The American Dream on Black Friday

Aaron Zitner at WSJ:

The American dream—the proposition that anyone who works hard can get ahead, regardless of their background—has slipped out of reach in the minds of many Americans.

Only 36% of voters in a new Wall Street Journal/NORC survey said the American dream still holds true, substantially fewer than the 53% who said so in 2012 and 48% in 2016 in similar surveys of adults by another pollster. When a Wall Street Journal poll last year asked whether people who work hard were likely to get ahead in this country, some 68% said yes—nearly twice the share as in the new poll.

American Dream

Daniel A. Cox and Ruy Teixeira at the Survey Center on American Life:

 Public attitudes about the American dream are somewhat more positive. Most Americans believe they are already living the American dream (32 percent) or that they will reach it in their lifetime (31 percent). Thirty-six percent of Americans say they will not reach it in their lifetime.

Although white Americans are far more likely than others to report that they have achieved the American dream, black (41 percent), Hispanic (40 percent), and Asian (44 percent) Americans generally remain optimistic that it is still within reach. Nearly four in 10 (39 percent) white Americans say they are living the American dream, compared to fewer than one in four Hispanic (24 percent), Asian (21 percent), and black (18 percent) Americans. Despite these differences in experience, more than one-third of black (40 percent), Hispanic (36 percent), and Asian (35 percent), and white (34 percent) Americans believe they will not achieve the American dream in their lifetime.

Understandably, perspectives on the American dream vary with age. Sixty-three percent of retirees (age 65 and older) believe they have already achieved the American dream. An additional 12 percent say they will yet reach it. Older Americans (24 percent) are also least likely to say they will not reach the American dream in their lifetime. Roughly four in 10 young and middle-aged Americans are similarly pessimistic (40 percent vs. 39 percent, respectively).

Education, a core element of socioeconomic mobility, is closely associated with perceptions of the American dream. Twenty-three percent of high school–educated Americans say they have already achieved the American dream, compared to 30 percent of Americans with some college or an associate degree, 42 percent of Americans with a four-year degree, and 47 percent of Americans with an advanced degree. This educational divide is mirrored among Americans who say they will not reach the American dream in their lifetime. Forty-two percent of high school–educated Americans say they will not achieve the American dream, compared to 24 percent of college-educated Americans.

Ke Huy Quan

Previous posts have noted how much Vietnamese refugees have contributed to the United States.

Ke Huy Quan's  acceptance speech  for best actor in a supporting role for his performance in "Everything Everywhere All at Once."

Thank you. Thank you. My mom is 84 years old and she's at home watching. Mom, I just won an Oscar! My journey started on a boat. I spent a year in a refugee camp. And somehow, I ended up here on Hollywood's biggest stage. They say stories like these only happen in the movies. I cannot believe it's happening to me. This– this is the American dream. Thank you so much.

...

I owe everything to the love of my life, my wife, Echo, who month after month, year after year for 20 years, told me that one day my time will come. Dreams are something you have to believe in. I almost gave up on mine. To all of you out there, please keep your dreams alive. Thank you, thank you so much for welcoming me back. I love you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The Mayflower Compact

Stephen B. Young at The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

The founding impulse for America came with the Pilgrims, mooring at Plymouth 400 years ago this autumn. The Calvinist Pilgrims came in search of a place to live out their faith — an intangible mind-set that called them to work and to pray. They set moral standards for themselves and organized their personal, family and community lives to aspire to those ideals.

Their moral vision was of a community of industrious believers in the good, of proud and hardworking, self-governing individuals, accepting a vocation of service to God and community.

The men who had chosen this course for their families agreed to:

“Solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another; covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic ... to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws ... as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good ... .”

This Mayflower Compact provided for the rule of law in governing the community; it honored personal freedoms under the law; it set expectations of each person to work for both personal and the common good. It presumed good will, good faith and commitment on the part of those who joined the common effort. It also presumed some education and rationality.

This moral vision came to be the American dream.

In 1776, this aspiration was applied to ennoble political separation from the government of Great Britain. The Declaration of Independence echoed the Mayflower Compact in being a contract among those who believed in “certain truths.” The new nation of the United States of America would seek to live by ideals, not by tribal identity or by the doctrines of any one religion. The new nation would be a novus ordo seclorum — “a new order for the ages.”

