Delivering the American Dream More Reliably

March 30, 2025 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We hear a lot about the dangers and “hallucinations” of AI as we test-drive our large language models. At the same time, we probably hear too little about how AI is helping us to advance our body of knowledge by processing huge volumes of data in previously unimagined ways. The benefits don’t always outweigh the risks, but sometimes they do—and in an unprecedented fashion.

I’m thinking today about how AI-driven assessments are starting to tell us whether social policy “fixes” that we implement today are actually achieving their intended results instead of speculating about their possible “pay offs” 10 or 20 years later. These new assessments can help us to determine “the returns on our investments” when we attempt to improve our society by (say) providing paternity leave for fathers, multiplying our social connections, or enhancing the stock of affordable housing in vibrant communities.

Artificial intelligence is already enabling us to identify and refine the variables for public policy success beforehand and to keep track of the resulting benefits in something that approaches real time.

I’ve written here several times about how too many of us are failing to achieve the American Dream. Straightforwardly, that’s whether our economy is affording our nation’s children the opportunity to do better economically than their parents over succeeding generations. For Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps, attaining that American Dream provides a “flourishing” that brings both us and our children psychic benefits (like pride and enhanced self-esteem) as well as greater prosperity and foreward momentum. We calculate the likelihood of its returns in measures of opportunity—from having many opportunites to improve ourselves to having almost none available at all.

Over the past 90 years, for millions in the U.S. (or nearly everyone whose family is not in the top 20 percent income-wise) the quest to attain the American Dream has been disappointing at best, soul-crushing at worst. Our inablity to reliably improve either our fortunes or those of the generations that succeed us unleashes a cascade of unfortunate consequences, such as widespread pessimism about the future, cynicism about our politics, an ever-widening gulf between economic “winners” and “losers,” a rise in “deaths of despair,” and a willingness to gamble on a leader who promises “a new golden age” but never reveals how anyone “who hasn’t gotten there already” will be able to reach it.

_{This is a chart, from a presentation at the Milken Institute by economist and Harvard professor Raj Chetty, includes income measures from tax returns for both parents and their children (both at age 30). Using AI tools, it tracks “the percent of children earning more than their parents” through the mid-1980’s. (The overall percentage has not improved between then and now.) Today, like in 1985, it is “essentially a 50/50 coin flip as to whether you are going to achieve the American Dream.” (A link that will enable a closer view of this chart, along with others included here, is provided below.)}

During the New Deal of the 1930s and Great Society of the 1960s, a raft of social programs was launched to give Americans “who worked hard and were willing to sacrifice for the sake of better tomorrows” greater opportunities to improve their circumstances and live to enjoy “the even greater success” of their children. Unfortunately, our prior attempts to engineer the “economic playing field” so that it delivers the American Dream more reliably have often been little better than “shots in the dark.”

For instance, many New Deal initiatives didn’t succeed until the economic engines of the Second World War kicked in. The “anti-poverty” programs of the Great Society bore fruit in some areas (such as voters’ rights) while causing unexpected consequences in others, like the weakening of low-income families when welfare checks effectively “replaced” fathers’ traditional roles as breadwinners. In those days, policymakers meant well but lacked the assessment tools to know whether their fixes were working until 10 or 20 years out, when they’d sometimes discover that the original problem persisted, or the collateral damage from the policy itself became evident.

Today, new policy-making tools are eliminating much of this guess-work. AI-driven data gathering, experimentation within different communities, and almost “real-time” assessments of progress have begun to transform the ways that new economic policies are developed and implemented. Raj Chetty, the teacher and economist pictured here, is at the forefront of this sea change.

I’m profiling his work today because of the results he, his team and his fellow-travelers in this big-data-driven space are beginning to achieve. But this work also injects a note of optimism into an increasingly pessimistic time. Policy delivery like Chetty’s points towards a future with greater economic promise than the majority of us can see today–when inflation persists, tariffs threaten even higher prices, and government safety nets are dismantled without apparent gains in efficiency. What Chetty calls his “Recipes for Social Mobility” (including his starting point for the chart (above) provide a methodical, evidence-based way to craft, implement and assess the durability of economic policies that could help to deliver the American Dream to millions of anxious families today.

