Levinthal 1

The American Dream

The American Dream. The idea that with hard work, merit, and dedication people can

climb the ladder of social mobility and have success. The American Dream is a concept that has

been deeply rooted in our culture since the founding of America. Immigrants came to America in

hopes of a better future, and with that hope they brought a cultural ideological push for social

mobility. They formed the ideology that if you work hard you can build the life that you want.

That is where the American Dream began.

According to Gladstone (2016), Benjamin Franklin was a large endorser of the American

Dream. Franklin grew up poor, but was lucky enough to get the upward mobility needed to

achieve the American Dream. He was quoted as saying “the best way of doing good to the poor

is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it”. Contrary to this quote,

his family continued to live in poverty. His sister for example, who was not mentioned in his

biography, was smart and charismatic like him. As a female her social mobility was stunted, she

was not given the same opportunities as him and was held back by child rearing. She once wrote

to Benjamin saying “some impediments are just too hard to break through and that far too much

potential is squandered through the accident of birth”. She and the rest of Benjamin's family

represented the other part of America, the less heard but more expansive group of Americans

who were never able to have the American Dream because of who they were, where they lived,

and what circumstances they had.

Nevertheless the idea of the American Dream is perpetuated. The American Dream is a

dominant ideology meaning that it is a widespread belief within a society unconsciously

perpetuated by its members. Dominant ideologies like the American Dream legitimize and
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naturalise the inequalities the working class faces and allow for the upper classes to continue to

exploit them (Crossman, A., 2017) (“dominant ideology” n.d.). We perpetuate the American

Dream because we want to believe that there is opportunity for social mobility and that our

circumstances can change. This perpetuation goes against reality, against what our lives really

are. It ignores the fact that few people who are at the bottom of the economic ladder are able to

get to the top - or even out of the bottom. The American Dream is really just a way to ignore the

American reality.

The United States has the lowest rate of social mobility of the affluent countries in the

world. More than 40 million people in the United States are living in poverty with 18.5 million

of those people living in deep poverty, having an income below half of the poverty line (Alston,

2018). According to McNamee and Miller (2004), America has one of the most unequal

distributions to ever exist, with the 95-100th percentile of Americans having over half of the

available net worth (57.7%) while the 0-50th percentile have 2.8% of the total available net

worth. America is the most unequal industrial country in the world. This goes against the

understanding held by most Americans that the United States is a “middle class” society, an

understanding held in close relation to the American Dream.

With all of this inequality comes another thing - a lack of mobility. The understanding of

the American Dream is that your personal merit, high morals, hard work, and integrity will

determine what social strata you will get into, but this is simply not the case. Where you will end

up on the social ladder really depends on where you start. This brings into play the concept of

economic mobility - the ability to move up and down the income ladder through one’s lifetime

and across generations (Pew Charitable Trust [PCT], 2011). Economic mobility takes place over
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generations meaning that a sort of relay race is taking place; your parents give you the economic

level they are at and you give your children the economic level you are at. Although people can

move up and down the economic ladder, they start out where they were born into, proving that

there is an unequal playing field to begin. According to Surowiecki (2017), 70 percent of the

people who are born into the bottom quintile of the income distribution never make it to middle

class, and less than 10 percent can get to the top quintile. It has also been found that 40 percent

of people at the top and bottom income brackets stay there (PCT, 2011). Your economic status is

entirely subjective to the circumstances you are born into, and the world where one can achieve

social mobility is getting smaller. All of this stands as a stark discrepancy from the picture that is

painted by the American Dream.

This is all the more true with minorities, as racism is an ever present factor of social

inequality. People's mobility is very much so based on society's perception of them. Stereotypes

placed upon different groups of people creates a new layer in one’s social mobility. People's

abilities are judged based off of the generalizations and groups they fit into. This defies the idea

that people are judged only on their merits. Race is one of the most dominant ways that this

non-merit based judgement can take place. We see people through the lense of race based

expectations, devaluing the actual abilities of the person. An example of this is African American

people who are often times underestimated because of their race. Things like Stephen Carter’s

“the best black syndrome” which is the tendency of White people to only judge African

Americans among other African Americans instead of with everyone else (Dalton, 2009),

perpetuates social inequality and further inhibits the social mobility that America is said to have.
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The place that someone is born is another way that social mobility is challenged.