Immigration and Social Mobility

At the National Bureau of Economic Research, Ran Abramitzky and colleagues have a paper titled "Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in the US over Two Centuries." The abstract:

Using millions of father-son pairs spanning more than 100 years of US history, we find that children of immigrants from nearly every sending country have higher rates of  upward mobility than children of the US-born. Immigrants’ advantage is similar historically and today despite dramatic shifts in sending countries and US immigration policy. In the past, this advantage can be explained by immigrants moving to areas with better prospects for their children and by “underplacement” of the first generation in the income distribution. These findings are consistent with the “American Dream” view that even poorer immigrants can improve their children’s prospects.

Reagan's Last Speech as President

Ronald Reagan, Remarks at the Presentation Ceremony for the Presidential Medal of Freedom Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/253440

 Now, tomorrow is a special day for me. I'm going to receive my gold watch. And since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it's fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: "You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American."

Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors. It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world. For it's the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America's triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond. Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close.

This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength-from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.

A number of years ago, an American student traveling in Europe took an East German ship across the Baltic Sea. One of the ship's crewmembers from East Germany, a man in his sixties, struck up a conversation with the American student. After a while the student asked the man how he had learned such good English. And the man explained that he had once lived in America. He said that for over a year he had worked as a farmer in Oklahoma and California, that he had planted tomatoes and picked ripe melons. It was, the man said, the happiest time of his life. Well, the student, who had seen the awful conditions behind the Iron Curtain, blurted out the question, "Well, why did you ever leave?" "I had to," he said, "the war ended." The man had been in America as a German prisoner of war.

Now, I don't tell this story to make the case for former POW's. Instead, I tell this story just to remind you of the magical, intoxicating power of America. We may sometimes forget it, but others do not. Even a man from a country at war with the United States, while held here as a prisoner, could fall in love with us. Those who become American citizens love this country even more. And that's why the Statue of Liberty lifts her lamp to welcome them to the golden door.

It is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream. And over and over, they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. They give more than they receive. They labor and succeed. And often they are entrepreneurs. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world—the last, best hope of man on Earth.

American Dream, Religion, Civic Life

AEI survey on the American Dream:

• While most Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, they are optimistic about life in their communities and their ability to achieve the American dream.
• Most people say their neighbors get along well and are willing to help each other, even though fewer report regularly helping their neighbors or trying to work together to fix or improve something in their neighborhood.
• Americans derive a sense of community from their friends, neighborhoods, and hometowns more than their ideology or ethnic identity. Regular interaction with friends and neighbors produces a strong sense of community.
• People who live close to an ample number of amenities such as schools, parks, libraries, and restaurants are happier with their communities, more engaged with their neighbors, and less lonely.
• While loneliness is a significant problem, it may not be the epidemic that some claim.

From the report:

The SCS [AEI Survey on Community and Society] asks Americans about their involvement in a variety of organizations. The question is specific, asking people whether they have been active members in the past year, “by which we mean you do volunteer work, participate, and/or attend meetings and events, doing more than just donating, paying dues or following on social media” in any of 11 different types of organizations. As Figure 7 shows, 44 percent indicate no active membership in these types of groups. A quarter have been active in only one type of group in the past year, and 29 percent have been active in two or more.

Membership in a religious organization is most common, with 22 percent saying they have been active members, followed by 14 percent who have been active in an education- or school-based organization, 13 percent in a volunteer public service organization, 12 percent in a business or professional organization, 11 percent in an organization for hobbies or cultural activities, and 10 percent in an athletic team or outdoor activities group. Fewer than 10 percent report active membership in each of the other types of organizations mentioned.

...
The SCS asks respondents whether they had done any of nine different political activities in the past two years. (See Figure 9.) Seventy-one percent report that they voted regularly in national elections, and 61 percent say they voted regularly in local elections. Thirty-one percent say they publicly expressed their support for a political campaign on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media. Around a quarter say they contacted any elected official or politician in the past two years (27 percent); asked their friends, neighbors, family, or coworkers to support a candidate or political position (26 percent); or displayed a political or campaign poster, bumper sticker, lawn sign, or clothing (24 percent). Twenty percent say they attended a rally, protest, speech, or campaign event, and 18 percent say they contributed money to a candidate running for office or a group working to affect public policy. Twelve percent say they worked or volunteered for a political party, candidate, or group that tried to influence policy.  

 From Pew:

People who are active in religious congregations tend to be happier and more civically engaged than either religiously unaffiliated adults or inactive members of religious groups, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of survey data from the United States and more than two dozen other countries.

Religiously active people also tend to smoke and drink less, but they are nothealthier in terms of exercise frequency and rates of obesity. Nor, in most countries, are highly religious people more likely to rate themselves as being in very good overall health – though the U.S. is among the possible exceptions.