In recent months, Chetty has been doing a kind of “road show” that profiles the early progress of his AI-driven approach. I heard a lecture of his on-line from New Haven three weeks ago, which led me to another talk that he gave during a 2024 conference held at the Milken Center for [yes] Advancing the American Dream in California. The slides and quotations today are from Chetty’s Milken Center presentation and can be given either a listen or a closer look via this link to it on YouTube.

After his first chart about “the fading American Dream,” Chetty presented an interactive U.S. map built upon meticulously assembled data that shows areas in the country where the children of low income parents have “greater” or “lesser” chances at upward social and economic mobility. Essentially, his team gathered income data on 20 million children born in the 1980’s to households earning $27k per year in order to determine how many of those children went on to earn more than their parents—adjusted for inflation—at age 35, localized to the parts of the country where they were living at the time.

_{Chetty’s Geography of Social Mobility chart.}

You’ll notice—somewhat surprisingly—that in this snapshot, kids of low-income parents enjoyed the greatest upward mobility in Dubuque, Iowa while actually losing the most ground compared with their parents in Charlotte, North Carolina over this time frame.

I had some additional reactions (beyond my amazement at the richness of the data painted here). For one thing, if I were on Chetty’s team, I would use colors other than “red” and “blue” to illustrate differences in upward mobility across the U.S. Using this color palette falls too easily (and unnecessarily) into our current Red and Blue state narratives, or exactly the kinds of prejudices that tying communities to actual data are trying to dispel.

While I watched Chetty talk about this slide, I also noticed you can scan a bar code that allows you to examine places that you might be curious about in closer detail (such as where you live) by putting in your zip code when prompted. When I did so, I already suspected that a child’s shot at upward mobility would be relatively low in my Philadelphia neighborhood, but was surprised to learn that it is far higher in many of the central Pennsylvania counties that have long been characterized as “a gun-loving, God-fearing slice of Alabama” between here and Pittsburgh.

While he spoke, Chetty highlighted “the microscopic views and comparisons” that a mapping tool like this allows, particularly when it confounds expectations. He describes, for example, how appalled Charlotte’s civic leaders were when learning about their “worst place finish” in this assessment and how it catalyzed new, similarly data-driven efforts to improve the prospects for that City’s children.

Chetty goes on to juxtapose this chart with an even more interesting one. At first glance one sees its similarities, but its differences are far more intriguing.

_{Contrasting places in the U.S. where there is Economic Opportunity (or Upward Mobility) with places where there are greater or lesser amounts of Economic Connectedness and the kind of Social Capital that it produces.}

The social capital that Chetty illustrates here is the same “commodity” that Bowling Alone’s Bob Putnam has been trying to build throughout his career, as described in my post a couple of weeks ago, “History Suggests that Better Days Could be Coming”. Putnam’s thesis goes like this: if you want to improve your community, state or nation, that drive begins by strengthening your in-person social connections, thereby increasing “the social capital” that’s available for spending when connected individuals wish to solve a problem or better their community’s circumstances.

At it’s simplest, Chetty’s comparison chart shows those places in America where people from different socio-economic backgrounds are more connected to one another, less connected and where there are greater or lesser accumulations of social capital as a result.

Chetty once again reminds us that localizing massive data sets in this manner allows those using these tools to dive even deeper into neighborhood, or even into street-by-street variations in both upward mobility and social capital.

In his “economic connectedness” map, social capital acrues from the amount of “cross-class interaction” that occurs between high and low income people in each county, town and neighborhood in the U.S. This relationship is key because Chetty’s team had already established that “the single strongest predictor of your chances of rising up is how connected you [or those most in need of “upward mobility”] are to higher income folks,” as opposed to living in a place where nearly everyone is on the same rung of the economic ladder.

To compile this chart, Chetty collaborated with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s “core data science team” to access the voluminous data the social network has gathered on the 72 million Americans who use the platform. He wanted to identify low-income users and determine how many “above median income friends” each one of them has, before breaking that aggregate snapshot down with his powerful mapping tool.

Connections across income classes produce opportunities “like getting a job referral, or an internship.” But Chetty also identified an “aspirational” component when members of different economic classes interact with one another on a regualr basis.

If you’ve never met somebody who went to college, you don’t think about that as a possibility for you. If you’re in a community where you’ve seen more people succeed in certain career pathways, that can change kid’s lives…

Once again, a few of my reactions to the comparisons these big-data snapshots invite.

