little evidence points to any impending meaningful increases, with wage growth holding relatively steady between 5 and 5.5% since the beginning of 2021.

Related: The Cheapest States To Live in 2023

'Just put it on my card'

To make ends meet, Americans are now more than ever electing to shift their expenses to credit cards and other lines of credit. American households currently hold $11.67 trillion in debt — a 25% increase from the $9.31 trillion they held before COVID-19. While inflation certainly contributes to the rapid rise of this number, inflation within itself isn't the most concerning piece of data when analyzing the financial health of the average American.

Younger generations, millennials in particular, are struggling to buy homes despite taking on this debt. In fact, the median age for homebuyers in America today is about 47 years of age, eight years older than the median age prior to the financial crisis. To add salt to this wound, the average American currently has just $5,300 in savings, solidifying that this picture will likely worsen before it gets any better.

Related: Is the American Dream Attainable?

The secret behind true wealth creation

We're in a transitionary period, teetering on the edge of a new digital economy . With this, we've witnessed quick, lucrative returns when trading stocks or cryptocurrencies , compared with returns on property ownership. This makes it more effective to chase 10 to 100x returns in capital markets instead of buying your first home, and although this might seem intuitive on the surface, this only applies to a certain demographic.

Suppose you're a Wall Streeter or a software engineer at a leading technology company in a major city like New York or San Francisco. Given the entry point to the housing market is grossly higher than that of an individual living in Des Moines, the capital required to have any skin in the game is a barrier to entry within itself. Sure, you could buy a property in another city, but the cost, both monetarily and operationally, of having real estate that isn't yours in combination with your own expenses is a tall order. You might have to sacrifice a few thousand dollars on rent by not owning property, but your net income in this scenario is best spent building a diversified portfolio of non-real estate assets.

In an alternate scenario, where someone holds a modest job — making an honest living like the vast majority of Americans — and resides in an affordable city , one's dollars are best spent investing in the property they live in, given that their entry point is likely accessible. Buying a house is the only investment you can easily pull off with 90+% leverage, meaning your upfront investment costs are subsidized. Conversely, buying stocks requires you to front 100% at the time of investment. What's more, the two-way volatility of the stock market is far harder to track compared to the housing market, which, for the past few decades, has generally moved upwards more consistently. You can certainly buy stocks, but due to the availability of leverage, assuming you have access to credit, real estate can more likely yield higher returns off of a small investment.

In contemporary society, the level of difficulty in achieving the American dream has skyrocketed. This picture-perfect life is visually synonymous with happily married couples with two children, a beautiful home and a white picket fence. However, the reality of this is vastly different. The latest numbers suggest people are no longer getting married, buying homes or having children nearly as much as in previous generations. Wealth disparity is at an all-time high, and divisions continue growing. The American dream is dead.

Why they want you to believe the dream

While the vast majority of Americans are feeling the pain of the Federal Reserve's tight monetary policy, the nation's elite are not. Elon Musk lost over $200 billion in net worth to kick off this year, yet he is still one of the wealthiest people ever to live. After a certain point, more money does little to change your quality of life.

In capitalist regimes, the rich remain rich because a willing middle class submits to their ideals. The rich own the credit card companies that the poor borrow from. The rich own the banks that pay out fractions of a percent in yield while making enormous profits via capital markets activities. The rich are also friends and lobbyists of the lawmakers that determine the fate of the majority in this country. The American dream wasn't designed to make you rich; it's a narrative spun by a coterie comprised of the nation's elite. It's a strategic and intricate device crafted to keep you where you are. It's a donkey and carrot model built to serve the system. While you're too busy chasing financial freedom through hard work and dedication, the American dream is adding more weight to your saddlebags.

Entrepreneur Leadership Network® Contributor

CEO and Co-Founder at Calaxy

Want to be an Entrepreneur Leadership Network contributor? Apply now to join.

Editor's Pick Red Arrow

• He Didn't Want to Lead His $1 Billion Business the Same Way Anymore — Here's How the High-Stakes Switch-Up Paid Off
• Lock Your Workplace Is Just Pretending to Care — and You're Part of the Problem, Too. Here's Why.
• Can ChatGPT Help Start a Business? I Tried the Latest Version, GPT-4o, to Find Out.
• Lock Her Startup's Product Was Better and Cheaper Than the Competition, So Why Wasn't It Selling? The Answer Would Bring in $25 Million a Year.
• Taylor Swift Just Gave a Masterclass in Crisis Management — Turning an Onstage Disaster Into a Highlight
• Fast-Food Chains and Their Menus Barely Resemble Those of the Past — And This Viral Post Reveals How Stark the Difference Is

Most Popular Red Arrow

How to be a billionaire by 25, according to a college dropout turned ceo worth $1.6 billion.

Austin Russell became the world's youngest self-made billionaire in 2020 at age 25.

Taylor Swift Has a Lucky Number. And She's Not the Only High Performer Who Leans Into Superstitions to Boost Confidence.

Even megastars like Swift need a little extra something to get them in the right mindset when it is game time.

Her Son Struggled In School. After Helping Him Become an 'A' Student, She Started a Business to Replicate Their Success.

Maria Washington and her husband Aaron realized they were on to something.

63 Small Business Ideas to Start in 2024

We put together a list of the best, most profitable small business ideas for entrepreneurs to pursue in 2024.

SEO Trends You Need to Be Aware of Right Now, According to a Seasoned Pro

Navigate the future of search engine optimization to elevate your online presence and drive meaningful engagement.

These 3 Big Tech Companies Offer 6-Figure Salaries and Easy Interviews — Especially If You Follow This Expert's Advice

There are far more candidates than positions, so being strategic on the job hunt is key.

Successfully copied link

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Student Opinion

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.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Is the American Dream Dying?

May 2, 2016 • 10 min read.

The idea behind the American Dream — if you work hard, you will get somewhere — is less true than ever as the wealth gap widens, according to James M. Stone, author of 'Five Easy Theses.'

• Public Policy

That income and wealth inequality was a worsening problem for the United States didn’t fully sink in until I was the Insurance Commissioner of Massachusetts in the 1970s. I had grown up believing that America was already pushing the edges of what was possible for mankind and headed steadfastly further in the direction of an inherent and universally admired fairness. We were lucky not to have to live with the inequities of a Latin American banana republic, a European hereditary aristocracy, or an ancient oriental empire to weigh on our consciences. Our country, I was taught, had both a higher level of distributional equity and more social mobility than just about any nation-state in all of history.

Quite a few of us believed then that if we could only overcome race and gender bias, our society would be on the way to near perfection. Looking back, it seems apparent that the perfection many of us had in mind was ill defined, with some seeking a pure, unbridled meritocracy and others preferring the far edge of an egalitarian flat plane — neither of which is in reality a sound destination. Whatever definition of perfection with respect to distributional equity is used, more importantly, it has by now become clear that this country isn’t going to get there, and in fact, if we were ever on the road at all, we missed our turn and we are now headed in the wrong direction.

At the Massachusetts Division of Insurance, the issue that opened my eyes revolved around setting premiums for car insurance on the basis of a policyholder’s socioeconomic status, a technique used in most of the country. Income is not a terribly bad predictor of claims cost and is statistically better than most — and it is easy to find proxies for it that sound like palatable pricing factors. The problem with this approach is twofold: It lacks incentives for responsible driving behavior that could improve outcomes and lower costs for the population as a whole, and it frequently results in charging clean drivers from disadvantaged neighborhoods unaffordable rates while giving bargain prices to drivers with poor records in wealthier areas, thus worsening the disparities.

The deeper I delved into the issue, and the more I learned about our income and wealth distribution generally, the faster my rosy, distorted view of economic equality in the United States fell away. The topic of inequality has stayed high on my list of interests since the Massachusetts government job ended long ago. But it was a source of no small disappointment to discover how small an audience, including among academics, the emerging picture drew until quite recently.

The American dream that “able and hard-working citizens can move upward freely from one [class] to the next … is less true than it used to be.”

Recent events have made it harder to ignore the issue of distributional equity. If you wonder where the Occupy Wall Street movement that arose after the 2008 crash got its steam, despite its singular lack of leadership or focus, consider that the three-year recovery from the recession that followed was absorbed almost in its entirety by the top 1% of the income distribution. The same reality, ironically, may also be lending additional power to the Tea Party movement. Since 2000, income for 70% or more of Americans has actually been flat or declined a little, thanks in part to the financial crisis.

Meanwhile, for the top decile in this millennium, income is up by double digits, despite the crisis. The average net worth of households in the upper 7% rose by 28% in the initial recovery years of 2009 through 2011 while the wealth of the other 93% fell by 4%. It should not be surprising that so many people think the recession isn’t over yet, and some are pretty angry. The only silver lining is that political and scholarly attention is finally being paid to the increasing economic inequality and the fading of our long-admired mobility.

The view over a longer timeline provides no more comfort. The median income in this country hasn’t risen at all in real terms for 40 years. The United States since most of us were born has regularly harvested more wealth than any other nation in the history of the world, but the fruits have been increasingly carried toward the tip of the pyramid. While income in the middle brackets stagnated over the past four decades, income for the upper 1% tripled. As recently as the middle of the 20th century, the share of the United States’ national income taken by the top 10% of income earners was about one-third. Now it is more like 50%. The fortunate pinnacle, the top 1% of all households, received 10% of the nation’s total income in the middle of the 20th century. Now the upper 1% takes about one-quarter of the grand total. If you are in this segment, I hope you can be grateful without believing that this is the way things ought to be.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the share of total income held by the bottom 20% of American households, which was never out of the single digits, has fallen by two points. That means that the middle classes have absorbed the loss of fifteen of the national income points that shifted to the possession of the top decile. Another widely quoted measure of growing disparity, affecting mainly the middle class, is the ratio of CEO pay to the average American worker’s pay. This ratio, which stood at about 20 to one when I was young, is now close to 300 to one. These trends are just not healthy for the nation.

“You are not being an alarmist if you fear that lobbyists and superrich contributors have excessive influence nowadays in every aspect of politics.”

I have always used a kind of shorthand to describe our socioeconomic classes. In this categorization, the all-important middle class consists of those people who can live reasonably comfortably if they are willing and able to work and improve their comfort level by harder or better work. The upper class is composed of those folks who can live well without work if they so choose. The lower class consists of those who can’t scratch together enough money to live decently even if they are willing to work hard.

The economics of our society just isn’t working for the middle class, the majority of its citizenry, when those who are willing and able to work cannot better their financial position. This is increasingly becoming the case in the 21st century. The American dream, moreover, has embodied an assumption that able and hard-working citizens can move upward freely from one of these classes to the next, including exits from the lowest classes and access to the top spots, and that sloth or incompetence will lead to a downward class shift. This is less true than it used to be, and it will be less so still as concentration at the pinnacle vacuums the opportunities from the spaces below.

Legitimate worry, moreover, should extend well beyond individual income and wealth imbalances. The growing concentration of corporate power is equally threatening to the values most Americans share. You are not being an alarmist if you fear that lobbyists and superrich contributors have excessive influence nowadays in every aspect of politics. Corporate power in the halls of Congress has waxed and waned over the history of our republic. It is probably greater now than at any time since Boss Tweed and Mark Hanna reigned from behind the scenes. Statistics show that the great majority of elections are won by whoever raises the largest war chest, and a friend of mine who served in the Senate told me that U.S. senators now typically spend about one-third of their time raising money. For House members, with a two-year election cycle, the situation must be worse.

