![workers [who] play by the rules of the road.”
Ten years later, in her December 2018 presidential
announcement, Sen. Elizabeth Warren hit on this theme, but
with a wrinkle. “No matter where you live in America or no
matter where your family came from in the world, you deserve a
path to opportunity,” she said. “In our country, if you work hard
and play by the rules, you ought to be able to take care of
yourself and the people you love.”
Notice the subtle escalation. In her telling, the American Dream
is essentially a guarantee, presumably from government. This
gives it an edgier quality. No longer strictly aspirational, it’s a
pact – one the nation isn’t always honoring. In this sense, her
critique is not qualitatively different from “Make America Great
Again,” which can be heard either as a hopeful longing -- or an
angry demand.
Voters who believe their hopes are being ignored and their
rights thwarted tend to look for people and institutions to
blame. In other words, if they are playing by the rules, and not
getting ahead, who has rigged the game?
Assessing Fault
One of the most striking findings in the new RealClear Public
Opinion survey is how consistently Americans believe that our
private and public institutions have made it more difficult, not
easier, to achieve the American Dream. This includes the
incumbent U.S. president, although his ratings are better than
the opposition political party – or his own party, for that matter.
More than half of respondents -- 56 percent -- say Congress has
made the American Dream more difficult to attain, while only
10 percent say Congress has made it easier -- a net negative of
46 percent. This was a typical result. Consider the ratings of
the other institutions:
-- Judicial system: 47 percent say that America’s judicial](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/realclearpoliticstheamericandreamnotdeadyetbyca-221101115138-283e4a50/85/Real-Clear-PoliticsThe-American-Dream-Not-Dead-YetBy-Ca-docx-5-320.jpg)
![capitalism vs. socialism,” notes poll director John Della Volpe.
“That’s a false choice that is poisoning the
conversation. Americans are debating how capitalism can be
modernized so that the next generation can succeed in attaining
their best life, their own unique version of the American
Dream.”
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for
RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
Tom Bevan is the co-founder and president of RealClearPolitics
and the co-author of "Election 2012: A Time for Choosing."
Email: [email protected], Twitter: @TomBevanRCP
Time
“Keeping the Dream Alive”
By Jon Meacham
June 21, 2012
The perennial conviction that those who work hard and play by
the rules will be rewarded with a more comfortable present and
a stronger future for their children faces assault from just about
every direction. That great enemy of democratic capitalism,
economic inequality, is real and growing. The unemployment
rate is dispiritingly high. The nation's long-term fiscal health is
at risk, and the American political system, the engine of what
Thomas Jefferson called "the world's best hope," shows no sign
of reaching solutions commensurate with the problems of the
day.
It has not always been this way. On Friday, May 1, 1931, James
Truslow Adams, a popular historian, was putting the final
touches on the preface to his latest book. It was a curious time
in the life of the nation. Though the Crash of 1929 had signaled](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/realclearpoliticstheamericandreamnotdeadyetbyca-221101115138-283e4a50/85/Real-Clear-PoliticsThe-American-Dream-Not-Dead-YetBy-Ca-docx-9-320.jpg)
![Groton School rector, Endicott Peabody, who had told him,
"Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will
be rising toward the heights — then all will seem to reverse
itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the
trend of civilization itself is forever upward, that a line drawn
through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries
always has an upward trend."
Roosevelt quoted that observation in his final Inaugural Address
in the winter of 1945, and in the ensuing decades, American
power and prosperity reached epic heights. The Peabody-
Roosevelt gospel seemed to get it right: the world was not
perfect, nor was it perfectible, but the story of America was at
heart the story of doing well, of conquering disease and going
to the stars and defending freedom and creating wealth. By and
large, Americans of the postwar era were living those "better,
richer, and happier" lives that Adams had written about in the
shadow of the Crash.
Whoever rises to deliver the inaugural Address of 2013 will
speak to a nation in which the American Dream is under
profound economic and cultural pressure. This is perhaps best
measured by the state of the middle class, about which we hear
so much, and with good reason: roughly 90% of Americans self-
identify as middle, upper-middle or lower-middle class (2%
acknowledge being "upper class"; 6% say they are "lower
class").
Definitions of class are hard to come by — so much so that the
U.S. Department of Commerce, on behalf of Vice President Joe
Biden's White House Task Force on the Middle Class,
emphasized descriptive language rather than statistics, finding
that "middle-class families are defined by their aspirations more
than their income. [We assume] that middle-class families
aspire to homeownership, a car, college education for their
children, health and retirement security and occasional family
vacations."