...
In the U.S., 58% of actively religious adults say they are also active in at least one other (nonreligious) kind of voluntary organization, including charity groups, sports clubs or labor unions. Only about half of all inactively religious adults (51%) and fewer than half of the unaffiliated (39%) say the same.7

...
In addition, a higher percentage of actively religious adults in the United States (69%) say they always vote in national elections than do either inactives (59%) or the unaffiliated (48%).

Muslim Americans Are Patriotic

Pew reports:

Despite the concerns and perceived challenges they face, 89% of Muslims say they are both proud to be American and proud to be Muslim. Fully eight-in-ten say they are satisfied with the way things are going in their lives. And a large majority of U.S. Muslims continue to profess faith in the American dream, with 70% saying that most people who want to get ahead can make it in America if they are willing to work hard.

These are among the key findings of Pew Research Center’s new survey of U.S. Muslims, conducted Jan. 23 to May 2, 2017, on landlines and cellphones, among a representative sample of 1,001 Muslim adults living in the United States. This is the third time Pew Research Center has conducted a comprehensive survey of U.S. Muslims. The Center’s initial survey of Muslim Americans was conducted in 2007; the second survey took place in 2011.

Religious Breakdown

 Peter Beinart writes at The Atlantic:

When pundits describe the Americans who sleep in on Sundays, they often conjure left-leaning hipsters. But religious attendance is down among Republicans, too. According to data assembled for me by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the percentage of white Republicans with no religious affiliation has nearly tripled since 1990. This shift helped Trump win the GOP nomination. During the campaign, commentators had a hard time reconciling Trump’s apparent ignorance of Christianity and his history of pro-choice and pro-gay-rights statements with his support from evangelicals. But as Notre Dame’s Geoffrey Layman noted, “Trump does best among evangelicals with one key trait: They don’t really go to church.” A Pew Research Center poll last March found that Trump trailed Ted Cruz by 15 points among Republicans who attended religious services every week. But he led Cruz by a whopping 27 points among those who did not.

Why did these religiously unaffiliated Republicans embrace Trump’s bleak view of America more readily than their churchgoing peers? Has the absence of church made their lives worse? Or are people with troubled lives more likely to stop attending services in the first place? Establishing causation is difficult, but we know that culturally conservative white Americans who are disengaged from church experience less economic success and more family breakdown than those who remain connected, and they grow more pessimistic and resentful. Since the early 1970s, according to W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, rates of religious attendance have fallen more than twice as much among whites without a college degree as among those who graduated college. And even within the white working class, those who don’t regularly attend church are more likely to suffer from divorce, addiction, and financial distress. As Wilcox explains, “Many conservative, Protestant white men who are only nominally attached to a church struggle in today’s world. They have traditional aspirations but often have difficulty holding down a job, getting and staying married, and otherwise forging real and abiding ties in their community. The culture and economy have shifted in ways that have marooned them with traditional aspirations unrealized in their real-world lives.”

The worse Americans fare in their own lives, the darker their view of the country. According to PRRI, white Republicans who seldom or never attend religious services are 19 points less likely than white Republicans who attend at least once a week to say that the American dream “still holds true.”

Mobility

At NBER,  Raj Chetty and colleagues have a paper titled "The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940." The summary:

One of the defining features of the “American Dream” is the ideal that children have a higher standard of living than their parents. We assess whether the U.S. is living up to this ideal by estimating rates of “absolute income mobility” – the fraction of children who earn more than their parents – since 1940.

We measure absolute mobility by comparing children’s household incomes at age 30 (adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index) with their parents’ household incomes at age 30. We find that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s.

Absolute income mobility has fallen across the entire income distribution, with the largest declines for families in the middle class. These findings are unaffected by using alternative price indices to adjust for inflation, accounting for taxes and transfers, measuring income at later ages, and adjusting for changes in household size. 

Absolute mobility fell in all 50 states, although the rate of decline varied, with the largest declines concentrated in states in the industrial Midwest, such as Michigan and Illinois. The decline in absolute mobility is especially steep – from 95% for children born in 1940 to 41% for children born in 1984 – when we compare the sons’ earnings to their fathers’ earnings.

Why have rates of upward income mobility fallen so sharply over the past half century? There have been two important trends that have affected the incomes of children born in the 1980s relative to those born in the 1940s and 1950s: lower Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates and greater inequality in the distribution of growth. We find that most of the decline in absolute mobility is driven by the more unequal distribution of economic growth rather than the slowdown in aggregate growth rates. When we simulate an economy that restores GDP growth to the levels experienced in the 1940s and 1950s but distributes that growth across income groups as it is distributed today, absolute mobility only increases to 62%. In contrast, maintaining GDP at its current level but distributing it more broadly across income groups – at it was distributed for children born in the 1940s – would increase absolute mobility to 80%, thereby reversing more than two-thirds of the decline in absolute mobility.