Democracy itself is endangered by this trend. Our treasured form of government is not something to take for granted. The more you learn about governments around the world, the more grateful you should be for our democracy, and the more clearly you should discern what a delicate flower it is. Not only is democracy far from inevitable for all places and all times, it is historically rare and fragile. Look how seldom democracies have occurred and thrived, in both time and place. The United States and Switzerland, after all, have the oldest two functioning democratic republics on the planet. Contrary to what some in our government thought as they tried to transplant our system elsewhere, democracy requires more than selection of leaders by popular elections. A true democracy is characterized by due process, minority rights, an independent press, reservations of various liberties, and effective separation of church and state. Without those essential corollaries, majority voting can become little more than what a wise humorist suggested: a dozen wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.

“Democracy requires as a precondition a healthy measure of pluralism — an underlying society with a wide distribution of money and power.”

At its fundamental core, democracy requires as a precondition a healthy measure of pluralism — an underlying society with a wide distribution of money and power. Although they are nicely symbiotic, democracy and a market economy are not the same, and democracy is certainly not identical to prosperity. America’s attachment to a market economy is relatively robust and its prosperity secure … as long as we can maintain our culture of challenge and innovation.

The threat is that we may find ourselves living in a market economy where a tiny fraction of the people and a small number of institutions reap virtually all of the rewards and make all of the social and economic policy decisions, presumably with a bias toward serving their own interests. This would be a democracy in name only. True democracy is surely not the most natural form of government for human beings, and perhaps it is only barely compatible with human nature, but it may well be mankind’s greatest invention. And the growing degree of concentration of wealth and power in our country today threatens its continuation. If our pluralism erodes, with it will vanish America’s brightest gem.

Some political economists will tell you that wealth and income disparities don’t matter because large distinctions in a mobile society spur ambition to succeed. But America is rapidly becoming less mobile as the distinctions grow. More wealth held tightly in the hands of fewer families implies a diminishing reward for hard, honest work on the part of everyone else.

More From Knowledge at Wharton

Why Skilled Immigration Can Lead to Economic Prosperity

Who Should Moderate Social Media Content?

Looking for more insights.

Sign up to stay informed about our latest article releases.

Why the American Dream Will Never Die

Over the next two months, The Atlantic will explore many different visions of the American dream, in stories, videos, and photo essays.

The American dream has been on life support for all of its 84 years.

The moment James Truslow Adams coined the term in his book The Epic of America in 1931, the death watch for the dream began. It was the very depth of the Great Depression, after all, hardly the time for a national legend of progress and self-fulfillment to flourish. In 1932, as Lawrence Samuel recounts in his book about the dream , a professor told a graduating class at Mount Holyoke that the dream was being frustrated. By 1933, Samuel writes, playwrights were staging sardonic morality plays in which the dream is gradually swallowed in successive generations by Communist fervor.

The dream continued dying all throughout the 20th century. One account of its decline contends that the real dream was murdered sometime shortly after World War II, and swapped for the cheap, consumerist facsimile with which Americans have been living ever since. This idea that the American dream was focused on material attainment crystallized between 1945 and 1975, said Jim Cullen, author of a history of the dream . And if it’s true, if the dream is diminished from an aspiration as lofty as the possibility of self-fulfillment to one as small and tangible as a white picket fence, then Americans aren’t really dreaming anymore, they’ve merely been lulled into a stupor.

In 1961, right in the midst of the period Cullen described, Eleanor Roosevelt took to The Atlantic to voice this concern. In an essay called “What Has Happened to the American Dream?” the former First Lady wrote :

The future will be determined by the young, and there is no more essential task today, it seems to me, than to bring before them once more, in all its brightness, in all its splendor and beauty, the American dream, lest we let it fade, too concerned with ways of earning a living or impressing our neighbors or getting ahead or finding bigger and more potent ways of destroying the world and all that is in it.

Proclamations of the dream’s death haven’t really let up. “The fact is, the American dream is dead,” Donald Trump recently declared as he announced his bid for President. Alternet and Mic.com have dueling arrays of charts to show anyone who claims the dream is still alive. Here at The Atlantic , we’ve gone as far as to declare it dead in the South , at least. Four years ago, The Onion was actually on the scene reporting shortly after the official time of death .

Yet the octogenarian dream has proven remarkably hard to kill off. Again and again, its death has been noted, and mourned. Politicians promise they’ll revive it. (The second half of Donald Trump’s quote: “The fact is, the American dream is dead—but if I win, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before.”) And yet somehow, a few years later, it turns out to have been alive enough to have its death proclaimed all over again.

The eternal story of the dream’s decline reflects a profound nostalgia. To believe the dream is dying, you have to believe it once flourished. But there’s an alternate story of the dream, in which the dream is an ideal that remains unobtained. It is not dead, so much as it is unborn. When the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. articulated his own dream, deeply rooted in the American dream, he wasn’t talking about a desiccated remnant of an idealized past, because to him, no version of that past could be ideal. He was, instead, imagining a better future.

Two years after King’s famous speech, James Baldwin met William F. Buckley in a debate at Cambridge University on the question of whether the American dream comes at the expense of the American Negro. For Baldwin, like King, a reckoning had to happen before the dream would even be thinkable: “Until the moment comes when we the Americans, we the American people, are able to accept the fact that my ancestors are both black and white,” Baldwin said , “that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other, and that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country—until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream. Because the people who are denied participation in it by their very presence will wreck it. And if that happens, it’s a very grave moment for the West.”

The fundamental tension in the dream—both the reason it keeps dying and the reason that, for some, it hasn’t yet been born—is that every American is supposed to share in it, yet many Americans envision it very differently. In her book about race and the American dream, Harvard professor Jennifer Hochschild wrote that these ambiguities in the dream “matter to more than philosophers debating its logic. They matter to its ability to function as the dominant ideology of a large and complex society.” Between lamenting the death of the dream and longing for its realization, Americans don’t seem to spend much time describing what it can be. Sometimes, their versions of the dream are at odds with one another. “What is the price of any given American Dream, and who pays it?” asks Cullen, at the close of his book. “Are some dreams better than others?”

Over the next two months, The Atlantic will be exploring these and other questions about the many different versions of the American dream. In a series of stories, videos and photo essays, we’ll be taking a closer look at the dream’s many incarnations in the lives of individuals around the country. We’ll be plunging deeper into the results of our recent survey , conducted with the Aspen Institute, on how Americans feel about the dream. We’ll assess the dream’s presence in contemporary American culture, as well as outside the U.S. And we’d love to hear stories of what the dream represents to you, whether your vision of the dream is dead, dying, or hasn’t yet been born.

Choose Your Test

• Search Blogs By Category
• College Admissions
• AP and IB Exams
• GPA and Coursework

Best Analysis: The American Dream in The Great Gatsby

Book Guides

The Great Gatsby is a tragic love story on the surface, but it's most commonly understood as a pessimistic critique of the American Dream. In the novel, Jay Gatsby overcomes his poor past to gain an incredible amount of money and a limited amount of social cache in 1920s NYC, only to be rejected by the "old money" crowd. He then gets killed after being tangled up with them.

Through Gatsby's life, as well as that of the Wilsons', Fitzgerald critiques the idea that America is a meritocracy where anyone can rise to the top with enough hard work. We will explore how this theme plays out in the plot, briefly analyze some key quotes about it, as well as do some character analysis and broader analysis of topics surrounding the American Dream in The Great Gatsby .

What is the American Dream? The American Dream in the Great Gatsby plot Key American Dream quotes Analyzing characters via the American Dream Common discussion and essay topics

Quick Note on Our Citations

Our citation format in this guide is (chapter.paragraph). We're using this system since there are many editions of Gatsby, so using page numbers would only work for students with our copy of the book.

To find a quotation we cite via chapter and paragraph in your book, you can either eyeball it (Paragraph 1-50: beginning of chapter; 50-100: middle of chapter; 100-on: end of chapter), or use the search function if you're using an online or eReader version of the text.

What Exactly Is "The American Dream"?

The American Dream is the belief that anyone, regardless of race, class, gender, or nationality, can be successful in America (read: rich) if they just work hard enough. The American Dream thus presents a pretty rosy view of American society that ignores problems like systemic racism and misogyny, xenophobia, tax evasion or state tax avoidance, and income inequality. It also presumes a myth of class equality, when the reality is America has a pretty well-developed class hierarchy.

The 1920s in particular was a pretty tumultuous time due to increased immigration (and the accompanying xenophobia), changing women's roles (spurred by the right to vote, which was won in 1919), and extraordinary income inequality.

The country was also in the midst of an economic boom, which fueled the belief that anyone could "strike it rich" on Wall Street. However, this rapid economic growth was built on a bubble which popped in 1929. The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, well before the crash, but through its wry descriptions of the ultra-wealthy, it seems to somehow predict that the fantastic wealth on display in 1920s New York was just as ephemeral as one of Gatsby's parties.

In any case, the novel, just by being set in the 1920s, is unlikely to present an optimistic view of the American Dream, or at least a version of the dream that's inclusive to all genders, ethnicities, and incomes. With that background in mind, let's jump into the plot!

The American Dream in The Great Gatsby

Chapter 1 places us in a particular year—1922—and gives us some background about WWI.  This is relevant, since the 1920s is presented as a time of hollow decadence among the wealthy, as evidenced especially by the parties in Chapters 2 and 3. And as we mentioned above, the 1920s were a particularly tense time in America.

We also meet George and Myrtle Wilson in Chapter 2 , both working class people who are working to improve their lot in life, George through his work, and Myrtle through her affair with Tom Buchanan.

We learn about Gatsby's goal in Chapter 4 : to win Daisy back. Despite everything he owns, including fantastic amounts of money and an over-the-top mansion, for Gatsby, Daisy is the ultimate status symbol. So in Chapter 5 , when Daisy and Gatsby reunite and begin an affair, it seems like Gatsby could, in fact, achieve his goal.

In Chapter 6 , we learn about Gatsby's less-than-wealthy past, which not only makes him look like the star of a rags-to-riches story, it makes Gatsby himself seem like someone in pursuit of the American Dream, and for him the personification of that dream is Daisy.

However, in Chapters 7 and 8 , everything comes crashing down: Daisy refuses to leave Tom, Myrtle is killed, and George breaks down and kills Gatsby and then himself, leaving all of the "strivers" dead and the old money crowd safe. Furthermore, we learn in those last chapters that Gatsby didn't even achieve all his wealth through hard work, like the American Dream would stipulate—instead, he earned his money through crime. (He did work hard and honestly under Dan Cody, but lost Dan Cody's inheritance to his ex-wife.)

In short, things do not turn out well for our dreamers in the novel! Thus, the novel ends with Nick's sad meditation on the lost promise of the American Dream. You can read a detailed analysis of these last lines in our summary of the novel's ending .

Key American Dream Quotes

In this section we analyze some of the most important quotes that relate to the American Dream in the book.

But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone--he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward--and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. (1.152)

In our first glimpse of Jay Gatsby, we see him reaching towards something far off, something in sight but definitely out of reach. This famous image of the green light is often understood as part of The Great Gatsby 's meditation on The American Dream—the idea that people are always reaching towards something greater than themselves that is just out of reach . You can read more about this in our post all about the green light .

The fact that this yearning image is our introduction to Gatsby foreshadows his unhappy end and also marks him as a dreamer, rather than people like Tom or Daisy who were born with money and don't need to strive for anything so far off.

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby's splendid car was included in their somber holiday. As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.

"Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I thought; "anything at all. . . ."

Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder. (4.55-8)

Early in the novel, we get this mostly optimistic illustration of the American Dream—we see people of different races and nationalities racing towards NYC, a city of unfathomable possibility. This moment has all the classic elements of the American Dream—economic possibility, racial and religious diversity, a carefree attitude. At this moment, it does feel like "anything can happen," even a happy ending.

However, this rosy view eventually gets undermined by the tragic events later in the novel. And even at this point, Nick's condescension towards the people in the other cars reinforces America's racial hierarchy that disrupts the idea of the American Dream. There is even a little competition at play, a "haughty rivalry" at play between Gatsby's car and the one bearing the "modish Negroes."