The government's verdict: "It is more difficult now than in the
past for many people to achieve middle-class status because](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/realclearpoliticstheamericandreamnotdeadyetbyca-221101115138-283e4a50/85/Real-Clear-PoliticsThe-American-Dream-Not-Dead-YetBy-Ca-docx-11-320.jpg)
Real Clear PoliticsThe American Dream Not Dead –YetBy Ca.docx
- 1. Real Clear Politics “The American Dream: Not Dead –Yet By Carl M. Cannon and Tom Bevan March 6, 2019 Solid pluralities of Americans think their country is heading in the wrong direction, have lost faith in its prominent public institutions, and believe both major political parties are an impediment to realizing the American Dream. Nonetheless, that dream persists – threatened, yes, but not nearly dead. These are the findings in the latest poll from RealClear Opinion Research, focusing on how Americans view their future possibilities and how much economic guidance and oversight should be provided by government. The answers provide a road map for the 2020 election season. Nearly four times as many respondents say the American Dream is “alive and well” for them personally (27 percent) as those who say it’s “dead” (7 percent). The overwhelming majority express a more nuanced outlook. Two-thirds of those surveyed believe the American Dream is under moderate to severe duress: 37 percent say it is “alive and under threat” while another 28 percent say it is “under serious threat, but there is still hope.” “In this poll, most people are telling us that the American Dream isn’t working as they believe it should be,” said John Della Volpe, polling director of RealClear Opinion Research. “The overwhelming number of people are not seeing the fruits of working hard, whether it’s through a professional (finances) or a personal (happiness) lens.”
- 2. The panel of 2,224 registered voters was probed for its views on other foundational aspects of 21st century American civic life, including their views of capitalism and socialism, and how they see the future unfolding for the younger generation of Americans. Asked, for example, whether the American Dream is alive for those under 18 years of age, the attitudes were decidedly pessimistic -- especially among Baby Boomers and the so-called Silent Generation (Americans born between the mid-1920 and mid-1940s), those who have been in control of our public and private institutions for decades. While 23 percent of Baby Boomers and Silent Generation voters say the American Dream is alive for them (already the lowest percentage among all age groups) only 15 percent say they believe it will be there for the next generation. Measuring attitudes about the American Dream means different things to different people. For this survey, RealClear Opinion Research defined it for the poll respondents by using Merriam- Webster’s dictionary, which describes the American Dream as “a happy way of living that can be achieved by anyone in the U.S. especially by working hard and becoming successful.” As one would expect, perceptions of the health of this idea differ by party, age, education and class. Among the most striking findings in the survey were the variances by ethnicity. Asian-Americans are the most likely to say the American Dream is working for them (41 percent) – twice the percentage as Hispanics. Despite such differences, both groups voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in 2016 and 2018, a trend that appears likely to continue in 2020. Geography also plays a decisive role in how Americans responded. Thirty-six percent of those living in urban environments say the American Dream is alive for them,
- 3. compared to those in rural areas (25 percent), the suburbs (24 percent), or small towns (20 percent). These findings are another reminder of how Donald Trump upset expectations in 2016, speaking directly to voters, particularly in Rust Belt states, whose communities have been hollowed out over decades by the forces of globalization and blighted by a catastrophic opioid epidemic. Other findings include: -- Republicans (35 percent) are more likely to say that the American Dream is alive and well, compared to Democrats (24 percent). -- Subsequent generations aren’t nearly as pessimistic as Baby Boomers about the future. While, as noted, only 15 percent of Boomers/Silent Generation believe the American Dream is alive and well for the next generation, these numbers are significantly higher for those who will actually be around to see what happens in the coming decades. One-quarter of both Millennials and Gen Z say that the American Dream is alive and well for the next generation. Members of Gen X are of the same mind, registering at 26 percent. Playing by the Rules The phrase “American Dream” was coined by historian James Truslow Adams in a 1931 book “The Epic of America.” Amid the depths of the Great Depression, Adams wrote of an “American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank.” This dream, he added, was “the Star in the West which led him on over the stormy seas and into the endless forests in search of a home where toil would reap a sure reward and no dead hands of custom or exaction would push him back into ‘his place.’” “This message of hope, coming in the midst of social disaster, not only sold the book,” National Geographic books editor Anthony Brandt wrote 50 years later, “it sold the phrase as well.”
