The American Dream is dying. Here’s what can replace it.
Much has been made of America’s fraying social fabric. American pride is at a record low. Polarization is at a record high, as our parties have become rigidly sorted by demographics, income, and education. The crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 Presidential election suggest that foundational trust in public authorities is on a dangerous precipice.
This can be tough to square with some basic facts about America. When visa constraints are removed, the United States is the second most attractive country for high-skill immigrants. The median wealth in the US today is $193k, ranking sixth worldwide. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the US defied global expectations by producing multiple safe and effective vaccines in less than a year, saving an estimated 3 million US lives.
While there are many scapegoats for America’s internal malaise, including the rise of social media and political dysfunction, these explanations miss the forest for the trees. Since its inception, America has lived and died by the sword of meritocracy and the American Dream. This national myth of individualism argues that our most crucial collective identity lies in a combination of opportunity and merit that supports economic, political, and social thriving.
While this trope is still espoused by every major political figure, Americans are finding the American Dream less and less palatable. Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard, studies trends in intergenerational mobility in America. His research finds that the odds that a child grows up to earn more than their parents has decreased steadily over the past fifty years. This empirical finding mirrors public opinion – today over one-third of all Americans say that the American Dream no longer exists.
One approach to this problem suggests we must take drastic action to revitalize the American Dream of eras past. But there are multiple flaws in this line of reasoning. First, most assessments of declining mobility are mostly referring to White men. For African Americans, mobility has always been low. Second, the version of the American Dream that focuses on upward mobility enforces a zero-sum perspective on well-being, where our flourishing is always judged by the yardstick of our parents and our neighbors.
Even if the American Dream and the meritocracy myth are empirically and theoretically flawed, any argument to deflate their influence in the national consciousness must come to the table armed with another pillar to guide us. Otherwise, we are a nation lost at sea, with no religion, ethnicity, culture, or shared values to guide us.
There is only one ethic that can compete with meritocracy: abundance. Anyone who has spent time outside of America will observe the unique, everyday luxuries of our society, including ubiquitous dryers and air conditioners, “Medium” fountain sodas, Targets and Walmarts, and SUVs. But there is more to our abundance than consumption. America accounts for roughly half of the world’s top 100 universities, drug discoveries, and billion dollar companies, despite accounting for only 4% of the world’s population.
Abundance clearly delineates America’s successes from its failures. In the pandemic, we stumbled in the collective action problems of masking and social distancing, but our vaccination efforts were a global success. On climate, America has succeeded in reducing its emissions by 20% since 2005 despite failing to pass any carbon pricing nationally, due to public-private partnerships in clean energy innovation.
Abundance also has the potential to unify progressives and conservatives. The new national consensus around industrial policy, exemplified by Ezra Klein’s supply-side progressivism on the left and Tyler Cowen’s state capacity libertarianism on the right, argues that the best way to solve affordability challenges is to empower the public and private sectors by reducing barriers to innovation and development.
Many will argue that meritocracy is essential to progress. Why else would people choose to build great things, if not for the economic and social returns a meritocracy affords? While this would be a fair response to calls for immediately dismantling our economic or educational systems, this is instead a call for change in political messaging and the justification for public policy decisions.
A shift in messaging away from meritocracy and towards abundance allows us to transcend the zero-sum thinking that says progress is defined by relative gains and a policy is either efficient or equitable. It also successfully locates the enemies of progress as those who are seeking to block abundance – the NIMBYs, lobbyists, border hawks, and degrowthers. Most importantly, it presents an optimistic future for Americans to invest in and be proud of, something everyone can agree we desperately need.