Nick "laughs aloud" at this moment, suggesting he thinks it's amusing that the passengers in this other car see them as equals, or even rivals to be bested. In other words, he seems to firmly believe in the racial hierarchy Tom defends in Chapter 1, even if it doesn't admit it honestly.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. (6.134)

This moment explicitly ties Daisy to all of Gatsby's larger dreams for a better life —to his American Dream. This sets the stage for the novel's tragic ending, since Daisy cannot hold up under the weight of the dream Gatsby projects onto her. Instead, she stays with Tom Buchanan, despite her feelings for Gatsby. Thus when Gatsby fails to win over Daisy, he also fails to achieve his version of the American Dream. This is why so many people read the novel as a somber or pessimistic take on the American Dream, rather than an optimistic one.  

...as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night." (9.151-152)

The closing pages of the novel reflect at length on the American Dream, in an attitude that seems simultaneously mournful, appreciative, and pessimistic. It also ties back to our first glimpse of Gatsby, reaching out over the water towards the Buchanan's green light. Nick notes that Gatsby's dream was "already behind him" then (or in other words, it was impossible to attain). But still, he finds something to admire in how Gatsby still hoped for a better life, and constantly reached out toward that brighter future.

For a full consideration of these last lines and what they could mean, see our analysis of the novel's ending .

Analyzing Characters Through the American Dream

An analysis of the characters in terms of the American Dream usually leads to a pretty cynical take on the American Dream.

Most character analysis centered on the American Dream will necessarily focus on Gatsby, George, or Myrtle (the true strivers in the novel), though as we'll discuss below, the Buchanans can also provide some interesting layers of discussion. For character analysis that incorporates the American Dream, carefully consider your chosen character's motivations and desires, and how the novel does (or doesn't!) provide glimpses of the dream's fulfillment for them.

Gatsby himself is obviously the best candidate for writing about the American Dream—he comes from humble roots (he's the son of poor farmers from North Dakota) and rises to be notoriously wealthy, only for everything to slip away from him in the end. Many people also incorporate Daisy into their analyses as the physical representation of Gatsby's dream.

However, definitely consider the fact that in the traditional American Dream, people achieve their goals through honest hard work, but in Gatsby's case, he very quickly acquires a large amount of money through crime . Gatsby does attempt the hard work approach, through his years of service to Dan Cody, but that doesn't work out since Cody's ex-wife ends up with the entire inheritance. So instead he turns to crime, and only then does he manage to achieve his desired wealth.

So while Gatsby's story arc resembles a traditional rags-to-riches tale, the fact that he gained his money immorally complicates the idea that he is a perfect avatar for the American Dream . Furthermore, his success obviously doesn't last—he still pines for Daisy and loses everything in his attempt to get her back. In other words, Gatsby's huge dreams, all precariously wedded to Daisy  ("He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God" (6.134)) are as flimsy and flight as Daisy herself.

George and Myrtle Wilson

This couple also represents people aiming at the dream— George owns his own shop and is doing his best to get business, though is increasingly worn down by the harsh demands of his life, while Myrtle chases after wealth and status through an affair with Tom.

Both are disempowered due to the lack of money at their own disposal —Myrtle certainly has access to some of the "finer things" through Tom but has to deal with his abuse, while George is unable to leave his current life and move West since he doesn't have the funds available. He even has to make himself servile to Tom in an attempt to get Tom to sell his car, a fact that could even cause him to overlook the evidence of his wife's affair. So neither character is on the upward trajectory that the American Dream promises, at least during the novel.

In the end, everything goes horribly wrong for both George and Myrtle, suggesting that in this world, it's dangerous to strive for more than you're given.

George and Myrtle's deadly fates, along with Gatsby's, help illustrate the novel's pessimistic attitude toward the American Dream. After all, how unfair is it that the couple working to improve their position in society (George and Myrtle) both end up dead, while Tom, who dragged Myrtle into an increasingly dangerous situation, and Daisy, who killed her, don't face any consequences? And on top of that they are fabulously wealthy? The American Dream certainly is not alive and well for the poor Wilsons.

Tom and Daisy as Antagonists to the American Dream

We've talked quite a bit already about Gatsby, George, and Myrtle—the three characters who come from humble roots and try to climb the ranks in 1920s New York. But what about the other major characters, especially the ones born with money? What is their relationship to the American Dream?

Specifically, Tom and Daisy have old money, and thus they don't need the American Dream, since they were born with America already at their feet.

Perhaps because of this, they seem to directly antagonize the dream—Daisy by refusing Gatsby, and Tom by helping to drag the Wilsons into tragedy .

This is especially interesting because unlike Gatsby, Myrtle, and George, who actively hope and dream of a better life, Daisy and Tom are described as bored and "careless," and end up instigating a large amount of tragedy through their own recklessness.

In other words, income inequality and the vastly different starts in life the characters have strongly affected their outcomes. The way they choose to live their lives, their morality (or lack thereof), and how much they dream doesn't seem to matter. This, of course, is tragic and antithetical to the idea of the American Dream, which claims that class should be irrelevant and anyone can rise to the top.

Daisy as a Personification of the American Dream

As we discuss in our post on money and materialism in The Great Gatsby , Daisy's voice is explicitly tied to money by Gatsby:

"Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly.

That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money--that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it. . . . High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl. . . . (7.105-6)

If Daisy's voice promises money, and the American Dream is explicitly linked to wealth, it's not hard to argue that Daisy herself—along with the green light at the end of her dock —stands in for the American Dream. In fact, as Nick goes on to describe Daisy as "High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl," he also seems to literally describe Daisy as a prize, much like the princess at the end of a fairy tale (or even Princess Peach at the end of a Mario game!).

But Daisy, of course, is only human—flawed, flighty, and ultimately unable to embody the huge fantasy Gatsby projects onto her. So this, in turn, means that the American Dream itself is just a fantasy, a concept too flimsy to actually hold weight, especially in the fast-paced, dog-eat-dog world of 1920s America.

Furthermore, you should definitely consider the tension between the fact that Daisy represents Gatsby's ultimate goal, but at the same time (as we discussed above), her actual life is the opposite of the American Dream : she is born with money and privilege, likely dies with it all intact, and there are no consequences to how she chooses to live her life in between.

Can Female Characters Achieve the American Dream?

Finally, it's interesting to compare and contrast some of the female characters using the lens of the American Dream.

Let's start with Daisy, who is unhappy in her marriage and, despite a brief attempt to leave it, remains with Tom, unwilling to give up the status and security their marriage provides. At first, it may seem like Daisy doesn't dream at all, so of course she ends up unhappy. But consider the fact that Daisy was already born into the highest level of American society. The expectation placed on her, as a wealthy woman, was never to pursue something greater, but simply to maintain her status. She did that by marrying Tom, and it's understandable why she wouldn't risk the uncertainty and loss of status that would come through divorce and marriage to a bootlegger. Again, Daisy seems to typify the "anti-American" dream, in that she was born into a kind of aristocracy and simply has to maintain her position, not fight for something better.

In contrast, Myrtle, aside from Gatsby, seems to be the most ambitiously in pursuit of getting more than she was given in life. She parlays her affair with Tom into an apartment, nice clothes, and parties, and seems to revel in her newfound status. But of course, she is knocked down the hardest, killed for her involvement with the Buchanans, and specifically for wrongfully assuming she had value to them. Considering that Gatsby did have a chance to leave New York and distance himself from the unfolding tragedy, but Myrtle was the first to be killed, you could argue the novel presents an even bleaker view of the American Dream where women are concerned.

Even Jordan Baker , who seems to be living out a kind of dream by playing golf and being relatively independent, is tied to her family's money and insulated from consequences by it , making her a pretty poor representation of the dream. And of course, since her end game also seems to be marriage, she doesn't push the boundaries of women's roles as far as she might wish.

So while the women all push the boundaries of society's expectations of them in certain ways, they either fall in line or are killed, which definitely undermines the rosy of idea that anyone, regardless of gender, can make it in America. The American Dream as shown in Gatsby becomes even more pessimistic through the lens of the female characters.  

Common Essay Questions/Discussion Topics

Now let's work through some of the more frequently brought up subjects for discussion.

#1: Was Gatsby's dream worth it? Was all the work, time, and patience worth it for him?

Like me, you might immediately think "of course it wasn't worth it! Gatsby lost everything, not to mention the Wilsons got caught up in the tragedy and ended up dead!" So if you want to make the more obvious "the dream wasn't worth it" argument, you could point to the unraveling that happens at the end of the novel (including the deaths of Myrtle, Gatsby and George) and how all Gatsby's achievements are for nothing, as evidenced by the sparse attendance of his funeral.

However, you could definitely take the less obvious route and argue that Gatsby's dream was worth it, despite the tragic end . First of all, consider Jay's unique characterization in the story: "He was a son of God--a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that--and he must be about His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty" (6.7). In other words, Gatsby has a larger-than-life persona and he never would have been content to remain in North Dakota to be poor farmers like his parents.

Even if he ends up living a shorter life, he certainly lived a full one full of adventure. His dreams of wealth and status took him all over the world on Dan Cody's yacht, to Louisville where he met and fell in love with Daisy, to the battlefields of WWI, to the halls of Oxford University, and then to the fast-paced world of Manhattan in the early 1920s, when he earned a fortune as a bootlegger. In fact, it seems Jay lived several lives in the space of just half a normal lifespan. In short, to argue that Gatsby's dream was worth it, you should point to his larger-than-life conception of himself and the fact that he could have only sought happiness through striving for something greater than himself, even if that ended up being deadly in the end.

#2: In the Langston Hughes poem "A Dream Deferred," Hughes asks questions about what happens to postponed dreams. How does Fitzgerald examine this issue of deferred dreams? What do you think are the effects of postponing our dreams? How can you apply this lesson to your own life?

If you're thinking about "deferred dreams" in The Great Gatsby , the big one is obviously Gatsby's deferred dream for Daisy—nearly five years pass between his initial infatuation and his attempt in the novel to win her back, an attempt that obviously backfires. You can examine various aspects of Gatsby's dream—the flashbacks to his first memories of Daisy in Chapter 8 , the moment when they reunite in Chapter 5 , or the disastrous consequences of the confrontation of Chapter 7 —to illustrate Gatsby's deferred dream.

You could also look at George Wilson's postponed dream of going West, or Myrtle's dream of marrying a wealthy man of "breeding"—George never gets the funds to go West, and is instead mired in the Valley of Ashes, while Myrtle's attempt to achieve her dream after 12 years of marriage through an affair ends in tragedy. Apparently, dreams deferred are dreams doomed to fail.

As Nick Carraway says, "you can't repeat the past"—the novel seems to imply there is a small window for certain dreams, and when the window closes, they can no longer be attained. This is pretty pessimistic, and for the prompt's personal reflection aspect, I wouldn't say you should necessarily "apply this lesson to your own life" straightforwardly. But it is worth noting that certain opportunities are fleeting, and perhaps it's wiser to seek out newer and/or more attainable ones, rather than pining over a lost chance.

Any prompt like this one which has a section of more personal reflection gives you freedom to tie in your own experiences and point of view, so be thoughtful and think of good examples from your own life!

#3: Explain how the novel does or does not demonstrate the death of the American Dream. Is the main theme of Gatsby indeed "the withering American Dream"? What does the novel offer about American identity?

In this prompt, another one that zeroes in on the dead or dying American Dream, you could discuss how the destruction of three lives (Gatsby, George, Myrtle) and the cynical portrayal of the old money crowd illustrates a dead, or dying American Dream . After all, if the characters who dream end up dead, and the ones who were born into life with money and privilege get to keep it without consequence, is there any room at all for the idea that less-privileged people can work their way up?

In terms of what the novel says about American identity, there are a few threads you could pick up—one is Nick's comment in Chapter 9 about the novel really being a story about (mid)westerners trying (and failing) to go East : "I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life" (9.125). This observation suggests an American identity that is determined by birthplace, and that within the American identity there are smaller, inescapable points of identification.