- 4. If the terminology was new, the concept wasn’t. Nor has it been static. The promise of a place of boundless physical wealth in a society encouraging freedom and industry was well-established by the mid-19th century -- when it suddenly made a fateful mutation. “The old American dream, the dream inherited from ten generations of ancestors,” historian H.W. Brands wrote, “was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard, of Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmers: of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at time, year by year.” WikiMedia All that changed at Sutter’s Creek in 1848, as Brands relates in his book chronicling how the California Gold Rush stamped itself forever on the American psyche. “The new dream,” Brands wrote, “was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck.” Sudden and possibly undeserved good fortune has a sinister antithetical, however, which is working hard and playing by the rules but with little hope of advancement. Voters who feel this way make a receptive audience for those advocating change. In his stock 1992 campaign speech, Bill Clinton cut to the heart of this unrest: “For millions and millions of Americans, the dream with which I grew up has been shattered,” he said. “The ideal that if you work hard and play by the rules you'll be rewarded, you'll do a little better next year than you did last year, your kids will do better than you. But that idea has been devastated for millions of Americans.” In his 2008 acceptance speech for his party’s presidential nomination (and after eight years of Republican rule), Barack Obama extrapolated on this theme, declaring that “America’s promise” holds that while the market economy should reward drive and innovation it also means looking out for “American
- 5. workers [who] play by the rules of the road.” Ten years later, in her December 2018 presidential announcement, Sen. Elizabeth Warren hit on this theme, but with a wrinkle. “No matter where you live in America or no matter where your family came from in the world, you deserve a path to opportunity,” she said. “In our country, if you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to be able to take care of yourself and the people you love.” Notice the subtle escalation. In her telling, the American Dream is essentially a guarantee, presumably from government. This gives it an edgier quality. No longer strictly aspirational, it’s a pact – one the nation isn’t always honoring. In this sense, her critique is not qualitatively different from “Make America Great Again,” which can be heard either as a hopeful longing -- or an angry demand. Voters who believe their hopes are being ignored and their rights thwarted tend to look for people and institutions to blame. In other words, if they are playing by the rules, and not getting ahead, who has rigged the game? Assessing Fault One of the most striking findings in the new RealClear Public Opinion survey is how consistently Americans believe that our private and public institutions have made it more difficult, not easier, to achieve the American Dream. This includes the incumbent U.S. president, although his ratings are better than the opposition political party – or his own party, for that matter. More than half of respondents -- 56 percent -- say Congress has made the American Dream more difficult to attain, while only 10 percent say Congress has made it easier -- a net negative of 46 percent. This was a typical result. Consider the ratings of the other institutions: -- Judicial system: 47 percent say that America’s judicial
- 6. system has made the American Dream more difficult to attain; only 11 percent answered “easier” (-36 percent). -- Wall Street: 45 percent say that Wall Street banks and investment firms have made the American Dream more difficult to attain; 13 percent say easier (-32 percent). -- Education establishment: 43 percent say that America’s K-12 education system has made it more difficult, 17 percent easier (- 26 percent); when asked about higher education, the same 43 percent of Americans say that the nation’s colleges and universities have put the American Dream further out of reach, while slightly more – 22 percent – said “easier.” -- The two major parties: Asked about the Republican Party, 46 percent say that the GOP has made the American Dream harder to attain, with only 24 percent saying easier. Democrats fared slightly better, although it isn’t anything to brag about: 40 percent of Americans believe the Democratic Party has made it more difficult to attain, with 24 percent answering “easier.” -- President Trump: Not surprisingly, this polarizing president had the highest percentage of people answering that he’s made the American Dream more difficult to realize, with fully 51 percent choosing that answer. But he also has a high positive figure, with 30 percent crediting Trump for making the dream more easily attainable. -- Labor unions: Organized labor had the best ratio of any group polled. Only 30 percent say unions have made the American Dream more difficult to attain. But even here, it is underwater, as only 22 percent said “easier.” “In this poll, most people are telling us that while they still believe in the promise of the American Dream, it’s being undermined by the very institutions that should be bolstering it,” said Della Volpe. “They also believe that it is not likely to get better for the next generation without significant institutional reforms.” But how far are they willing to go? What about reconsidering free-market democracy itself?