According to Chetty (2016), in the United States a person's odds of moving from the bottom

quintile of the income brackets to the top is 7.5%, this is much lower than many other affluent

countries. The U.K. has a 9.5% percent chance, Denmark has 11.7%, and Canada 13.5%. In

addition to a very low chance for upward mobility in America, the amount of economic mobility

in the county a child is raised in directly affects their future economic mobility and the mobility

that counties have varies greatly. A child in San Jose for example has a 12.9% chance of moving

from the bottom income bracket to the top, while places like Atlanta and Charlotte have less than

5% - lower than any developed country. This stands in contrast to some areas in the middle of the

country that have more than a 16.8% chance of moving from the bottom to top income bracket -

higher than any country there is currently data for. This disparity in economic mobility really

shows the divide in economic ability and equality across America. If you move a child from a

less mobile area to a more mobile area at age 9, they will end up with 54% more in their average

income than what it would be in the previous location. But the later in age that a child moves the

closer their average income will be to the less mobile areas average income rather than the more

mobile area’s. The percent of increased average income decreases until age 22, so if someone

moves after 22 their average income will be the same as the less mobile area’s without any

increase. This shows the economic immobility and divide of the classes all stemming from where

you were raised - something that one has no control over. This is another contradiction in the

ideology of the American Dream.

Nevertheless this dominant ideology persists. In PBS Newshour's piece “Land of the Free

Home of The Poor” (2011), reporters showed three pie charts to people standing in line for the
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Letterman Show - one chart with all five income brackets each having 20% of the wealth, one

chart representing Sweden’s wealth distribution where the richest have 36% of the wealth and the

poorest have 11%, and last chart was the United States’ wealth distribution where the richest

have 84% of the wealth and the poorest two income brackets have .3% of the wealth. The people

were not told which country the wealth distribution belonged to, and were asked which chart

they thought represented America. They almost consistently went for the top two charts. This is a

direct example of the oblivion that many people in America have about the U.S.’s economic

disparity. The widespread belief of the idea allows it to persist and influence our understandings

of the world. People believe in it because it is passed as common knowledge in our culture.

Dominant ideologies such as the American Dream help to maintain the status quo and stability

by allowing everyone to believe that they are next in line to get their success. If everyone was

able to understand and accept their social situations there would be an upheaval that would send

stability into a downward spiral. There are also people who benefit from the blinding of the

American Dream. They are capitalists who gain from the labor of the working class and sell

tastes of the American Dream to them. They want you to continue to embrace the dominant

ideologies as they profit directly from them.

People also embrace the idea of the American Dream to cope with their reality. As social

psychologist Shelley Taylor is quoted as saying, “[T]he normal human mind is oriented toward

mental health and... at every turn it construes events in a manner that promotes benign fictions

about the self, the world, and the future. The mind is, with some significant exceptions,

intrinsically adaptive, oriented toward overcoming rather than succumbing to the adverse events

of life...”(as cited in Dalton, 2009). A lower class person would be much more inclined to
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believe the widely accepted idea that if they continue to work hard they are going to have

success, rather than the reality that they are working just to survive and that they have very little

chance of moving up in the world. They can look at the rare and few who did get their American

Dream and legitimize this ideology, thinking that if it worked for them it can work for me. It is a

more optimistic filter on the bleak realities of life.