Furthermore, for those in the novel not born into money, the American identity seems to be about striving to end up with more wealth and status. But in terms of the portrayal of the old money set, particularly Daisy, Tom, and Jordan, the novel presents a segment of American society that is essentially aristocratic—you have to be born into it. In that regard, too, the novel presents a fractured American identity, with different lives possible based on how much money you are born with.

In short, I think the novel disrupts the idea of a unified American identity or American dream, by instead presenting a tragic, fractured, and rigid American society, one that is divided based on both geographic location and social class.

#4: Most would consider dreams to be positive motivators to achieve success, but the characters in the novel often take their dreams of ideal lives too far. Explain how characters' American Dreams cause them to have pain when they could have been content with more modest ambitions.

Gatsby is an obvious choice here—his pursuit of money and status, particularly through Daisy, leads him to ruin. There were many points when perhaps Gatsby ;could have been happy with what he achieved (especially after his apparently successful endeavors in the war, if he had remained at Oxford, or even after amassing a great amount of wealth as a bootlegger) but instead he kept striving upward, which ultimately lead to his downfall. You can flesh this argument out with the quotations in Chapters 6 and 8 about Gatsby's past, along with his tragic death.

Myrtle would be another good choice for this type of prompt. In a sense, she seems to be living her ideal life in her affair with Tom—she has a fancy NYC apartment, hosts parties, and gets to act sophisticated—but these pleasures end up gravely hurting George, and of course her association with Tom Buchanan gets her killed.

Nick, too, if he had been happy with his family's respectable fortune and his girlfriend out west, might have avoided the pain of knowing Gatsby and the general sense of despair he was left with.

You might be wondering about George—after all, isn't he someone also dreaming of a better life? However, there aren't many instances of George taking his dreams of an ideal life "too far." In fact, he struggles just to make one car sale so that he can finally move out West with Myrtle. Also, given that his current situation in the Valley of Ashes is quite bleak, it's hard to say that striving upward gave him pain.

#5: The Great Gatsby is, among other things, a sobering and even ominous commentary on the dark side of the American dream. Discuss this theme, incorporating the conflicts of East Egg vs. West Egg and old money vs. new money. What does the American dream mean to Gatsby? What did the American Dream mean to Fitzgerald? How does morality fit into achieving the American dream?

This prompt allows you to consider pretty broadly the novel's attitude toward the American Dream, with emphasis on "sobering and even ominous" commentary. Note that Fitzgerald seems to be specifically mocking the stereotypical rags to riches story here—;especially since he draws the Dan Cody narrative almost note for note from the work of someone like Horatio Alger, whose books were almost universally about rich men schooling young, entrepreneurial boys in the ways of the world. In other words, you should discuss how the Great Gatsby seems to turn the idea of the American Dream as described in the quote on its head: Gatsby does achieve a rags-to-riches rise, but it doesn't last.

All of Gatsby's hard work for Dan Cody, after all, didn't pay off since he lost the inheritance. So instead, Gatsby turned to crime after the war to quickly gain a ton of money. Especially since Gatsby finally achieves his great wealth through dubious means, the novel further undermines the classic image of someone working hard and honestly to go from rags to riches.

If you're addressing this prompt or a similar one, make sure to focus on the darker aspects of the American Dream, including the dark conclusion to the novel and Daisy and Tom's protection from any real consequences . (This would also allow you to considering morality, and how morally bankrupt the characters are.)

#6: What is the current state of the American Dream?

This is a more outward-looking prompt, that allows you to consider current events today to either be generally optimistic (the American dream is alive and well) or pessimistic (it's as dead as it is in The Great Gatsby).

You have dozens of potential current events to use as evidence for either argument, but consider especially immigration and immigration reform, mass incarceration, income inequality, education, and health care in America as good potential examples to use as you argue about the current state of the American Dream. Your writing will be especially powerful if you can point to some specific current events to support your argument.

What's Next?

In this post, we discussed how important money is to the novel's version of the American Dream. You can read even more about money and materialism in The Great Gatsby right here .

Want to indulge in a little materialism of your own? Take a look through these 15 must-have items for any Great Gatsby fan .

Get complete guides to Jay Gatsby , George Wilson and Myrtle Wilson to get even more background on the "dreamers" in the novel.

Like we discussed above, the green light is often seen as a stand-in for the idea of the American Dream. Read more about this crucial symbol here .

Need help getting to grips with other literary works? Take a spin through our analyses of The Crucible , The Cask of Amontillado , and " Do not go gentle into this good night " to see analysis in action. You might also find our explanations of point of view , rhetorical devices , imagery , and literary elements and devices helpful.

Trending Now

How to Get Into Harvard and the Ivy League

How to Get a Perfect 4.0 GPA

How to Write an Amazing College Essay

What Exactly Are Colleges Looking For?

ACT vs. SAT: Which Test Should You Take?

When should you take the SAT or ACT?

Get Your Free

Find Your Target SAT Score

Free Complete Official SAT Practice Tests

How to Get a Perfect SAT Score, by an Expert Full Scorer

Score 800 on SAT Math

Score 800 on SAT Reading and Writing

How to Improve Your Low SAT Score

Score 600 on SAT Math

Score 600 on SAT Reading and Writing

Find Your Target ACT Score

Complete Official Free ACT Practice Tests

How to Get a Perfect ACT Score, by a 36 Full Scorer

Get a 36 on ACT English

Get a 36 on ACT Math

Get a 36 on ACT Reading

Get a 36 on ACT Science

How to Improve Your Low ACT Score

Get a 24 on ACT English

Get a 24 on ACT Math

Get a 24 on ACT Reading

Get a 24 on ACT Science

Stay Informed

Get the latest articles and test prep tips!

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

Ask a Question Below

Have any questions about this article or other topics? Ask below and we'll reply!

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

• Publications
• Our Methods
• Short Reads
• Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

Americans are split over the state of the American dream

“The American dream ” is a century-old phrase used to describe the idea that anyone can achieve success in the United States through hard work and determination. Today, about half of Americans (53%) say that dream is still possible.  

Pew Research Center asked Americans about their views of the American dream as part of a larger survey exploring their social and political attitudes.  

We surveyed 8,709 U.S. adults from April 8 to 14, 2024. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and its methodology .

Another 41% say the American dream was once possible for people to achieve – but is not anymore. And 6% say it was never possible, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey of 8,709 U.S. adults.

While this is the first time the Center has asked about the American dream in this way, other surveys have long found that sizable shares of Americans are skeptical about the future of the American dream .

Who believes the American dream is still possible?

There are relatively modest differences in views of the American dream by race and ethnicity, partisanship, and education. But there are wider divides by age and income.

Americans ages 50 and older are more likely than younger adults to say the American dream is still possible. About two-thirds of adults ages 65 and older (68%) say this, as do 61% of those 50 to 64.

By comparison, only about four-in-ten adults under 50 (42%) say it’s still possible for people to achieve the American dream.

Higher-income Americans are also more likely than others to say the American dream is still achievable.

While 64% of upper-income Americans say the American dream still exists, 39% of lower-income Americans say the same – a gap of 25 percentage points.

Middle-income Americans fall in between, with a 56% majority saying the American dream is still possible.

Race and ethnicity

Roughly half of Americans in each racial and ethnic group say the American dream remains possible. And while relatively few Americans – just 6% overall – say that the American dream was never possible, Black Americans are about twice as likely as those in other groups to say this (11%).

Partisanship

While 56% of Republicans and Republican leaners say the American dream is still possible to achieve, 50% of Democrats and Democratic leaners say the same.

A 57% majority of adults with a bachelor’s degree or more education say the American dream remains possible, compared with 50% of those with less education.

Age and income differences within both parties

Age and income differences in views of the American dream persist within each political party.

Clear majorities of both Republicans (64%) and Democrats (67%) ages 50 and older say achieving the American dream is still possible.

In contrast, just 38% of Democrats under 50 and 48% of Republicans under 50 view the American dream as still possible.

In both parties, upper-income Americans are about 25 points more likely than lower-income Americans to say it is still possible for people to achieve the American dream.

Do people think they can achieve the American dream?

Americans are also divided over whether they think they personally can achieve the American dream. About three-in-ten (31%) say they’ve achieved it, while a slightly larger share (36%) say they are on their way to achieving it. Another 30% say it’s out of reach for them. These views are nearly identical to when the Center last asked this question in 2022.

White adults (39%) are more likely than Black (15%) and Hispanic adults (19%), and about as likely as Asian adults (34%), to say they have already achieved the American dream.

Black (48%), Hispanic (47%) and Asian adults (46%) are more likely than White adults (29%) to say they are on their way to achieving it.

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they have achieved the American dream (38% vs. 28%). But Democrats are somewhat more likely than Republicans to say they’re on the way to achieving it (38% vs. 34%). Democrats are also more likely than Republicans to view the American dream as personally out of reach.

Income and age

Older and higher-income Americans are more likely than younger and less wealthy Americans to say they have achieved or are within reach of the American dream. These patterns are similar to those for views about the American dream more generally.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and its methodology .

• Economic Conditions
• Income, Wealth & Poverty

Gabriel Borelli is a research associate focusing on U.S. politics and policy at Pew Research Center .

Income inequality is greater among Chinese Americans than any other Asian origin group in the U.S.

The state of the asian american middle class, the state of the american middle class, is college worth it, 7 facts about americans and taxes, most popular.

1615 L St. NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 |  Media Inquiries

Research Topics

• Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

© 2024 Pew Research Center

24/7 writing help on your phone

To install StudyMoose App tap and then “Add to Home Screen”

The American Dream: Evolution and Challenges in the 21st Century

Save to my list

Remove from my list

Introduction

The evolution of the american dream.

The American Dream in the 21st Century

The American Dream: Evolution and Challenges in the 21st Century. (2016, Jun 18). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/is-the-american-dream-dead-essay

"The American Dream: Evolution and Challenges in the 21st Century." StudyMoose , 18 Jun 2016, https://studymoose.com/is-the-american-dream-dead-essay

StudyMoose. (2016). The American Dream: Evolution and Challenges in the 21st Century . [Online]. Available at: https://studymoose.com/is-the-american-dream-dead-essay [Accessed: 19 Jul. 2024]

"The American Dream: Evolution and Challenges in the 21st Century." StudyMoose, Jun 18, 2016. Accessed July 19, 2024. https://studymoose.com/is-the-american-dream-dead-essay

"The American Dream: Evolution and Challenges in the 21st Century," StudyMoose , 18-Jun-2016. [Online]. Available: https://studymoose.com/is-the-american-dream-dead-essay. [Accessed: 19-Jul-2024]

StudyMoose. (2016). The American Dream: Evolution and Challenges in the 21st Century . [Online]. Available at: https://studymoose.com/is-the-american-dream-dead-essay [Accessed: 19-Jul-2024]

• The Evolution and Allure of Extreme Sports in the 21st Century Pages: 2 (553 words)
• Cricket: A Historical Evolution from Origins to the 21st Century Pages: 8 (2325 words)
• Challenges of Scientific Advancement in the 21st Century Pages: 2 (478 words)
• Hello Kitty: Navigating 21st Century Challenges Pages: 4 (949 words)
• Immigrants and The American Dream; The Idea Of The American Dream Pages: 3 (696 words)
• The Misguided American Dream: Criticism of 'the American Dream' in 'Death of a Salesman' Pages: 8 (2176 words)
• Holistic Nursing in America Prior to the 21st Century and Lewis and Clark Expedition Pages: 12 (3358 words)
• Walmart And The Flat Earth: Supply-Chaining, Insourcing, And an Expanding 21St Century Pages: 6 (1591 words)
• The Cola Wars Continues: Coke and Pepsi in the 21st Century Pages: 16 (4631 words)
• Greenpeace and the 21st century Environmentalism Pages: 7 (1902 words)

👋 Hi! I’m your smart assistant Amy!