- 7. State of Capitalism With socialism or “Democratic Socialism” the trend du jour in American politics, the RealClear Opinion Research poll probed the public about its own economic ideology. For starters, nearly three in five Americans (58 percent) believe that capitalism as currently practiced is generally working for most Americans today and do not believe further government regulation is warranted. This majority believes that either (a) the free markets are already too heavily regulated (22 percent) or (b) favor maintaining the status quo and say that capitalism is generally working well in America (36 percent). The remaining 42 percent come under two headings. The first (27 percent) say that capitalism and the free markets are “broken” and that stronger government control of markets such as health care, housing and education is necessary. The second cohort of 15 percent says capitalism and the free markets “are not working well.” These voters favor less invasive intervention, but still favor stronger government regulation. Not surprisingly, there are significant differences by party, as 33 percent of Republicans say there is already too much regulation compared to 17 percent of Democrats (independents were at 19 percent). In addition, while 39 percent of Democrats say that the system is broken and stronger government control of markets such as health care, housing and education is necessary, only 11 percent of Republicans answer that way. Independents are in the middle (26 percent). Support for free-market capitalism is lowest among young Americans. Exactly half the respondents under 25 years of age say that capitalism is either “not working well” (24 percent) or is “broken” (26 percent). By way of comparison, 38 percent of those over age 65 feel the same way. Looking only at those who
- 8. are likely to vote in the Democratic primaries, 40 percent agree that the markets are broken and that stronger government control is necessary, with another 19 percent believing additional regulation is warranted. On the issue of which goods and services the government ought to make available to its citizens for little or no cost, 68 percent of all voters -- including nearly half of Republicans -- believe that health care fits into this category. There is less consensus on other services being discussed at this early stage of the 2020 campaign. Although four out of 10 of all registered voters believe community college ought to be made available to citizens for little or no cost and 31 percent say the same about child care – a proposal recently introduced by Sen. Warren – these numbers are markedly higher among Democrats. Fifty-three percent of Democrats believe that government should provide free or low- cost access to community college, with 42 percent saying the same about child care. Republicans are far less likely to agree, but again independents look more like Democrats than Republicans on this issue and will play a key role once the primaries are settled and candidates move on to the general election. These findings suggest two great trends are at work as the political firmament gears up for the next election. The first is that, strong personalities aside, 2020 is shaping up as a referendum on federalism: How much government do Americans want, and how much are they willing to pay for? Also: Precisely what role should government have in the economy? What it is not shaping up to be, at least so far, is a referendum on free- market democracy. “Despite what we heard this weekend from both sides of the political spectrum, the American electorate is not debating
- 9. capitalism vs. socialism,” notes poll director John Della Volpe. “That’s a false choice that is poisoning the conversation. Americans are debating how capitalism can be modernized so that the next generation can succeed in attaining their best life, their own unique version of the American Dream.” Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon. Tom Bevan is the co-founder and president of RealClearPolitics and the co-author of "Election 2012: A Time for Choosing." Email: [email protected], Twitter: @TomBevanRCP Time “Keeping the Dream Alive” By Jon Meacham June 21, 2012 The perennial conviction that those who work hard and play by the rules will be rewarded with a more comfortable present and a stronger future for their children faces assault from just about every direction. That great enemy of democratic capitalism, economic inequality, is real and growing. The unemployment rate is dispiritingly high. The nation's long-term fiscal health is at risk, and the American political system, the engine of what Thomas Jefferson called "the world's best hope," shows no sign of reaching solutions commensurate with the problems of the day. It has not always been this way. On Friday, May 1, 1931, James Truslow Adams, a popular historian, was putting the final touches on the preface to his latest book. It was a curious time in the life of the nation. Though the Crash of 1929 had signaled
- 10. the beginning of the Great Depression that was to endure for years to come, there was also a spirit of progress, of possibility. On the day Adams was finishing his manuscript, President Herbert Hoover pressed a button in Washington to turn on the lights of the newly opened Empire State Building at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, which, at 1,250 ft., was to be the tallest building in Manhattan until the construction of the World Trade Center four decades later. (PHOTOS: Behind the Cover: Capturing the American Dream) High hopes amid hard times: the moment matched Adams' thesis in his book, The Epic of America, a history of the nation that was to popularize a term not yet in the general vernacular in those last years of the reigns of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. Adams' subject, he wrote, was "that American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank which is the greatest contribution we have as yet made to the thought and welfare of the world." It was not a new thing, this abiding belief that tomorrow would be better than today. "That dream or hope," Adams wrote, "has been present from the start." What was new was the specific phrase Adams was using: the American Dream. From John Winthrop and the Puritan search for an earthly "city upon a hill" in the New World to Benjamin Franklin's "The Way to Wealth" aphorisms to Horatio Alger and the drama of the upwardly mobile, Adams' phrase had — and has — the deepest of roots in the American experience. For reasons ranging from geography to market capitalism to Jeffersonian ideas of liberty, we may well be the only people on the planet who tend to believe without irony that Thomas Paine was right when he declared that "we have it in our power to begin the world over again." In fact, we don't have that power. No one does. History cannot be dismissed with a nod. But from generation to generation, Americans have indeed dreamed of steady personal and national progress. In the twilight of his life, Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself one of the most accomplished purveyors of hope and dreams in American history, recalled the words of his old
