The American dream is dying, according to the Times. To mark the US’s 250th anniversary, the paper commissioned YouGov to explore whether the country’s citizens still believe that if you ‘work hard and play by the rules’ you will eventually be successful.
Turns out, only 38 per cent of the respondents think this applies to all Americans, while 59 per cent think the American dream is now less attainable than it was when they were growing up. In addition, 38 per cent rated today’s quality of life as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’, compared with 60 per cent who said the same about 1976, the bicentennial year.
No doubt flatlining real wages and the hollowing out of America’s middle class have played a part in this increasing pessimism, but it’s worth noting that the American dream has never really been grounded in reality. If you define it in terms of how many generations it takes a child from a modest background to reach the average level of income, the Nordic countries come out on top in the OECD, where it takes two generations; America in the bottom half, takes five generations. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Social Mobility Index, the US ranks 27th out of 82 countries, while Canada ranks 14th and the UK 21st.
In mitigation, one reason it takes longer for a poor person’s descendants to earn the average income in the US is because this is a lot higher than it is in most OECD countries. In Canada, the median income is approximately$40,000, whereas in the US it’s $59,000. GDP per capita is a slightly different metric, but the Institute of Economic Affairs recently published a revealing survey in which it asked Britons where they thought the UK ranked among US states according to that standard. The answer was seventh, but the correct answer is 51st: Britain is poorer than Mississippi, the poorest American state.
So seeing America as a land of opportunity is an illusion, but it’s one that has probably contributed to its economic prosperity. People will work harder if they believe that sheer effort will propel them to the top, even if it won’t. For that reason, the loss of faith in the American dream could have serious economic consequences. But there’s also a dark underbelly to that noble lie which I experienced during the five years I spent in New York.
From the moment I arrived in 1995, I was struck by how contemptuous people were of the people below them in the socioeconomic hierarchy. In London, the professional classes were – outwardly, at least – respectful of the service personnel they came into contact with every day, careful not to make them feel inferior by virtue of the gulf in status that separated them. In New York, by contrast, such noblesse oblige was almost unknown. Successful people drew attention to their superior status at every opportunity, with none of the middle-class guilt I’d grown used to in England.
Had these cock-of-the-walks earned their places at the top of the pecking order, that would have been understandable. But most of them had been born to a life of privilege. Their achievement consisted of remaining in the same income bracket as their parents. Why, then, did they behave as if they’d pulled themselves up by their bootstraps? The answer, I eventually worked out, is because they believed in the American dream. So powerful is that myth, they were able to persuade themselves that they deserved their immense good fortune in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. But worse than that, they were convinced that those lower down the food chain also deserved their inferior status, hence the dismissive attitude.
In New York, successful people drew attention to their superior status at every opportunity
I’m beginning to sound like a socialist, but the lesson I took from this was the opposite. All the things I disliked about Britain – the public schools, the belief that it’s not what you know but who you know, the hereditary principle – actually made life more bearable. Because we’re convinced our society is still hidebound by class (a belief no more grounded in reality than the American dream), the people at the top are plagued by doubt about whether they’re entitled to their success and the people at the bottom don’t feel so bad about themselves. If inequality is inevitable, I concluded, better that people think it’s undeserved than deserved.
So if the American dream really is beginning to lose its mythical power, that may not be such a bad thing. Yes, it’s been an engine of growth, but it’s also convinced US citizens that life outcomes are far more closely linked to merit than they really are. As one New Yorker put it to me: ‘Too many of us were born on third and think we’ve hit a triple.’
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