Don’t know where to start? Type your requirements and I’ll connect you to an academic expert within 3 minutes.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Waking Up from the American Dream

If you are an undocumented person anywhere in America, some of the things you do to make a dignified life for yourself and your loved ones are illegal. Others require a special set of skills. The elders know some great tricks—crossing deserts in the dead of night, studying the Rio Grande for weeks to find the shallowest bend of river to cross, getting a job on their first day in the country, finding apartments that don’t need a lease, learning English at public libraries, community colleges, or from “Frasier.” I would not have been able to do a single thing that the elders have done. But the elders often have only one hope for survival, which we tend not to mention. I’m talking about children. And no, it’s not an “anchor baby” thing. Our parents have kids for the same reasons as most people, but their sacrifice for us is impossible to articulate, and its weight is felt deep down, in the body. That is the pact between immigrants and their children in America: they give us a better life, and we spend the rest of that life figuring out how much of our flesh will pay off the debt.

I am a first-generation immigrant, undocumented for most of my life, then on DACA , now a permanent resident. But my real identity, the one that follows me around like a migraine, is that I am the daughter of immigrants. As such, I have some skills of my own.

You pick them up young. Something we always hear about, because Americans love this shit, is that immigrant children often translate for their parents. I began doing this as a little girl, because I lost my accent, dumb luck, and because I was adorable in the way that adults like, which is to say I had large, frightened eyes and a flamboyant vocabulary. As soon as doctors or teachers began talking, I felt my parents’ nervous energy, and I’d either answer for them or interpret their response. It was like my little Model U.N. job. I was around seven. My career as a professional daughter of immigrants had begun.

In my teens, I began to specialize. I became a performance artist. I accompanied my parents to places where I knew they would be discriminated against, and where I could insure that their rights would be granted. If a bank teller wasn’t accepting their I.D., I’d stroll in with an oversized Forever 21 blazer, red lipstick, a slicked-back bun, and fresh Stan Smiths. I brought a pleather folder and made sure my handshake broke bones. Sometimes I appealed to decency, sometimes to law, sometimes to God. Sometimes I leaned back in my chair, like a sexy gangster, and said, “So, you tell me how you want my mom to survive in this country without a bank account. You close at four, but I have all the time in the world.” Then I’d wink. It was vaudeville, but it worked.

My parents came to America in their early twenties, naïve about what awaited them. Back in Ecuador, they had encountered images of a wealthy nation—the requisite flashes of Clint Eastwood and the New York City skyline—and heard stories about migrants who had done O.K. for themselves there. But my parents were not starry-eyed people. They were just kids, lost and reckless, running away from the dead ends around them.

My father is the only son of a callous mother and an absent father. My mother, the result of her mother’s rape, grew up cared for by an aunt and uncle. When she married my father, it was for the reasons a lot of women marry: for love, and to escape. The day I was born, she once told me, was the happiest day of her life.

Soon after that, my parents, owners of a small auto-body business, found themselves in debt. When I was eighteen months old, they left me with family and settled in Brooklyn, hoping to work for a year and move back once they’d saved up some money. I haven’t asked them much about this time—I’ve never felt the urge—but I know that one year became three. I also know that they began to be lured by the prospect of better opportunities for their daughter. Teachers had remarked that I was talented. My mother, especially, felt that Ecuador was not the place for me. She knew how the country would limit the woman she imagined I would become—Hillary Clinton, perhaps, or Princess Di.

My parents sent loving letters to Ecuador. They said that they were facing a range of hardships so that I could have a better life. They said that we would reunite soon, though the date was unspecified. They said that I had to behave, not walk into traffic—I seem to have developed a habit of doing this—and work hard, so they could send me little gifts and chocolates. I was a toddler, but I understood. My parents left to give me things, and I had to do other things in order to repay them. It was simple math.

They sent for me when I was just shy of five years old. I arrived at J.F.K. airport. My father, who seemed like a total stranger, ran to me and picked me up and kissed me, and my mother looked on and wept. I recall thinking she was pretty, and being embarrassed by the attention. They had brought roses, Teddy bears, and Tweety Bird balloons.

Getting to know one another was easy enough. My father liked to read and lecture, and had a bad temper. My mother was soft-spoken around him but funny and mean—like a drag queen—with me. She liked Vogue . I was enrolled in a Catholic school and quickly learned English—through immersion, but also through “Reading Rainbow” and a Franklin talking dictionary that my father bought me. It gave me a colorful vocabulary and weirdly over-enunciated diction. If I typed the right terms, it even gave me erotica.

Meanwhile, I had confirmed that my parents were not tony expats. At home, meals could be rice and a fried egg. We sometimes hid from our landlord by crouching next to my bed and drawing the blinds. My father had started out driving a cab, but after 9/11, when the governor revoked the driver’s licenses of undocumented immigrants, he began working as a deliveryman, carrying meals to Wall Street executives, the plastic bags slicing into his fingers. Some of those executives forced him to ride on freight elevators. Others tipped him in spare change.

My mother worked in a factory. For seven days a week, sometimes in twelve-hour shifts, she sewed in a heat that caught in your throat like lint, while her bosses, also immigrants, hurled racist slurs at her. Some days I sat on the factory floor, making dolls with swatches of fabric, cosplaying childhood. I didn’t put a lot of effort into making the dolls—I sort of just screwed around, with an eye on my mom at her sewing station, stiffening whenever her supervisor came by to see how fast she was working. What could I do to protect her? Well, murder, I guess.

Our problem appeared to be poverty, which even then, before I’d seen “Rent,” seemed glamorous, or at least normal. All the protagonists in the books I read were poor. Ramona Quimby on Klickitat Street, the kids in “Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.” Every fictional child was hungry, an orphan, or tubercular. But there was something else setting us apart. At school, I looked at my nonwhite classmates and wondered how their parents could be nurses, or own houses, or leave the country on vacation. It was none of my business—everyone in New York had secrets—but I cautiously gathered intel, toothpick in mouth. I finally cracked the case when I tried to apply to an essay contest and asked my parents for my Social Security number. My father was probably reading a newspaper, and I doubt he even looked up to say, “We don’t have papers, so we don’t have a Social.”

It was not traumatic. I turned on our computer, waited for the dial-up, and searched what it meant not to have a Social Security number. “Undocumented immigrant” had not yet entered the discourse. Back then, the politically correct term, the term I saw online, was “illegal immigrant,” which grated—it was hurtful in a clinical way, like having your teeth drilled. Various angry comments sections offered another option: illegal alien . I knew it was form language, legalese meant to wound me, but it didn’t. It was punk as hell. We were hated , and maybe not entirely of this world. I had just discovered Kurt Cobain.

Obviously, I learned that my parents and I could be deported at any time. Was that scary? Sure. But a deportation still seemed like spy-movie stuff. And, luckily, I had an ally. My brother was born when I was ten years old. He was our family’s first citizen, and he was named after a captain of the New York Yankees. Before he was old enough to appreciate art, I took him to the Met. I introduced him to “S.N.L.” and “Letterman” and “Fun Home” and “Persepolis”—all the things I felt an upper-middle-class parent would do—so that he could thrive at school, get a great job, and make money. We would need to armor our parents with our success.

We moved to Queens, and I entered high school. One day, my dad heard about a new bill in Congress on Spanish radio. It was called the DREAM Act, and it proposed a path to legalization for undocumented kids who had gone to school here or served in the military. My dad guaranteed that it’d pass by the time I graduated. I never react to good news—stoicism is part of the brand—but I was optimistic. The bill was bipartisan. John McCain supported it, and I knew he had been a P.O.W., and that made me feel connected to a real American hero. Each time I saw an “R” next to a sponsor’s name my heart fluttered with joy. People who were supposed to hate me had now decided to love me.

But the bill was rejected and reintroduced, again and again, for years. It never passed. And, in a distinctly American twist, its gauzy rhetoric was all that survived. Now there was a new term on the block: “Dreamers.” Politicians began to use it to refer to the “good” children of immigrants, the ones who did well in school and stayed off the mean streets—the innocents. There are about a million undocumented children in America. The non-innocents, one presumes, are the ones in cages, covered in foil blankets, or lost, disappeared by the government.

I never called myself a Dreamer. The word was saccharine and dumb, and it yoked basic human rights to getting an A on a report card. Dreamers couldn’t flunk out of high school, or have D.U.I.s, or work at McDonald’s. Those kids lived with the pressure of needing a literal miracle in order to save their families, but the miracle didn’t happen, because the odds were against them, because the odds were against all of us. And so America decided that they didn’t deserve an I.D.

Link copied

The Dream, it turned out, needed to demonize others in order to help the chosen few. Our parents, too, would be sacrificed. The price of our innocence was the guilt of our loved ones. Jeff Sessions, while he was Attorney General, suggested that we had been trafficked against our will. People actually pitied me because my parents brought me to America. Without even consulting me.

The irony, of course, is that the Dream was our inheritance. We were Dreamers because our parents had dreams.

It’s painful to think about this. My mother, an aspiring interior designer, has gone twenty-eight years without a sick day. My dad, who loves problem-solving, has spent his life wanting a restaurant. He’s a talented cook and a brilliant manager, and he often did the work of his actual managers for them. But, without papers, he could advance only so far in a job. He needed to be paid in cash; he could never receive benefits.

He often used a soccer metaphor to describe our journey in America. Our family was a team, but I scored the goals. Everything my family did was, in some sense, a pass to me. Then the American Dream could be mine, and then we could start passing to my brother. That’s how my dad explained his limp every night, his feet blistered from speed-running deliveries. It’s why we sometimes didn’t have money for electricity or shampoo. Those were fouls. Sometimes my parents did tricky things to survive that you’ll never know about. Those were nutmegs. In 2015, when the U.S. women’s team won the World Cup, my dad went to the parade and sent me a selfie. “Girl power!” the text read.

My father is a passionate, diatribe-loving feminist, though his feminism often seems to exclude my mother. When I was in elementary school, he would take me to the local branch of the Queens Public Library and check out the memoir of Rosalía Arteaga Serrano, the only female President in Ecuador’s history. Serrano was ousted from office, seemingly because she was a woman. My father would read aloud from the book for hours, pausing to tell me that I’d need to toughen up. He would read from dictators’ speeches—not for the politics, but for the power of persuasive oratory. We went to the library nearly every weekend for thirteen years.

My mother left her factory job to give me, the anointed one, full-time academic support. She pulled all-nighters to help me make extravagant posters. She grilled me with vocabulary flash cards, struggling to pronounce the words but laughing and slapping me with pillows if I got something wrong. I aced the language portions of my PSATs and SATs, partly because of luck, and partly because of my parents’ locally controversial refusal to let me do household chores, ever, because they wanted me to be reading, always reading, instead.

If this all seems strategic, it should. The American Dream doesn’t just happen to cheery Pollyannas. It happens to iconoclasts with a plan and a certain amount of cunning. The first time I encountered the idea of the Dream, it was in English class, discussing “The Great Gatsby.” My classmates all thought that Gatsby seemed sort of sad, a pathetic figure. I adored him. He created his own persona, made a fortune in an informal economy, and lived a quiet, paranoid, reclusive life. Most of all, he longed. He stood at the edge of Long Island Sound, longing for Daisy, and I took the train uptown to Columbia University and looked out at the campus, hoping it could one day be mine. At the time, it was functionally impossible for undocumented students to enroll at Columbia. The same held for many schools. Keep dreaming, my parents said.