- 11. Groton School rector, Endicott Peabody, who had told him, "Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights — then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward, that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend." Roosevelt quoted that observation in his final Inaugural Address in the winter of 1945, and in the ensuing decades, American power and prosperity reached epic heights. The Peabody- Roosevelt gospel seemed to get it right: the world was not perfect, nor was it perfectible, but the story of America was at heart the story of doing well, of conquering disease and going to the stars and defending freedom and creating wealth. By and large, Americans of the postwar era were living those "better, richer, and happier" lives that Adams had written about in the shadow of the Crash. Whoever rises to deliver the inaugural Address of 2013 will speak to a nation in which the American Dream is under profound economic and cultural pressure. This is perhaps best measured by the state of the middle class, about which we hear so much, and with good reason: roughly 90% of Americans self- identify as middle, upper-middle or lower-middle class (2% acknowledge being "upper class"; 6% say they are "lower class"). Definitions of class are hard to come by — so much so that the U.S. Department of Commerce, on behalf of Vice President Joe Biden's White House Task Force on the Middle Class, emphasized descriptive language rather than statistics, finding that "middle-class families are defined by their aspirations more than their income. [We assume] that middle-class families aspire to homeownership, a car, college education for their children, health and retirement security and occasional family vacations." The government's verdict: "It is more difficult now than in the past for many people to achieve middle-class status because
- 12. prices for certain key goods — health care, college and housing — have gone up faster than income." Median household income has also remained stagnant for more than a decade; when the figures are adjusted for inflation, Americans are making less now than they were when Bill Clinton was in the White House. There, in brief, is the crisis of our time. The American Dream may be slipping away. We have overcome such challenges before. To recover the Dream requires knowing where it came from, how it lasted so long and why it matters so much. Emerson once remarked that there is properly no history, only biography. This is the biography of an idea, one that made America great. Whether that idea has much of a future is the question facing Americans now. The History of a Dream Dreams of God and of gold (not necessarily in that order) made America possible. The First Charter of Virginia — the 1606 document that authorized the founding of Jamestown — was 3,805 words long. Ninety-eight of them are about carrying religion to "such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God"; 97% of the charter concerns the taking of "all the Lands, Woods, Soil, Grounds, Havens, Ports, Rivers, Mines, Minerals, Marshes, Waters, Fishing, Commodities," as well as orders to "dig, mine, and search for all Manner of Mines of Gold, Silver, and Copper." Explorers in the 16th and 17th centuries sought riches; religious dissenters came seeking freedom of worship. In 1630 layman John Winthrop wrote a sermon alluding to America as "a city upon a hill," explicitly linking the New World to the Sermon on the Mount. (Always shrewd about visuals, Ronald Reagan would add the adjective shining to the image several centuries later.) We have been cognitively dissonant from the beginning. European settlers set about driving the Native American populations to the west, setting in motion a tragic chain of events that culminated in the Trail of Tears in the middle of the 19th century. In 1619, meanwhile, a Dutch man-of-war brought
- 13. African slaves to Virginia. And so while white settlers built and dreamed, people of color were subjugated and exploited by a rising nation that prided itself on the expansion of liberty. The British Americans who broke with England to form a new nation in the 1770s found slavery inconvenient but not insurmountable as they codified the dream that had fueled the discovery and early years of the New World. By founding the U.S. on the idea that a man's natural rights included "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," Jefferson, writing in the Philadelphia summer of 1776, put hope at the center of the national drama. The pursuit of happiness is a phrase philosophically rooted in the thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment, but it was only in America that the notion moved from theory to broad-based reality. This was partly because there was so much room to run in the New World. The vastness of the continent, the seemingly endless frontier, the staggering natural resources: these, combined with a formidable American work ethic, made the pursuit of happiness more than a full-time proposition. It was a consuming one, all-enveloping. Suddenly birth mattered less than it ever had before. Entitled aristocracies crumbled before natural ones. If you were white and willing to work, you stood a chance of transcending the circumstances of your father and his father's father. By 1832, the height of the Age of Jackson, even Henry Clay, who thought Old Hickory an American Bonaparte, could declare, "We are a nation of self-made men." The next year, President Jackson appointed one such man to be postmaster of Salem, Ill. Though a Whig, Abraham Lincoln was happy to accept. His rise from frontier origins became both fable and staple in the American Dream narrative. Lincoln understood the power of his story in real time, for he knew that he embodied the Jeffersonian hopes of Americans everywhere. "I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House," Lincoln said the year before he died. "I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has."
