The American Dream

What’s the idea?

When it was first coined, The American Dream was described as ‘that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.’

What makes it powerful?

What could be more alluring? The American Dream represents the opportunity to wipe the slate clean of unfair advantage, creating a place where each person’s fortune is only defined by their actions. Initially the allure for American settlers was the promise of benefiting more from their labour instead of nobility reaping the rewards. But the Californian Gold Rush evolved many settlers’ aspirations from just wanting to earn an honest living to aspiring to never having to work again. Which in turn evolved many people’s definition of the American Dream to also become synonymous with achieving enormous wealth.?

How did it start?

The term ‘The American Dream’ was coined in a best-selling book in 1931 titled ‘Epic of America,’ by James Truslow Adams. However the concept is much older and forms the basis of the US Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, which state that ‘all men are created equal’, having an inalienable right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’.?

The concept of fairer societies and treating people more equally are no new thing, but by coining it an American ideal Adams created an enormously powerful piece of language that united an otherwise disparate nation of peoples. The enormous range of backgrounds of American citizens over the years has culminated in a country that is not united by a single culture, religion or even language. The American Dream then is a national rallying cry, and was perhaps a critical factor in contributing towards US cultural dominance in the 20th century.?

How did it change the world?

When one phrase sums up something so key to the identity of a nation it’s a little difficult to separate the impact of the country from the idea.

However if we consider the American Dream to mostly be an attitude toward work, we can ask what the global impact has been of the idea that all people have equal opportunity to generate significant wealth in their lifetime, as long as they work hard enough?

Post-war, with an enormous cultural and economic gap in the world order, this concept would have been very aspirational for countries emerging from imperial rule (not unlike the US itself).?

So other nations with strong work ethics may have been inspired by the American model. For example, can we see a touch of the American Dream in the workaholic cultures of Japan and South Korea? The world’s biggest democracy, India, has obviously taken some inspiration with Bollywood, and the development of Silicon Valley-esque Bengaluru.?

Across East Asia, even in China, extreme college entrance exam culture designates teenagers with scores that determine their careers later in life, in a very high-pressure meritocratic approach that isn’t too far from the principles of the American Dream.??

And of course other former British colonies like Australia and Canada have very similar working conditions to the US, even Britain now has an attitude toward work that is closer to the States than its European cousins.?

What’s next?

Whilst having been the dominant attitude toward work for 75 years, there are increasing challenges to the American Dream ideal even within the US. With more conversation about mental health, there is greater awareness of the impact of highly stressful jobs on long-term wellbeing. And with better technology there is greater awareness of the different working styles of nations that ‘work to live’ rather than ‘live to work’, creating online conversation about work/life balance. This became particularly pronounced during and after the Pandemic with the Great Resignation and the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early). When citizens are better educated and more scientifically informed than ever, will the American Dream survive in the face of research that suggests work can be bad for us?

There are also frustrations that the American Dream was supposed to create a fairer society, where individual merit was rewarded over inborn privilege. But overwhelmingly women and ethnic minorities do not believe that the current system is capable of creating equal opportunity for them, and social mobility is measurably worse in the US than most European countries.?

With financial inequality deepening, and the wealthy passing their wealth only onto their children, the key tenets of Adams’ original vision are under threat. Particularly as privileged figures like Trump rewrite their personal histories to suggest that they embody the ideals of the American Dream, when their stories are about as far from rags to riches as is possible. Just look to the recent backlash against ‘nepo babies’ on social media to see the building anger amongst young people toward this inequality.??

It begs the question of whether the American Dream is sustainable for a highly developed country. Is it actually more like a challenger brand positioning, only achievable when everyone is starting out with the same (nothing)? How can you continue to get everyone in your population to believe that there is a level playing field when your country is top of the leaderboards and they are still trapped in poverty??

And what about a future where the world of work is categorically redefined by another new world order - what happens to the American identity when the average Joe is having to compete against AI for a living? Will he still believe in his opportunity to ‘make it’ then?

The American Dream may not be dead yet, but it has a challenging future ahead.