_{A detailed view of the mid-Atlantic in general, and Philadelphia in particular, on Chetty’s mapping of Economic Connectedness.}

Despite Philadelphia’s “relatively weak” score on upward mobility, I was also not surprised that my part of the state ranks as “relatively strong” (or a medium shade of blue) when it comes to the social capital that’s produced by our economic connectedness. Among many other things, that means those of us in Southeastern Pennsylvania already have a relatively-strong foundation for driving greater upward mobility, along with more helpful data about our localized advantages and challenges as we dig deeper into our particular blocks on this map.

On the other hand, I found the social policy solution that Chetty profiled in his talk somewhat disappointing, although it seemed to me that the experimental template that gave rise to it would be a serviceable-enough incubator for additional policies going forward.

He describes at length a test study his team initiated in Seattle involving low income households with subsidized (formerly Title 8) housing vouchers. Their first discovery was that most voucher holders try to use them in their own communities, with little or no gain in economic connectedness. They then realized that while “real-estate brokers” are commonly used for finding places to live in higher income communities, their eqivalent is non-existent for those who want to get “the most bang for the buck” out of the $2500 credit in one of these housing vouchers.

Chetty’s team concluded that if a sponsor (e.g. a local government, for-profit or non-profit) wanted to build social capital for low-income households, it could spend what amounted to 2% of the value of each voucher to hire “brokers” to help low-income residents find housing in communities with greater economic connectedness than the uniformly impoverished neighborhoods where most of them lived.

This solution was affordable and it quickly built social capital for low income individuals, but even under the best of circumstances it is unlikely to impact enough households because of the limited amounts of affordable housing in most higher income communities, a fact that Chetty readily admits:

I don’t want to give the impression that I think the desegregation approach, moving people to different areas, is the only thing we should do. Obviously, that’s not going to be a scalable approach in and of itself.

But this demonstration of how to engineer a social policy illustrates the potential for modeling and testing reforms that can attract “smarter, evidence-driven investments” as mapping tools like these are refined and used by more policy makers.

Chetty’s Seattle experiment also puts a spotlight on social programs that increase economic connectedness. While the parents who were able to move from low income communities to mixed income neighborhoods surely had an opportunity to realize gains in social capital, it’s their children who stood to benefit the most from more diverse schools, better playgrounds and exposure to career options they might never have considered before.

What motivates Chetty, his team and his hosts at the Milken Institute the most are the opportunities that these AI-driven, data-rich tools will be presenting in the very near future to the millions who are pursuing the American Dream but failing to achieve it.

Twenty years ago, a civil rights organization that sought to open pathways towards college and upward mobility had, as its memorable motto: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

With a conclusion as obvious as that in mind, I’ll give Raj Chetty’s final presentation slide some of the last words here about assets that we’ve been wasting for far too long.

_{The box reads: “If women, minorities, and children from low income families invent at the same rate as high-income white men, the innovation rate in America wouild quadruple.“}

I guess I would prefer to make this slide more powerful still.

It’s true that we’re wasting many of our most valuable people-assets in the US. today, but “delivering the American Dream more reliably” is not the legacy of “high-income white men.” First off, many of our most successful innovators today aren’t “white” but are people of color, immigrants and their descendants (like Chetty himself). Moreover, this is an 80%-of-America size problem (or everyone who’s NOT in the top 20% income-wise) not a burden that’s only carried by previously marginalized communities. I believe that Chetty’s ground-breaking work will attract the base of support that it deserves if slides like this are imodified to reflect the true magnitude of our Lost Einsteins. So I don’t know how Chetty’s team quantified the “lost opportunities” highlighted here “as quadruple” the number of our current innovators, but I’d wager that’s an undercount.

+ + +

For those who are interested, I’ve written about our frustrated pursuit of the American Dream several times before. These posts include:

“The Great Resignation is an Exercise in Frustration and Futility” (citing data that government management of the economy has caused our middle and lower classes to realize essentially the same income due to government transfer payments, arguing that perverse incentives such as “these redistributions of wealth also stifle upward mobility”);
“Let’s Revitalize the American Dream” (citing a 2015 study that found the U.S. ranks “among the lowest of all developed countries in terms of the potential for upward mobility despite clinging to the mythology of Horatio Alger”); and
“America Needs a Rebranding Campaign” (If “equality of opportunity” is really our touchstone as a nation, then it “needs to infuse every brand touchpoint” of ours, including our “packaging, public relations, advertising, services, partnerships, social responsibility, HR & recruitment, loyalty programs, events & activations, user experience, sourcing & standards, and product portfolio.” In other words, America needs “to start walking the equality-of-opportunity walk,” instead of just talking about it.)