- 14. The Dream is about liberty and prosperity and stability, but it is also about escape and reinvention. Mark Twain understood this. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn doesn't flinch from the racism and greed of American life. If there is any redemption to be found, it comes from small moments of communion, of humanity. The novel concludes with the enslaved Jim's being granted his freedom and Huck's deciding "to light out for the Territory, ahead of the rest" — an enduring American impulse and an essential element of the American Dream. The myth of the West was the myth of the nation: that all of us could light out for the Territory and build new, prosperous lives. The allure of the belief in the individual's capacity to make his way — to cross oceans or mountains — only grew stronger as America grew older. Our center of political gravity has always been in motion from east to west (and, to a real extent, from north to south). Though the Census of 1890 declared that the frontier was no more, the idea of packing up and moving on to better things has never faded. Dream and Reality Yet there is a missing character in this popular version of the story of America's rugged individualism: the government, which helped make the rise of the individual possible. Americans have never liked acknowledging that what we now call the public sector has always been integral to making the private sector successful. Given the American Revolution's origins as a rebellion against taxation and distant authority, such skepticism is understandable, even if it's not well founded. As we have with race, we have long proved ourselves quite capable of living with this contradiction, using Hamiltonian means (centralized decisionmaking) while speaking in Jeffersonian rhetorical terms (that government is best which governs least). The Pacific Railroad and Homestead acts, signed by Lincoln a century and a half ago this year, used the power of government to settle the West. The railway legislation gave federal support to the creation of a transcontinental railroad, a vast project that
- 15. played a key role in making the U.S. an economic and cultural whole. Once the Golden Spike had joined the rails of east and west, the danger and duration of stagecoach rides gave way to the muscle and speed of locomotives — able to carry dreamers west, ship crops east and shrink the psychic distance of the continent. The Homestead measures enabled settlers to claim small parcels of farmland west of the Mississippi, making new lives (and livelihoods) possible. The Morrill Act created land-grant universities, opening higher education to many throughout the country. The legislation of the Progressive Era brought a measure of humanity to the rigors of the industrial age and a democratization of power through women's suffrage and the direct election of Senators. The prosperity of the Roaring '20s proved short-lived, opening the way for the Age of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Americans have been ambivalent about government since at least the time of George III, often approving its role when we benefit from it and disapproving when others seem to be getting something we aren't. The New Deal and particularly Social Security redefined the individual's relationship to the state, knitting the public and private sectors together much more closely. Long a more or less silent partner in people's lives, government became more evident as the U.S. struggled to survive the crisis of the 1930s. We forget how extreme that crisis was for those who lived through it. Asked whether there had ever been anything like the Great Depression before, John Maynard Keynes replied, "Yes, it was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted 400 years." Democracy itself was in the dock, the American Dream a seemingly failed idea. Other dreams were now in play. The new age was up for grabs, it appeared, between the totalitarianism of Germany and Italy and that of Soviet communism. Roosevelt was said to have remarked that the two most dangerous men in America were Douglas MacArthur and Huey Long — possible dictators of the right and of the left.