I did. I was valedictorian of my class, miraculously got into Harvard, and was tapped to join a secret society that once included T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. I was the only Latina inducted, I think, and I was very chill when an English-Spanish dictionary appeared in our club bathroom after I started going to teas. When I graduated, in 2011, our country was deporting people at record rates. I knew that I needed to add even more of a golden flicker to my illegality, so that if I was deported, or if my parents were deported, we would not go in the middle of the night, in silence, anonymously, as Americans next door watched another episode of “The Bachelor.” So I began writing, with the explicit aim of entering the canon. I wrote a book about undocumented immigrants, approaching them not as shadowy victims or gilded heroes but as people, flawed and complex. It was reviewed well, nominated for things. A President commended it.

But it’s hard to feel anything. My parents remain poor and undocumented. I cannot protect them with prizes or grades. My father sobbed when I handed him my diploma, but it was not the piece of paper that would make it all better, no matter how heavy the stock.

By the time I was in grad school, my parents’ thirty-year marriage was over. They had spent most of those years in America, with their heads down and their bodies broken; it was hard not to see the split as inevitable. My mom called me to say she’d had enough. My brother supported her decision. I talked to each parent, and helped them mutually agree on a date. On a Tuesday night, my father moved out, leaving his old parenting books behind, while my mom and brother were at church. I asked my father to text my brother that he loved him. I think he texted him exactly that. Then I collapsed onto the floor beneath an open drawer of knives, texted my partner to come help me, and convulsed in sobs.

After that, my mom became depressed. I did hours of research and found her a highly qualified, trauma-informed psychiatrist, a Spanish speaker who charged on a sliding scale I could afford. My mom got on Lexapro, which helped. She also started a job that makes her very happy. In order to find her that job, I took a Klonopin and browsed Craigslist for hours each day, e-mailing dozens of people, being vague about legal status in a clever but truthful way. I impersonated her in phone interviews, hanging off my couch, the blood rushing to my head, struggling not to do an offensive accent.

You know how, when you get a migraine, you regret how stupid you were for taking those sweet, painless days for granted? Although my days are hard, I understand that I’m living in an era of painlessness, and that a time will come when I look back and wonder why I was such a stupid, whining fool. My mom’s job involves hard manual labor, sometimes in the snow or the rain. I got her a real winter coat, her first, from Eddie Bauer. I got her a pair of Hunter boots. These were things she needed, things I had seen on women her age on the subway, their hands bearing bags from Whole Foods. My mom’s hands are arthritic. She sends me pictures of them covered in bandages.

My brother and I now have a pact: neither of us can die, because then the other would be stuck with our parents. My brother is twenty-two, still in college, and living with my mom. He, too, has some skills. He is gentle, kind, and excellent at deëscalating conflict. He mediated my parents’ arguments for years. He has also never tried to change them, which I have, through a regimen of therapy, books, and cheesy Instagram quotes. So we’ve decided that, in the long term, since his goal is to get a job, get married, have kids, and stay in Queens, he’ll invite Mom to move in with him, to help take care of the grandkids. He’ll handle the emotional labor, since it doesn’t traumatize him. And I’ll handle the financial support, since it doesn’t traumatize me.

I love my parents. I know I love them. But what I feel for them daily is a mixture of terror, panic, obligation, sorrow, anger, pity, and a shame so hot that I need to lie face down, in my underwear, on very cold sheets. Many Americans have vulnerable parents, and strive to succeed in order to save them. I hold those people in the highest regard. But the undocumented face a unique burden, due to scorn and a lack of support from the government. Because our parents made a choice—the choice to migrate—few people pity them, or wonder whether restitution should be made for decades of exploitation. That choice, the original sin, is why our parents were thrown out of paradise. They were tempted by curiosity and hunger, by fleshly desires.

And so we return to the debt. However my parents suffer in their final years will be related to their migration—to their toil in this country, to their lack of health care and housing support, to psychic fatigue. They were able, because of that sacrifice, to give me their version of the Dream: an education, a New York accent, a life that can better itself. But that life does not fully belong to me. My version of the American Dream is seeing them age with dignity, being able to help them retire, and keeping them from being pushed onto train tracks in a random hate crime. For us, gratitude and guilt feel almost identical. Love is difficult to separate from self-erasure. All we can give one another is ourselves.

Scholars often write about the harm that’s done when children become caretakers, but they’re reluctant to do so when it comes to immigrants. For us, they say, this situation is cultural . Because we grow up in tight-knit families. Because we respect our elders. In fact, it’s just the means of living that’s available to us. It’s a survival mechanism, a mutual-aid society at the family level. There is culture, and then there is adaptation to precarity and surveillance. If we are lost in the promised land, perhaps it’s because the ground has never quite seemed solid beneath our feet.

When I was a kid, my mother found a crystal heart in my father’s taxi. The light that came through it was pretty, shimmering, like a gasoline spill on the road. She put it in her jewelry box, and sometimes we’d take out the box, spill the contents onto my pink twin bed, and admire what we both thought was a heart-shaped diamond. I grew up, I went to college. I often heard of kids who had inherited their grandmother’s heirlooms, and I sincerely believed that there were jewels in my family, too. Then, a few years ago, my partner and I visited my mom, and she spilled out her box. She gave me a few items I cherish: a nameplate bracelet in white, yellow, and rose gold, and the thick gold hoop earrings that she wore when she first moved to Brooklyn. Everything else was costume jewelry. I couldn’t find the heart.

I realized that, when my mother found the crystal, she was around the same age I am now. She had probably never held a diamond, and she probably wanted to believe that she had found one in America, a dream come true. She wanted me to believe it, and then, as we both grew up, alone, together, she stopped believing, stopped wanting to believe, and stopped me from wanting to believe. And she probably threw that shit out. I didn’t ask. Some things are none of our business. ♦

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

The American Dream : Dead, Alive, Or On Hold? Essay

In the essays “The American Dream: Dead, Alive, or on Hold?” by Brandon King and “Confronting Inequality” by Paul Krugman, the authors discuss a wide variety of ideas that affect or maintain the idea of income inequality in America today. In the essay by Brandon King, he clearly states that the values of the American Dream are still alive today, but are getting harder and harder to achieve for the average person. King argues that the American Dream of today has drastically changed from what it used to be, and that the thought of being successful only lays within having a steady life with little to no struggle. However, in “Confronting Inequality”, Krugman has a different approach on the topic, arguing that the American Dream is no longer alive. Krugman states that the rise of income inequality will also lead heavily to social inequality, and that the rise of income inequality is a huge cause of social inequality as well. The two authors use a majority of viewpoints and methods to explore the same topic of inequality. However, there are also many ways in which both authors offer different sides of the argument and how it should be handled. Throughout the essay “The American Dream: Dead, Alive, or on Hold?” King conveys a stern argument that the American dream is in fact still alive. He begins the essay by explaining what exactly the American dream is and what position it should hold in our lives today. King states, “I would redefine the American Dream today as the potential

Argumentative Essay On Dream Hoarders

The “American Dream,” according to Truslow Adams, is “being able to grow to the fullest development as man and woman.” This ideal is not based on fame or wealth, but on enough to sustain a family and live comfortably, with a steadily rising income and a decent home. It is to be believed that hard work along with the “great equalizer”, education, allows individuals the freedom to determine their own life path, regardless of their background. The idea of the American dream ensures upward social mobility for those dedicated enough to achieve this lifestyle. In spite of that, recent arguments have said that this dream is either dying, or already dead. In his book “Dream Hoarders,” Richard Reeves counters that the American Dream is in fact alive and well, but simply being hoarded by the upper middles class.

The American Dream Essay

The idea of the American dream revolves around attaining happiness, success and equality. For higher wealth classes obtaining these components aren't a concern; but for many, the American Dream has become a nightmare. For the poor being able to obtain simple necessities such as food, clothing and shelter is a daily struggle. The price of being poor is a lot costlier then those in the realm of the wealthy. Based on the current economic and social systems in America it does not provide everyone with a fair chance to achieve the “American Dream”. In todays society many Americans believe money is the only way to happiness. True or not true, money certainly isn't a hindrance to obtaining the necessary components for survival. But if the American Dream is no longer about happiness and freedom it becomes solely about wealth and possession. "Money cannot buy happiness." (Anonymous, Spring Board pg.81) represents the concept that money doesn't necessarily play apart in your emotional well-being. Today, materialism is more important than character. Money isn't everything; you don't need it to be happy and certainly not to achieve "The American Dream". In addition to that, although money can jump-start your future it can also drive you into the ground. Dana Gioia, the author of "Money", says "...Money holds heads above water..." Implying money plays a crucial part in keeping your dreams alive while America demands so much. Although finances are a building block to ones version of the

The American Dream Essay : The American Dream

Despite working hard to achieve the American Dream and to have a prosperous and successful life in America the rising costs of college and housing as well as lower pay in some states creates debt for many Americans. Although other people around the world come to America to reach the American dream, but are halted by all of the costs that reside to become a part of it.

American Dream Dead Alive

In the articles, “The American Dream: Dead, Alive, or on Hold by Brandon King, the author argues his opinions on the American dream and how it still alive and attainable, although he realizes that the dream is not the same as it was before. At the time King wrote this article, he was a student at the University of Cincinnati in 2011, three years after the stock market crash in 2008. With the timing of the stock market crashing, this gave King the idea of writing about the American dream and how it is today. When the article was published in the college book “They say, I say” we the reader saw that King redefined the American Dream as "the potential to work for an honest, secure way of life and save for the future." Replacing what he described

Of Mice And Men Rhetorical Analysis

Through everybody’s eyes is their own version of the American Dream. Whether it’s the stereotypical dream with a good job, a family, and a house with a white picket fence, or it could be just getting by at the end of the month financially. The American Dream doesn’t have a specific image but rather a particular mindset. Lots of people have a goal in their life that they have to work hard to be successful towards that goal, but in most cases that goal may be unrealistic.

Analysis Of The American Dream

King goes on, stating that achieving the American Dream is the key to conquering inequality between the different social classes in the world. He believes that the differences in social class is they key to bringing our country together. In the essay, it pointed out economists and politicians point of view. They believe that the American Dream is dead because of the difference in social classes and because of that the economy cannot flourish and thus will remain fragile. They state that the economy focuses more on the small wealthy minority than the middle and lower classes. The huge income gap between the social classes is one of the reasons the economists and politicians believe that the American Dream is dead because they think the middle and lower classes can’t possibly move up in the economy and thus can't complete their American Dream. King arguments oppose this. He states that “[t]he American Dream,

American Dream Essay

All around the world the United States of America is viewed as a place of freedom and equal opportunity for all people who settle in the country. Immigrants, especially from second or third world countries, view America as a chance for them to start over and a live the lavish lifestyles they are accustomed to hearing. However, this belief that everyone in the United States lives how they want to and has equal opportunity is false. Immigrants from countries all over the world face many different issues as they settle in the United States. Although these problems may vary, the message is the same; the American dream is a lot more difficult to achieve than previously thought. Although every immigrant is different in the problems

The American dream has many meanings but only one that matters, which is having a job that you enjoy and appreciate and for your freedom to be known. The Public Broadcast Service published videos that explored the daily realities of the New York working class. One video followed the experiences of Walid Abdelwahab. He is a well known cart vendor working on the streets of New York city he traveled all the way from Egypt to succeed and have a better lifestyle. Walid has been vending all of his life to help support his family; however, he has faced many rigor moments but he still continues to work with a smile on his face, no matter what happens. This supports the existence of the American dream because he moved from a different country leaving everything behind so that him and his family can live a happy life.

The American Dream : Dead, Alive, Or On Hold?

Brandon King, a law student who majored in political science, writes on topics of inequality and political structures in the United States. One of his published works, The American Dream: Dead, Alive, or on Hold?, debates his interpretation of the notion of the American Dream and whether the concept is dead, alive, or on hold. The speaker emphasizes his belief that the common phrase is still alive within America and that one must work hard in order to achieve it. When it comes to the topic of the American Dream, King will eagerly agree that the idea is still alive and thriving in the minds of Americans; however, I deem that the idea is on hold within American society due to lack of upward social position and economic mobility.

