Is the American dream still in reach?

Few tenets of the American mythos are more enduring than the American dream. But the aspiration to move upward toward a brighter tomorrow feels out of reach, a significant number of people in the U.S. tell pollsters — and they aren't necessarily wrong. Just what is the American dream, and what kind of shape is it in today?

What is the American dream?

At its root, it's a "century-old phrase used to describe the idea that anyone can achieve success in the United States through hard work and determination," Pew Research Center said. Historian James Truslow Adams, who coined the phrase in his 1931 book "The Epic of America," added that the American dream is possible "regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."

"Upward mobility became the calling card of American life" with the arrival of the Puritans, who were looking for an alternative to the Old World system in which people "born with titles" were "able to be wealthy and powerful just by virtue of their birth," author Adam Chandler said to Smithsonian Magazine. The idea that anyone can improve their station with hard work and dedication still draws people to America.

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Adams wrote "The Epic of America" at the height of the Great Depression, so his American dream concept was largely aspirational. But a decade later, the dream was coming true.

More than 90% of children born in 1940 ended up better off than their parents, MIT economist Nathaniel Hendren and Harvard economist Raj Chetty have found. But "only around half of those born in the 1980s were able to say the same," The Wall Street Journal said. "It's still a coin flip whether or not you'll earn more than your parents," Hendren said, "but mobility probably hit a record low in the early 2020s."

Is the American dream still attainable?

A narrow 53% majority believes it is, Pew found in an April 2024 poll, while another 41% said it was once possible to attain but no longer. Older and wealthier people were about 25 percentage points more likely than younger and lower-income Americans to say the American dream is possible on the American dream, while people with a college degree were 7 points more bullish than those with less education. Pew found that 31% of respondents felt they had achieved the American team, 36% said they were on their way to achieving it and 30% said it was out of reach.

Belief in the American dream has waxed and waned over the years, dipping in the 1990s and after the 2008 recession and rebounding a bit in the early 2010s. But it has been heading downward for years now.

A July 2024 Wall Street Journal/NORC survey found that "overwhelmingly desire all the traditional trappings of the American dream" — which the Journal described as "owning a home, having a family, and looking forward to a comfortable retirement" — "but very few believe they can easily achieve it." For example, 98% of respondents said owning a home was an essential life goal but only 10% said homeownership was at at least somewhat easy to attain.

Marriage, homeownership and a comfortable retirement seem less like American goals than universal ones. But "people are right to feel that the American dream has become harder to achieve both in terms of their chances of doing better than their parents and their chances of rising out of poverty," Harvard's Chetty said to the Journal.

Why is the American dream increasingly out of reach?

Growing wealth and income inequality and decades of stagnant wages have raised the height of the ceiling for the American dream while leaving the vast majority of people near the floor. Despite America's reputation as a land of opportunity, "there is less movement up and down the economic ladder here than in many other countries," the Brookings Institution said in a 2022 report. In America today, "wealth inequality is high. And wealth status is sticky," and this combination creates "sharp class divides which are at odds with the American dream."

Journalist David Leonhardt, who wrote about the fading American Dream in his 2023 book "Ours Was the Shining Future," primarily blames this stratification on the restructuring of the U.S. economy, from the democratic capitalism that helped create America's large middle class, to the laissez-faire "greed is good" policies that replaced it starting in the 1980s. And thanks to political shifts — Democrats, increasingly college-educated and socially liberal, haven't been able to win enough power to tip the economy back in the other direction, and Republicans aren't interested — "there is no longer a mass movement focused on improving economic outcomes for most Americans," he said in his book. "The country's largest activist groups, on both the left and the right, are focused on other subjects."

High interest and mortgage rates, rising insurance costs, low housing stock and soaring real estate prices have also made it harder for first-time homebuyers to purchase a house, something 75% of Americans consider an essential component of the American dream, according to a November survey by Realtor.com. "The bar keeps getting higher and higher for what it takes to afford the typical home," Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather said to The Wall Street Journal. "Many first-time buyers wish they could take a time machine back five years to when both prices and mortgage rates were significantly lower." Real estate interests may seem invested in tying homeownership to the American dream, but it is one of the primary ways Americans build wealth.

And while "income and wealth inequality have both soared" in America, the "clearest sign of our problems" is the "stagnation of life expectancy for working-class people," Leonhardt said at The New York Times. "In 1980, the U.S. had a typical life expectancy for an affluent country," but now it ranks lower than its peers and even many poorer countries.

Can the dream be revived?

If "the American political system helped create today's problems," then surely "the American political system can solve them," Leonhardt said at the Times. The American dream was made real largely by organized labor, civil rights crusaders and other "often grass-roots political movements" that steadily nudged the government into creating the America they envisioned. If the revitalized labor movement and other groups representing the bottom 90% of Americans can coalesce into a "mass movement organized around the goal of lifting living standards" for the middle class and working class, he added, it "might well succeed. It has before."

Not everyone agrees that the dream is dying. "The American dream is of individual upward mobility, not social progress toward uniformity," John Early and former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) said in the Journal in 2023. And that "American dream is alive and well." Three recent studies, they said, suggest that the "vast majority" of U.S. adults still "have higher income than their parents did."

Ultimately, there is also no one definition of the American dream, and people can fit their dream to their lives or aspirations — a good family life, enjoying bountiful wilderness, the freedom to live as you choose.

Look, "it is better to be born rich, brilliant and beautiful," Early and Gramm said, "but poor, ordinary and homely people succeed in America every day."