The American Dream influences society greatly. Often times these influences can be seen

as bad: by getting Americans to submit to a social caste system, perpetuating the working classes

struggles, and allowing for capitalists to take advantage of their labor. Although there are

negative attributes to the American Dream it is not necessarily all bad. The American Dream

gives people hope. In a world full of dead ends people have hope. The dominant ideology of the

American Dream gives people something to strive for, something that keeps them moving

forward in a world pushing them back. Although this ideology may ignore some parts of reality,

it also gives people aspirations, and without aspiration there can be no motivation. No drive to

work hard and succeed. We can see this in an ethnographic study by Jay MacLeod (2009) of the

people in a low-income housing development called Clarendon Heights. There were two groups

of boys in this housing development - the Brothers and the Hallway Hangers, these youths

concepts of the American Dream were directly reflected on their aspirations and motivations in

life. The Hallway Hangers did not apply the concept of the American Dream to their lives and

did not believe that they would have any social mobility or success. The Brothers on the other

hand did have a concept of the American Dream, they believed that they would eventually get

out of Clarendon Heights and lead stable and successful lives. I think this is an example of the

hope the American Dream can bring, and although a lack of social mobility is stacked against the
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Brothers because housing assistance has put them in a low opportunity high poverty area (Chetty,

2016), they have something to work for - something to strive and live for, while the Hallway

Hangers have no ambition or drive to work hard or to make a life for themselves because they

see the odds stacked against them. I think that that lack of belief only goes to further inhibit the

chances of mobility for these boys.

In a brief personal interview of two people close to me I asked what the American Dream

means to them, and it was clear that not all Americans live their lives with their eyes closed.

Both of them had a thorough understanding of the American Dream and agreed that it

encompasses the idea that we can choose our fates and carve our own paths to success. They also

understood the discrepancies within the idea. They could see that there are many factors that

inhibit one’s ability to achieve their goals. As one of my interviewees said, “There are a large

number of Americans who are working jobs that neither pay well nor make them happy, and

there is no reasonable way out of their situation, which often requires either more education,

more capital, more connections, or more employment opportunities than they can find. So

perhaps the American Dream is nice propaganda, but it falls short of reality for many.” So

although they appreciated the goals and aspirations the American Dream created, they also

understood the reality of American society.

The American Dream is not American reality. The American Dream blinds us from our

world of low social mobility and high economic disparity. The working class perpetuates this

ideology in order to normalise the economic inequality they face. Nevertheless the American

Dream is a big piece of American culture, giving its citizens the ability to dream, the ability to

hope, and to think that maybe one day with hard work they will get their success. As said in by
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Harlon L. Dalton (2009), “After all, in order to succeed in life, especially when the odds are

stacked against you, it is often necessary to first convince yourself that there is a reason to get up

in the morning.”
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References

Alston, P. (2018) "American Dream is rapidly becoming American Illusion", OHCHR

Chetty, R. (2016) "Reviving the American Dream Lessons from Big Data", TEDxStanford

Crossman, A. (2017, April 28). What is the Dominant Ideology Thesis? Retrieved October 28,

2018, from https://www.thoughtco.com/dominant-ideology-3026260

Dalton, H. (2009) "Horacio Alger", Rereading America. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.

272-78

dominant ideology. Oxford Reference. Ed. Retrieved 11 Oct. 2018, from

http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095725846.

Pew Charitable Trust (2011) "Economic Mobility_ the American Dream", retrieved from

http___www.pewtrusts.org_en_multimedia_video_2011_economic-mobility-and-the-american-d

ream

Gladstone, B (Busted" America's Poverty Myths) (2016. Oct 13). Rags-to-Riches [Audio

podcast]. Retrieved from https://www.wnyc.org/story/rags-riches/

MacLeod, J. (2009) "Ain't No Makin' It", Westview Press, Boulder CO

McNamee & Miller (2004) "The Meritocracy Myth", Sociation Today, Vol. 2 (1)

PBS NewHour (2011) "Land of the Free Home of the Poor", Retrieved from

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/land-of-the-free-home-of-the-poor

Surowiecki, J. (2017) "The Mobility Myth", New Yorker Magazine, June 19