The American Dream In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

For years upon years, we have heard the concept of an “American Dream” repeatedly. In school, at home, and there’s probably several who have mused about it on their own during their time by themselves. It seems that, also, several have concluded that the Dream is dead: gone, disappeared, poof into thin air. Some argue that it’s nothing but a pack of lies our predecessors were fed to believe that perhaps America had a better future lingering just around the corner, or that it’s changed much from what it was ‘back in the day’. The American Dream has remained unchanged since the Great Depression, but the nation we are today may slowly be killing it. In John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the Dream is to have that equal opportunity for success, the same as in Bobby Jindal’s and Ellen Powell’s articles, but it seems that inequality may be killing the American Dream.

The American Dream Brandon King Summary

In his essay, “The American Dream: Dead, Alive or on Hold?”, Brandon King explores current perceptions of the American Dream. King conveys his reasons as to why the American dream still lives despite the recessions the country has faced. However, the lower class questions the legitimacy of his claim. Although many believe the dream is dead, King argues it still lives going beyond a mere Rags-to Riches idea.

The American Dream: A False Sense of Hope Essay

• 12 Works Cited

In an average day, an American is exposed to over 3000 advertisements, (Kilbourne). Whether they want to admit it or not, they are drawn toward them. A common scheme of the advertisers is to allow the consumer to “picture the new them.” Whether this be a wealthier them, a skinner them, or a prettier them, they gear there product towards every person and want everyone be able to connect with the advertisement and picture the “new them.” American Idol, Nutrisystem, and The Biggest Loser, the lottery, and many other “products” promote that anyone has the chance to be famous, fit, or fortunate. The successes from these “products” present themselves as they were before, with the sob story that hopefully touches a nerve with

The American Dream : Dead, Alive Or On Hold?

Many years ago today, the United States of America was the prime example of prosperity and opportunity. It established America with the idea that its citizens would be guaranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Today, it is true that people have liberties and are free to pursue happiness. However, in recent years, in the worst recession since the Great Depression. Unemployment, growing economy inequality, and medical care have skyrocketed. Despite the odds, the American Dream is still a goal that many people strive for and hope to reach. In fact, an essay written by Brandon King, The American Dream: Dead, Alive or on Hold? He says, “the American dream is a dream in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with the opportunity for each according to his/her ability and achievement…” (King 610-611). Therefore, the problem with the American Dream lies not within the dream itself, but within the means people pursue to attain this dream.

The American Dream Is Still Alive Essay

Nowadays, many Americans wonder if the American Dream is still alive. At one point in our country, people felt that they could achieve success by working hard. However, after the economic hardships and recession of the 21st century, a number of Americans not only lost income, but some also lost their jobs. Although there has been slow progression to improve the economy, there are those who question whether or not the dream of Americans can ever be achieved again. With unemployment levels still high and salaries failing to increase, there certainly is doubt in most of Americans. In his essay, Brandon King formulates ways to redefine and change the way to look at the American dream. After analyzing King’s essay, one can see his view as believing that the dream is still very much intact. As he points out, the American economy is a very complex system that has had downfalls, but there is always a way to get back up from it. Regardless of your economic status (poor or middle class), if one has a working job, it is possible to succeed based on how much someone is willing to work to achieve their goals. As King would agree, the American dream is not only still alive and well, but anyone can reach success.

Essay on Is the American Dream Still Alive and Well

The American Dream is the result of possibilities and success. The term “American Dream” was been invented by James Truslow Adams in 1931: “That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” Another reference to the American Dream appears in the Declaration of Independence (1776). The author wrote that people are “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The question of the debate was: “Is the American Dream Still Alive and Well?”

Related Topics

• Middle class

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

American Dream

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Corporate Finance Institute - American Dream
• Humanities LibreTexts - The American Dream
• Brookings - Is the American dream really dead?

Recent News

American Dream , ideal that the United States is a land of opportunity that allows the possibility of upward mobility , freedom , and equality for people of all classes who work hard and have the will to succeed.

The roots of the American Dream lie in the goals and aspirations of the first European settlers and colonizers . Most of these people came to the North American continent to escape tyranny , religious and political persecution, or poverty . In 1776 their reasons for coming were captured by the Founders in the Declaration of Independence : “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These lines have often been cited by groups seeking equal standing in American society.

While the idea of the American Dream may have originated well before 1776, the phrase itself was coined by American businessman and historian James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America . That work defines the past and future of the American Dream, which, according to Adams, is:

“not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a 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.”

To Adams, the American Dream is about aspiring to be one’s best self and to rise above the station one was born into. It is not about simply acquiring wealth and material possessions.

Despite Adams’s optimism about the United States as a land of opportunity, his book warns of flaws in the American way of life. It calls out the dangers of unbridled capitalism and mass consumption . The worker, he wrote, gets “into a treadmill in which he earns, not that he may enjoy, but that he may spend, in order that the owners of the factories may grow richer.” Adams’s book also cites dangers to “the intellectual worker” who must adjust his or her work “to the needs of business or mass consumption.” The result of this accommodation, according to Adams, “is to lower the quality of…thought,” as represented in newspapers and journals, “to that of the least common denominator of the minds of the millions of consumers.” In addition, Adams’s book calls out the devotion to accumulation of wealth without regard for the good of society:

“A system that steadily increases the gulf between the ordinary man and the super-rich, that permits the resources of society to be gathered into personal fortunes that afford their owners millions of income a year, with only the chance that here and there a few may be moved to confer some of their surplus upon the public in ways chosen wholly by themselves, is assuredly a wasteful and unjust system. It is, perhaps, as inimical as anything could be to the American dream.”

What Adams foresaw appears to have become a reality in 21st-century America: consumerism and materialism abound, threatening the environment and the political structure. Intellectualism has become tribalized. The gulf between rich and poor continues to increase. In addition, it is becoming more and more difficult to attain the American Dream for many people, including religious and ethnic minorities , women, and the poor. Hard work alone is often not enough for families or their children to get ahead, especially if they are low-wage earners. Black and Hispanic women are least likely to move upward. In fact, roughly one in six Black Americans do not believe in the American Dream at all. Certain areas of the country, in particular the Southeast and the Midwestern Rust Belt , have trended much lower in economic mobility than other areas. According to one study, 92 percent of children born in 1940 earned more money than their parents. However, only 50 percent of children born in the 1980s have done so. Sentiment among Millennials , Generation Z , and Generation X , as captured in a 2020 opinion poll , reflected these trends, indicating that 46 percent, 52 percent, and 53 percent of each group, respectively, felt that the American Dream is attainable. On the basis of these trends, policy groups are working to improve the probability of upward mobility in the United States.

While the American Dream may be increasingly difficult to attain in the United States, the idea has arguably been exported successfully. Around the world, people are fulfilling their own version of the American Dream. Many countries are working toward more-just economic, educational, and legal systems to support equality and upward mobility .

• News & Politics
• Science & Health
• Life Stories
• The New Sober Boom
• Getting Hooked on Quitting
• Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous
• Is College Necessary?
• Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear
• Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset
• SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters
• 'Dark' Personalities Drawn to BTC
• The Top Online Casinos With Bitcoin
• The Top Sports Betting Sites With Bitcoin
• The Top eSports Betting Sites With Bitcoin in 2024
• The Top Gambling Sites With Bitcoin

The death of the American Dream birthed Trumpism

"though trumpism is ten times more terrifying than reaganism, they share the same dna", by chauncey devega.

The United States is the richest country in the world. But that statistic camouflages the more complex truth that the United States has a relatively small number of rich people and a much larger number of poor and working poor people. The average income for the top twenty percent of the population in 2022 was approximately $278,000. The average family income for the bottom 20 percent of the population was approximately $16,000.

When the income data is examined on a more granular level the divides between the poor, the working class, and the wealthy become even starker. The top 5 percent of individual earners had an average income of almost $336,000 in 2021. The same year, the top 1 percent had an average income of almost $820,000. The top .1% earned an average amount of approximately 3.3 million dollars.

Wealth is a much more revealing indicator of how extreme the levels of economic and social inequality really are in the United States.  The top 1 percent of income earners now control approximately 26 percent of the country’s wealth . That amount of wealth is more than that owned by the entire American middle class. The poorest Americans by income (the bottom 20 percent) control only 3 percent of the country’s wealth.

Contrary to America’s dominant cultural myths about “bootstraps," wealth and income are selectively created (and in many ways directly subsidized) by the state through tax policy and other measures. To wit,  Americans in the top 20 percent of income generally receive a much larger return from the federal government in terms of subsidies, credits, and other benefits than the amount of taxes they pay. Political scientist Suzanne Mettler has compelling described these benefits as “the submerged state” , i.e. “welfare for rich people." 

America’s elites (and especially the news media) love to tout the stock market as a barometer for the country’s economic health and prosperity. But that data is misleading: The top 1 percent of richest Americans by wealth control some 54% percent of stocks and mutual funds . Here, the American financier class benefits from the tax and other economic policies that they literally write, which are in turn passed by Congress and the president (who are also members of the financial elite).

In total, there is a set of perverse incentives built into this version of late-stage American capitalism, where private actors and other predatory gangster capitalists profit from the country’s extreme levels of wealth and income inequality — and are therefore incentivized to perpetuate such an unfair and ultimately anti-democratic system.

In her new book “Poverty for Profit”, lawyer and public policy expert Anne Kim documents this system and how it disproportionately targets Black and Brown communities. She is also a contributing editor at Washington Monthly, where she was a senior writer. 

In this conversation, Kim shows how predatory capitalism is preying on under-resourced black and brown communities and documents its real human cost. At the end of this conversation Kim, warns that the country’s extreme income inequality and the death of the American Dream are directly tied to the rise of Trumpism and the country’s democracy crisis.

This is the second part of a two-part conversation .

How does your research intervene against the many organizing myths of American society such as “individualism” and “meritocracy”?

There’s a huge body of work that pushes against these myths by illuminating the structural limitations so many Americans face. I aim to add one more dimension to this argument, by showing how the corporatization of poverty helps to perpetuate systemic disadvantage.

Of course, personal choices matter. But for too many people, these “choices” are limited or non-existent, or dictated by the industries that colonize low-income communities. Many people don’t have access to affordable healthy food, for instance, because dollar stores and bodegas control the food choices available in their neighborhoods. “Willpower” can’t overcome a diet where the only available options are ultra-processed foods high in fat and sodium – like much of what’s served in school lunches to poor children. Pizza Hut, for example, offers what it calls its “A+ Pizza Program” for school cafeterias. The company says its pizza crusts are made with “51 percent white whole wheat flour” to comply with federal nutrition standards for the National School Lunch Program.

“Personal responsibility” is a myth when the poverty industry controls the choices you have.

Which of the human stories – here I will use the language of tragedies and traps – struck you the hardest in researching and writing the book?

The person whose story has stayed with me the longest is Rafiq, a young man I met in Baltimore who was literally in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He was walking past a house in the middle of a raid and got picked up on basically trumped-up charges with no evidence. His lawyer said the jury acquitted him in less than half an hour.

By all rights, he should have been able to put this ordeal behind him. Instead, he owed his bail bondsman thousands of dollars because – it turns out – the “premium” that bondsmen charge for bail is non-refundable. It doesn’t matter if you get acquitted or the charges are dropped, the bondsman gets his money. So, Rafiq was in debt for an arrest that should never have happened, and in a system that not only punishes defendants for being poor but facilitates their exploitation by a predatory industry.

The moneyed classes and the corporatocracy privatize their gains and profits and externalize their losses.

In the context of the poverty industry, the profits businesses make exact a terrible toll on the people they purport to “serve.” The hundreds of dollars someone pays a tax preparer, for instance, means hundreds of dollars not spent on food or rent or to pay down debt. But it’s not like the tax prep industry will be held to account for the hunger a family might face because of their practices.