- 16. Yet there was FDR, determined to preserve the world that Jefferson and Jackson had built and Lincoln had saved. The cataclysm of war lifted America to imperial status and set off an economic boom unrivaled in the history of the world. The war ended the Great Depression, but the work of the New Deal added a new dimension to the American Dream: the broad expectation that government had a role to play in advancing individual lives. After the defeat of Hitler and of imperial Japan, the Dream was rekindled. Through the GI Bill and home loans and deductions for mortgage interest, as well as interstate rail and highways and Cold War defense spending, more Americans entered the middle class than ever before. Even those long excluded from it. It is striking that the symbolic high-water mark of the civil rights movement was framed in terms of the American Dream. When Martin Luther King Jr. rose to address the March on Washington in August 1963, he described his dream of an integrated America as "deeply rooted in the American Dream." He was asking only for black Americans' rightful share of the life that most white Americans had come to take for granted: a life in which whites were judged by "the content of their character." The Crack-Up The story is familiar: Jim Crow was dying in the same hour many whites believed the American Dream was also in extremis. Social customs and values largely taken for granted were under assault. America seemed powerless in Vietnam and unmoored at home. By late 1967, columnist Joseph Kraft had put the phrase Middle Americans in political circulation. Richard Nixon called them "the silent majority." In 1970 the editors of TIME named "the Middle Americans" as the Man and Woman of the Year, writing that with the exceptions of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Henry Kissinger, Nixon's Administration was "like the reunion photograph of a Depression class that rose to the top by Horatio Alger virtues." One example Time chose to note: "George Romney, the
- 17. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is the son of a Mormon who was driven out of Mexico by Pancho Villa and supported his 10 children for a time as a carpenter in El Paso." John Updike captured the cultural moment well in his 1971 novel Rabbit Redux. The middle-class protagonist, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, finds himself in a conversation about equality with a black man named Skeeter. "You talk as if the whole purpose of this country since the start has been to frustrate Negroes," says Angstrom. "Hell, you're just ten percent. The fact is most people don't give a damn what you do. This is the freest country around, make it if you can, if you can't, die gracefully." The Dream that had survived the '30s barely dragged itself out of the '60s. In ensuing decades, the impact of economic growth has been uneven. The widening gap between rich and poor suggests the Dream is becoming more elusive for more people than at any other time in our history. Strangely, it's now possible for the French to be more socially and economically mobile than Americans. Restoring the Dream Economic fairness is not a new concern. "There is no reason why wealth, which is a social product, should not be more equitably controlled and distributed in the interests of society," wrote Adams in The Epic of America. In fact there is a reason: by its very nature capitalism produces winners — and losers. Some dreams come true; some don't. Equality of outcome, though, is not the same thing as equality of opportunity, and equality of opportunity is at the heart of the American vision. "And that dream has been realized more fully in actual life here than anywhere else," Adams wrote, "though very imperfectly even among ourselves." In 2003, Jim Cullen, a historian who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City, published an illuminating book titled The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation. Asked how he assesses the state of his old subject today, Cullen says, "With a lot of folks,
- 18. I'm afraid I'm not as optimistic as I was. An idea like this does not die overnight, but I'm worried." What makes the current moment different from previous ebb times, Cullen notes, is the rise of the rest of the world. "In the 19th and 20th centuries, no one spoke of the French Dream or the Russian Dream, but in the 21st century it probably is possible to speak of a Chinese Dream," says Cullen. Ronald Reagan was eloquent about American possibilities; so is Bill Clinton. Such different men, yet they were both products of a middle-class America that enabled the son of an alcoholic shoe salesman (Reagan) and the stepson of an alcoholic car salesman (Clinton) each to rise to the presidency. Taken together, the political legacies of Reagan and Clinton are instructive as President Obama — or a President Romney — tries to rebuild a foundation under the middle class. Neither Reagan nor Clinton was particularly doctrinaire: they believed in the capacity of individuals to build lives and create jobs. They differed in degree, not kind, on the question of government's role. Reagan said government was the problem but didn't do a great deal to dismantle it. Clinton declared the era of Big Government to be over but kept the country in the political center as the boom of the 1990s powered by information technology (with roots, inevitably, in government spending) created record surpluses. And despite the fervently held views of their foes, neither Obama nor Romney is particularly doctrinaire either. This year the choice for President comes at a time when specific ideas about relieving and growing the middle class — education reform and access, for instance — seem less important than the present and the future of the overall economy. The most basic requirement of the American Dream is a job. In 1980 Reagan broke away from Jimmy Carter after asking, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" Romney will pose that question again and again; Obama will talk about how it takes longer than three years to reverse a decade of decline. Obama will say Romney favors the rich; Romney will say he wants to