These findings show that higher growth rates alone are insufficient to restore absolute mobility to the levels experienced in mid-century America. Under the current distribution of GDP, we would need real GDP growth rates above 6% per year to return to rates of absolute mobility in the 1940s. Intuitively, because a large fraction of GDP goes to a small fraction of high-income households today, higher GDP growth does not substantially increase the number of children who earn more than their parents. Of course, this does not mean that GDP growth does not matter: changing the distribution of growth naturally has smaller effects on absolute mobility when there is very little growth to be distributed. The key point is that increasing absolute mobility substantially would require more broad-based economic growth.

We conclude that absolute mobility has declined sharply in America over the past half century primarily because of the growth in inequality. If one wants to revive the “American Dream” of high rates of absolute mobility, one must have an interest in growth that is shared more broadly across the income distribution.

The Dream Is Dead for Half of Millennials

A release from Harvard's Institute of Politics:

Nearly Half of Young Americans Believe the American Dream is Dead for Them. When November IOP polling asked 18- to 29- year-olds if the “American Dream is alive or dead” for them personally, respondents were nearly evenly split (49%: “alive;” 48%: “dead”). While no significant difference was found based on race or ethnicity (whites – 49% said “alive;” African-Americans – 44% said “alive;” Hispanics – 52% said “alive”), respondents’ level of education did play a role. Nearly six-in-ten (58%) college graduates said the American Dream was alive for them personally, compared to only 42% of those not in college/never enrolled in college saying the same. Additionally, a significant majority of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders supporters said they believed the American dream was “dead” (Trump voters – 61%: American Dream “dead,” 39%: “alive;” Sanders voters – 56%: American Dream “dead,” 44%: “alive”).

At The Washington Post, Philip Bump cites Pew data on the decline of the middle class.

No wonder, then, that young Americans are skeptical of their ability to get ahead. Pew's data also shows that the age range looked at in the Harvard IoP survey saw the biggest drop in income status since 1971, with the biggest gain of any demographic group going to those 65 and over.

Within that American dream data was a noticeable split. Those with a college degree thought that the American dream was alive and well at a rate 16 percentage points higher than those who weren't in college or who had never attended. Non-college-graduates also saw broad decreases in income in Pew's analysis, with the research firm writing that "[t]hose Americans without a college degree stand out as experiencing a substantial loss in economic status."

We've known for some time that people with college degrees have done better in recent years. But two threats still exist. The first is student loan debt, which continues to be a massive burden to recent college graduates. The second is wage stagnation. In analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, for example, wages for young college graduates have been dropping since the year 2000. The trend is more widespread and older than that, but this number certainly might make a new graduate pessimistic.

The American Dream: Compilation of Surveys

Karlyn Bowman writes at AEI:

Do Americans believe the American Dream is endangered? The December issue of AEI’s Political Report distills public opinion on what Americans think the dream means and how close they are to it and looks at how opinion about this perennial topic has changed over time.

• Defining the dream: What constitutes the dream has stayed constant since pollsters started asking about it years ago. Education, freedom, and homeownership are core elements — being wealthy is not.
• Harder than in the past: In 2014, 70 percent of adults ages 34 or older told Pew pollsters that young adults today face more challenges than they did when starting out. In surveys taken years ago, people also agreed it would be harder for young people than it was for themselves.
• Opportunity for average Joe: Forty-three percent of Americans told Gallup pollsters in 1998 that there was more opportunity for the average person to get ahead than there used to be. In 2013, 12 percent gave that response, while 58 percent said less and 28 percent said about the same (Gallup).
• Does hard work pay off? It depends. Twenty years ago, 68 percent of those surveyed by Pew said most people could make it if they worked hard. In 2014, 65 percent gave that response. But Americans are less satisfied now (54 percent) than they were in 2001 (76 percent) about the opportunities America offers to get ahead by hard work (Gallup).
• Achieving the dream, eventually: Most Americans surveyed feel they will eventually achieve the dream, if they haven’t already. Thirty percent of Hispanics feel as if they have achieved the American Dream, while 56 percent feel they will eventually. Twenty-one percent of African Americans say they have achieved the dream, while 60 percent feel they will eventually (Harvard School of Public Health/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/NPR).
• Millennials believe in the dream — for themselves: A third say they now earn enough to lead the kind of life they want, and another 53 percent say they will eventually (Pew). Millennials are less confident about “their generation.”