Ditto for bail bondsmen. In the case of Rafiq, whom I mentioned above, the debt he owes the bail bondsman was guaranteed by his mom, whose financial security was also put in jeopardy. Rafiq also has a family, which means the money going toward his unjust debt was money that wasn’t going toward diapers or baby food for his young daughter. But I doubt the bail bondsman feels any responsibility for the trauma he’s caused for Rafiq’s family.

“Poverty for Profit” is really a model of capitalism gone wrong – or is it precisely capitalism and markets and private interests working exactly as designed in the neoliberal regime and gangster capitalism?

I’m not anti-business. I respect business, and I admire the innovation and creativity of entrepreneurs. But I also think there are some realms that businesses just are not suited for, and that includes human services. I just don’t think that the motive for profit aligns very well with poverty reduction. Investing in human potential is expensive , the returns take a long time to accrue, and the results can’t always be measured in dollars. There have been some well-meaning efforts to “do well by doing good,” but as I mention in the book, those haven’t really panned out either.

How do you imagine that libertarians and other members of the right-wing (and yes, the corporate Democrats) who worship at the mantle of the “free market” and the neoliberal regime would respond to your book?

They’d dismiss it as liberal bellyaching about a problem they’d argue doesn’t exist. They’d say that government-run programs would be ten times less efficient than privatized ones, and they’d trot out extreme examples of government “waste” to prove their point, like the $600 hammer for the Pentagon that actually never existed .

They’d also argue that anti-poverty programs aren’t tough enough in demanding “personal responsibility” from poor Americans. That’s why they want draconian work requirements in every safety net program, including Medicaid, even though the research is clear that work requirements don’t do anything other than deprive people of the benefits they need. Some conservatives would be perfectly content for the government to have no role in poverty reduction – which means they’d likely applaud and even encourage the activities of the poverty industry.

Is Milton Friedman smiling or disgusted at the findings of your new book?

Actually, I think he’d be shrugging his shoulders with a big “so what?”

In a 1970 essay for the New York Times, Friedman wrote that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” I think he’d say that the companies engaged in the poverty industry are simply doing what they’re supposed to do. He does say companies should stay “within the rules of the game,” “in open and free competition without deception or fraud,” so perhaps he’d frown at some of the practices I’ve documented in the book. But I also think he'd be more likely to say the fraudsters are outliers, not a natural consequence of how the poverty market is structured.

There is the “Black and Brown tax”. There is also the “poverty tax” in America. What is the relationship between them?

They’re additive, and the cumulative result is a double disadvantage for Black and Brown people in poverty. The “Black and Brown tax” explains in part the massive racial wealth gap, which the Brookings Institution recently estimated to be more than $240,000 . That’s the difference in wealth between a median white household and a median Black one, and it’s the result of systemic discrimination, lower wages, unequal access to education and a host of other factors.

The “poverty tax,” on the other hand, is the additional price poor people often pay for basic services. Many low-income Americans don’t have access to mainstream banking, for example, so they rely on check cashers, pawnshops, and other players in what the government euphemistically calls the “alternative financial services industry.” I’d argue that the tax prep fees I write about in my book are also part of this “poverty tax,” as are bail bond premiums. I’d also argue that some poverty taxes are non-monetary; rather the “price” is poorer health, substandard housing and education, greater exposure to environmental toxins, the list goes on. I have no doubt people pay the poverty tax with their lives as a result.

Please explain more about how there are dentists who are exploiting the poor. That is dystopian. 

Many mainstream dentists don’t treat patients on Medicaid, which created a market for some dentists and dental chains to specialize in these patients (mostly kids). These dentists then also realized they can make a ton of money on volume, because Medicaid pays by the procedure. The result has been a booming Medicaid dental industry that’s seen an outsized number of reported abuses by dentists and dental franchises performing unnecessary work to collect Medicaid dollars.

In one instance I wrote about, a North Carolina dentist reportedly performed 17 root canals on a three-year-old and was ordered to pay $10 million in penalties. In another case, a dental chain called Benevis agreed to pay $23.9 million to settle claims of Medicaid fraud brought by federal prosecutors. Some of these clinics have moreover been accused of using “ papoose boards ” to immobilize children for multiple procedures. The state of Colorado ended up banning papoose boards because of reported abuses involving Medicaid dental practices.

We need your help to stay independent

No doubt the vast majority of Medicaid dentists provide good quality care, so I’m not trying to tar and feather everyone. On the other hand, things have been bad enough that the U.S. senate held hearings on the damage done by  “corporate dentistry.”

There are also dialysis centers in the strip malls in poor communities where there are also dollar stores, check cashing businesses and tax return places. Again, this is like something out of the films “Idiocracy”, “Brazil” or something in a David Cronenberg film.

The “consumer” experience of living in a low-income community is nothing like the experience of people in the middle class and above. You get the feeling that everyone’s not so much a customer to be served than a potential target for exploitation. Instead of a Pottery Barn, you’ve got the rent-to-own store with crappy furniture at usurious rental rates. Instead of a Citibank, you’ve got a pawnshop.

District Heights, Maryland is one of several predominantly Black communities just across the river from D.C., minutes away from the U.S. Capitol. If you drive to the main crossroads in the area, at the intersection of Pennsylvania Ave. and Silver Hill Road, you’ll see a huge dialysis center and a drive-through liquor store, literally right next to each other facing traffic. That’s what you see sitting at the stoplight, and it tells you a lot about the quality of life for many in this community.

And if you go to Penn Station, which is one of the shopping centers nearby, you’ll find two more dialysis centers, and then a third one across the street. There are also a couple dollar stores,  a cash advance and check cashing place, another liquor store, a rent-to-own furniture outlet, and a discount clothing store. Down the road off Silver Hill, there are two pawnshops within about a block of each other.  There are, at least, several grocery stores nearby, which means the area isn’t also a “food desert.” According to the USDA, more than 39 million Americans live in low-income areas with limited access to supermarkets, many of which are disproportionately located in Black communities.

It's hard to overstate how huge the gaps have become in the amount of savings and wealth held by America’s wealthiest families versus households at the bottom. According to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances , the median net worth of families in the bottom 20 percent by income was $14,000 in 2022 – compared to $2.56 million for families in the top 10 percent. People in the bottom half of the income distribution had an average of $54,700 saved up for their retirement – compared to $913,300 for those in the top 10 percent. The racial wealth gap is also appallingly vast. According to the Federal Reserve, the typical Black family’s wealth equals just 15 percent of the wealth held by a typical White household.

How do you want people to feel after reading your book? More importantly, what do you want them to do?

One of the reviews for my book called it “ rage-inducing ,” and more than one person has told me they’ve gotten progressively angrier with each chapter they’ve read.  The book isn’t, however, just a catalog of outrages, and I’m hoping that even if people end up angry, they also end up understanding how we got to where we are. I can’t tell people how to vote, but I think it’s pretty clear who’s responsible for the current state of public policy. I’d like people to use their voice and to use their vote.

America’s right-wing has become so odious that many people, including many progressives, are feeling practically nostalgic for Reagan-era conservatism. I totally get that – Reagan was no insurrectionist, at least!  But it’s crucial not to lose sight of just how destructive Reagan-era conservatism has been, especially for US social policy and how America treats its poor.

Reagan racialized poverty like no other politician before him. He popularized the idea of “ welfare queen s ” sponging off government while living in luxury. His administration also presided over massive cuts to social programs while at the same time providing tax cuts to the rich that ballooned the federal deficit.  And as I write about in the book, he worked aggressively to outsource huge chunks of the government to the private sector, including social services. That’s why we have multi-billion-dollar corporations running state welfare and Medicaid programs and making enormously consequential decisions about access to benefits and people’s well-being. Reagan’s optimistic “Morning in America” image sugarcoated an ideology that was really quite cruel.

I know many progressives, and young progressives in particular, are disappointed by what the Obama and Biden presidencies failed to achieve and are thinking of sitting it out this fall. But is Trump 2.0 really what they’d prefer?  Though Trumpism is ten times more terrifying than Reaganism, they share the same DNA. That’s why Trump wanted work requirements in Medicaid and has no compassion for migrants seeking asylum. He’s beholden to billionaires and elevates white nationalists. His overtures to Black and Hispanic voters aren’t just clumsy – they’re sickeningly hypocritical.

What President Biden called the fight for the “soul of the country” has been going on for 40 years and it culminates this fall. Not to vote is to vote; let’s not lose the battle now.

about this topic

• The upper class has trouble reading other people's emotional states, study says
• The health gap: The rich enjoy ten more years of good health compared to poor
• Trump is conditioning MAGA for the next stage

Chauncey DeVega is a senior politics writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at  Chaunceydevega.com . He also hosts a weekly podcast,  The Chauncey DeVega Show . Chauncey can be followed on  Twitter  and  Facebook .

Related Topics ------------------------------------------

Related articles.

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — American Values — What Is The American Dream Today: It Is Dead

What is The American Dream Today: It is Dead

• Categories: American Dream American Values

About this sample

Words: 1020 |

Published: Oct 2, 2020

Words: 1020 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Table of contents

Destroyers of the american dream: is it dead, the global appeal of the american dream, works cited.

• Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Kline, P., Saez, E., & Turner, N. (2014). Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility. American Economic Review, 104(5), 141-147. doi: 10.1257/aer.104.5.141
• EPI. (2018). State of Working America Wages 2018. Economic Policy Institute. Retrieved from https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2018/
• OECD. (2017). Education at a Glance 2017. OECD Publishing. Retrieved from https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/eag-2017-en.pdf?expires=1612362629&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=7ED21C7700BFD6FDF0BFE2F623DA9AEE
• Reeves, R. V. (2017). Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It. Brookings Institution Press.
• Pantoja, A. D., & Segura, G. M. (2013). Latino America: How America’s Most Dynamic Population is Poised to Transform the Politics of the Nation. Public Affairs.
• Davis, J. B. (2014). Who Stole the American Dream? Random House LLC.
• Freeman, R. B. (2010). Labor Regulations, Unions , and Social Protection in Developing Countries: Market distortions or efficient institutions?. The World Bank Research Observer, 25(2), 151-179. doi: 10.1093/wbro/lkp024
• Galbraith, J. K. (2012). Inequality and instability: A study of the world economy just before the great crisis. Oxford University Press.
• Hacker, J. S., & Pierson, P. (2014). After the ACA: Freeing Americans from the fear of medical bankruptcy. American Journal of Public Health, 104(5), 784-785. doi: 10.2105/ajph.2014.301933
• Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Harvard University Press.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr Jacklynne

Verified writer

• Expert in: Economics Sociology

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

4 pages / 1919 words

3 pages / 1410 words

2 pages / 811 words

1 pages / 1806 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on American Values

'Treason.' Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, www.law.cornell.edu/wex/treason.'Renunciation of U.S. Nationality Abroad.' U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs, [...]

America, often referred to as the "land of the free and the home of the brave," has captured the hearts and aspirations of countless individuals worldwide. As an immigrant who has come to call America home, I have had the [...]

The concept of being a "good American" is deeply rooted in the nation's history and has evolved over time, reflecting changing values, beliefs, and social norms. In this essay, we will explore the multifaceted nature of American [...]

America, a land of opportunity, freedom, and diversity, has captured the hearts of many individuals throughout history. From its stunning landscapes to its vibrant cities, America has a unique charm that draws people from all [...]

Our lives are inherently subjected to economic, political, and sociological trends. Fortunately, the plasticity of human nature allows us to adapt to these perpetually changing environments. Over the past 60 years, the United [...]

Materialism in America isn’t something new, rather it's something that has been a part of American society for some time now. Materialism is defined as valuing material possessions and physical comfort over spiritual values. In [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free