This post was adapted from my March 9, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

With Upward Mobility Frustrated at Every Turn, Let’s Revitalize the American Dream

October 6, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As I write this, tens of thousands of people are waiting in line in London “to pay their respects” to the Queen. This is no casual choice, since the viewing-line stretches for miles and it could take you a day to reach your goal, which is a walking glimpse (and perhaps a bow of the head or bended knee) before her standard-draped coffin in Westminster Hall.

If you were lucky enough yesterday, the trajectory of your arrival might also have coincided with the brief visit by the Queen’s children (and new King) who were there paying homage to her memory at the compass points of her resting place. But the lines that kept forming outside didn’t need the glimpse of any living royal.

Some asked why so many would wait so long to just walk by.

In my own wondering, I learned that since at least World War II, the Brits have developed a curmudgeonly fondness for standing, waiting for something and ambling towards “whatever it is” with others, chatting and complaining as they go. In the War years, the quest was for rations; today, it’s for a different kind of sustenance.

The British are known for their love of getting in line, which in Britain has long been called a ‘queue,’ from the French word for tail. It was once said ‘an Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.’

Despite the solitary joke, joining a queue is essentially a group experience, the participants joined by a common desire about what they’re likely to find at the end along the way.

Jenny Muskat, a middle-age woman from London, emerged from Westminster Hall late Thursday and said it took her ‘only’ six-and-a-half hours of waiting. She said she had been unsure earlier in the day about joining the line, but was happy she did after making fast friends with others in the queue. ‘We spent all these hours together, we laughed together, we just now cried together, and it was beautiful,’ she said.

What most of these Brits are doing—and it seems incomprehensible to some—is investing a great deal of time and effort to express their collective respect. They’re saying by this stupendous outpouring: “Thank you. As our Queen, you have given me, given all of us a great deal. In fact, you’ve given us a view of our best selves: Steady. Gracious. Tireless. Of our wry sense of humor. Thank you for being there, for making the rest of us look this good for all these years.”

Masses of people “paying their respect” seems almost unthinkable at a time when irony and cynicism make short work out of anything that’s cherished. People on social media were incredulous that anyone in their right mind would wait for that many hours to walk past a box with a body in it. If a national figure with millions of followers like Donald Trump (certainly a ”comparable” in terms of devotion) were to die tomorrow, the crowds would surely come out, but their gathering would be more of a political act, a kind of middle finger to everyone who didn’t come out, instead of a mass demonstration of respect for public virtues and the personal impacts of their mirrored glory.

_{The Queen’s Queue}

To me, the Magic of the Queen derived from the fact that she was always, throughout her very long life, a kind of cipher. We knew what she wanted us to know about her, and almost nothing more—those virtues again, like steadfastness, self-restraint and even nobility while she was greeting “her people” and accepting their hellos and flowers in her “walkabouts” at another town hall or soccer field.

Because the Queen was a kind of screen, her subjects and other admirers could project what they wanted onto her—a sense of majesty or a quintessential Britishness—and see such qualities reflected back upon them. Her fans are grateful today, eager to express their thanks and respect, because this idealized Queen made these “commoners” feel better about the parts of her that they see in themselves, and that at a time when almost nothing else in modern life does.

The closest that Americans come to this kind of “give and take” with popular figures tend to involve individuals with two qualities that are very different from those that the Queen projected and then returned by way of “reflected glory.” Our idealized figures are usually both “self-made” and “very rich.” The clearest example I can think of is Steve Jobs, who turned his particular mirror back on the rest of us by encouraging the dream that we could also transform the world (and become fabulously rich in the process) by having an idea and a garage in which to realize it. Interestingly, some of Jobs’ unshakable aura may also have come from his timing. In the years after his passing, social media’s cynicism and irony have done a better job of rightsizing his successors (like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos) so that their reflected glories are much less desirable to see in ourselves.

Instead these days, most of us have to project our plans about “making ourselves” and “becoming rich” onto a faceless American Dream, while hoping that what gets reflected back encourages our self-sacrifice, inventiveness, hard work and everyday desire to give our children better lives than we’ve had. Unfortunately, while millions continue to believe in that Dream, its promises are no longer encouraging most of us to work harder to achieve it. Instead, those workers who are paying attention in the lower 4/5ths of our economy feel stifled, stuck, betrayed, undermined and “quietly quitting” instead of having their upward mobility encouraged and advanced.

I say “those who are paying attention” because the “tradeoffs” of a top-down, government-managed economy (from the more entrepreneurial one that we had until the 1970s) were not only greater “fairness to all” (without regard to individual talent or effort), but also more material well-being (that is, more stuff) so that hopefully no one would feel quite so badly about the loss of an economic upside, and well-oiled corporations could reap more profits by satisfying our consuming desires.

Having this glut of stuff, along with the distractions of entertainment and social media—its full-bore anesthetizing effects as the years spooled on—are what Aldus Huxley forecast in “Brave New World Revisited,” written in 1932. In a prior post called Whose Future Should We Fear Most (which contrasted George Orwell’s and Huxley’s forecasts through today), I tried to capture the context for mass sedation that Huxley’s book so accurately anticipated.

In our era of 24/7 entertainment ‘on demand,’ of non-stop drama from our ‘news’ outlets, and of a constant barrage of social media updates, none of us ever has to pay much attention to what is happening in the so-called “real world” or the roles we should be playing in it. There is always a new ‘prompt’ from our phones, watches or “smart” speakers to provide us with a refuge from reality. The soma of near constant screen distraction and ‘the internet of things’ has also become a fixture of our daily lives in the four score years since Brave New World was published.

Too many who are no longer animated by the American Dream or disappointed by its promises have also been reduced to passivity by these diversions. They simply can’t be bothered to muster a justifiable sense of outrage before Netflix or YouTube suggests the next thing for them to watch.

But as inflation bites and more data gets mustered, it’s amazing to me that anyone “who’s not already rich or totally checked out” can avoid a sense of outrage and its class-driven political upheavals.

In a post from a couple of weeks back called The Great Resignation is an Exercise in Frustration and Futility I cited data suggesting that government management of the economy has caused the middle, lower middle, and lowest economic classes to realize essentially the same income at the end of their working (or non-working) days due to government transfer payments. But these redistributions of wealth also stifle upward mobility. Mass quitting followed by a frantic search for “better lives via better jobs” is not only a fool’s errand but also an invitation to deeper resentments against “capitalism” and “the American way of life.” It embodies the reality that most Americans these days feel stuck on their rungs of the economic ladder.

The effective death-knell for upward mobility may be saddest for previously disadvantaged people who have struggled and saved and sacrificed so that they could reach the middle classes only to find that they’re still experiencing economic anxiety over the costs of health care, education, a comfortable retirement or an unexpected emergency. It’s hard working rural or immigrant whites, urban Blacks, second or third generation Latinos who finally thought they’d broken through—were on their way to the Dream they’d projected their hopes upon—only to find that nothing but futility was reflecting back on them and making them feel like failures.

These white, brown and black Americans have sometimes directed their anger and bitterness towards the poorest among us who seem to be living as well as they are, or towards rich/oblivious Progressives at the top of the pile who can afford to have privileged views since they come at the expense of the remaining 80%. Instead of having someone to be thankful for (like the Queen) or to aspire to be like (such as Steve Jobs), Americans have been finding scapegoats for their rage like Black Lives Matter and its supporters or the Coastal Elites.

Notwithstanding where we find ourselves today (and in spite of all evidence to the contrary), the American Dream still encourages more hope than it can deliver on, and the country’s ire still hasn’t turned on the richest 20%, or the corporations that are also accruing a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth.

Instead, there are enough folks in that lower 80% who still believe they can hit the economic jackpot that neither the “Occupy Wall Street” uprising of 2011 nor Bernie Sander’s democratic socialism movement in 2016 could enlist enough of the disgruntled masses. Moreover, while President Trump was directing his ire at poor and often minority protestors after the death of George Floyd, he and Congress enhanced the protections for the richest Americans and our most profitable corporations in the so-called Tax Reform Act of 2017. Like we were his game-show contestants, he continued to hock the Dream by telling us: Everyone in America can be a billionaire, just like me, once we rid ourselves of all these freeloaders.

Our increasingly empty Dream was about to lose even more of its hold on our imaginations during the pandemic. As a consequence, the pressure in the pressure cooker for the vast majority that finds it nearly impossible to better their circumstances will continue to build against the way that our elected leaders (both Democrat and Republican) have managed the American economy and designated its winners and losers for the past 50 years.

So where do we go from here?

Like an anti-addiction program, the first step is acknowledging the overwhelming evidence of the American Dream’s fragile state. In 2015, according to a study reported in Fast Company, the U.S. already ranked “among the lowest of all developed countries in terms of the potential for upward mobility, despite clinging to the mythology of Horatio Alger.” That article, called “The American Dream is Dead: Here’s Where It Went,” provided a breakdown of the developed countries where your chances of rising economically were the strongest.

1. Denmark
2. Norway
3. Finland
4. Canada
5. Australia
6. Sweden
7. New Zealand
8. Germany
9. Japan
10. Spain

America is simply not the Land of (Economic) Opportunity that it once was.

In my Great Resignation post, I joined Nobel-Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps in waxing nostalgic for a more-entrepreneurial/ less-government-managed economy given the psychological and economic benefits that it brings to everyone who’s willing to work hard to get ahead. But Phelps didn’t provide much of a roadmap to recover our economic vitality when he wrote “Mass Flourishing.” On the other hand another economist, Oren Cass, has several ideas about boosting upward mobility for all American workers given the much-changed country that we’re living in today. (See my 2019 post A Winter of Work Needs More Color for an overview of Cass’s proposals, including incentivizing all of the country’s working families instead of subsidizing only a few of its most impoverished ones.)

In line with both Phelps’s and Cass’s thinking, we need to come to a more inclusive approach to the harms that follow when we stifle individual initiative and deprive a vast majority of the workerforce of its financial and psychological rewards.

A study that was reported out of Yale University this week argues that the lack of upward mobility early in life increases mortality rates in all young adults who confront it. While the emphasis in the study’s presentation was on groups that suffer the most (like young urban Blacks), it’s important to note the pernicious effects that are felt by every young person when they feel that they can’t improve their personal fortunes. A similar message came from studying pockets of white rural America that are dying from opioid abuse and suicide as chronicled in Angus Deaton’s and Anne Case’s ground-breaking “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” a book I briefly discussed here in another earlier post.

Many of the researchers and prognosticators who have confronted these problems have argued that “intergenerational wealth accumulation” is essential for upward economic mobility. In other words, how much your parents or even grandparents “had” and “left to you” may be as significant (if not more) to upward mobility than your personal work ethic. Some observers, like the author of this New York Magazine essay, clearly agree:

Without the safety net of accumulated family wealth, the children of self-made men and women can be ‘unmade’ in a hurry. With such wealth, by contrast, the trust-fund deadbeat’s child can follow her grandparents’ footsteps back through Harvard.
Thus, making America an exceptionally [upwardly] mobile society [again] will require a greater degree of income and wealth redistribution than most politicians would dare to suggest: To get more poor kids up the ‘ladder of opportunity’ we’re going to have to shorten the space between its rungs.

With my caveat that it’s not just “poor kids” but (more accurately) nearly everyone in the middle, lower middle and lowest classes, I am reluctant to argue that the same bipartisan government that nearly killed the American Dream should be given the mandate of “redistributing” the accumulated wealth at the top of our economy’s pyramid. But something needs to be done. If unlocking the nation’s sleeping economic vitality can’t be driven by wise leaders, than it is likely to be advanced by protests (and worse) on the streets.

Projecting my hopes for upward mobility onto the American Dream doesn’t have to become a reminder of my failures as a worker, it simply doesn’t. And allowing that kind of resentment to keep accruing is a dangerous thing.

Just as the Brits saw their reflected glory in their Queen and wanted to thank her for it, we can recover our reflected glory in the promises of that Dream—but we’ll have to want it as a country, almost more than we want anything else, given how hard that revitalization process is likely to be.

This post was adapted from my September 18, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

With Upward Mobility Frustrated at Every Turn, Let’s Revitalize the American Dream

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