- 19. create a country where everybody can once again dream of getting rich. The winner will be the one who convinces just enough of us that he, not the other guy, can fuel economic growth. It may not be an edifying conversation, but it's the conversation we're about to have. And both men will talk about the American Dream, but no single politician can restore the faith of our fathers and mothers. That's up to all of us. We are stronger the wider we open our arms. Our dreams are more powerful when they are shared by others in our time. And we are the only ones who can create a climate for the American Dream to survive another generation, then another and another. "If the American dream is to come true and to abide with us," Adams wrote in 1931, "it will, at bottom, depend on the people themselves." True then, and true now. THE ATLANTIC “The Economist Who Would Fix the American Dream” Story by Gareth Cook August 2019 Updated at 3:47 p.m. ET on July 17, 2019. Raj chetty got his biggest break before his life began. His mother, Anbu, grew up in Tamil Nadu, a tropical state at the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Anbu showed the greatest academic potential of her five siblings, but her future was constrained by custom. Although Anbu’s father encouraged her scholarly inclinations, there were no colleges in the area, and sending his daughter away for an education would have been unseemly.To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app. But as Anbu approached the end of high school, a minor miracle redirected her life. A local tycoon, himself the father of a bright daughter, decided to open a women’s college, housed in his
- 20. elegant residence. Anbu was admitted to the inaugural class of 30 young women, learning English in the spacious courtyard under a thatched roof and traveling in the early mornings by bus to a nearby college to run chemistry experiments or dissect frogs’ hearts before the men arrived. Anbu excelled, and so began a rapid upward trajectory. She enrolled in medical school. “Why,” her father was asked, “do you send her there?” Among their Chettiar caste, husbands commonly worked abroad for years at a time, sending back money, while wives were left to raise the children. What use would a medical degree be to a stay-at-home mother? In 1962, Anbu married Veerappa Chetty, a brilliant man from Tamil Nadu whose mother and grandmother had sometimes eaten less food so there would be more for him. Anbu became a doctor and supported her husband while he earned a doctorate in economics. By 1979, when Raj was born in New Delhi, his mother was a pediatrics professor and his father was an economics professor who had served as an adviser to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. When Chetty was 9, his family moved to the United States, and he began a climb nearly as dramatic as that of his parents. He was the valedictorian of his high-school class, then graduated in just three years from Harvard University, where he went on to earn a doctorate in economics and, at age 28, was among the youngest faculty members in the university’s history to be offered tenure. In 2012, he was awarded the MacArthur genius grant. The following year, he was given the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the most promising economist under 40. (He was 33 at the time.) In 2015, Stanford University hired him away. Last summer, Harvard lured him back to launch his own research and policy institute, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Chetty turns 40 this month, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential social scientists of his generation. “The question with Raj,” says Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, one of the
- 21. country’s leading urban economists, “is not if he will win a Nobel Prize, but when.” The work that has brought Chetty such fame is an echo of his family’s history. He has pioneered an approach that uses newly available sources of government data to show how American families fare across generations, revealing striking patterns of upward mobility and stagnation. In one early study, he showed that children born in 1940 had a 90 percent chance of earning more than their parents, but for children born four decades later, that chance had fallen to 50 percent, a toss of a coin. In 2013, Chetty released a colorful map of the United States, showing the surprising degree to which people’s financial prospects depend on where they happen to grow up. In Salt Lake City, a person born to a family in the bottom fifth of household income had a 10.8 percent chance of reaching the top fifth. In Milwaukee, the odds were less than half that. Chetty at age 9. He was later valedictorian of his high school, and he went on to earn an undergraduate degree and a doctorate in economics from Harvard University. At age 28, he was among the youngest faculty members in the university’s history to be offered tenure. Since then, each of his studies has become a front-page media event (“Chetty bombs,” one collaborator calls them) that combines awe—millions of data points, vivid infographics, a countrywide lens—with shock. This may not be the America you’d like to imagine, the statistics testify, but it’s what we’ve allowed America to become. Dozens of the nation’s elite colleges have more children of the 1 percent than from families in the bottom 60 percent of family income. A black boy born to a wealthy family is more than twice as likely to end up poor as a white boy from a wealthy family. Chetty has established Big Data as a moral force in the American debate. Now he wants to do more than change our understanding of America—he wants to change America itself. His new Harvard-
- 22. based institute, called Opportunity Insights, is explicitly aimed at applying his findings in cities around the country and demonstrating that social scientists, despite a discouraging track record, are able to fix the problems they articulate in journals. His staff includes an eight-person policy team, which is building partnerships with Charlotte, Seattle, Detroit, Minneapolis, and other cities. For a man who has done so much to document the country’s failings, Chetty is curiously optimistic. He has the confidence of a scientist: If a phenomenon like upward mobility can be measured with enough precision, then it can be understood; if it can be understood, then it can be manipulated. “The big-picture goal,” Chetty told me, “is to revive the American dream.” Last summer, I visited Opportunity Insights on its opening day. The offices are housed on the second floor of a brick building, above a café and across Massachusetts Avenue from Harvard’s columned Widener Library. Chetty arrived in econ-casual: a lilac dress shirt, no jacket, black slacks. He is tall and trim, with an untroubled air; he smiled as he greeted two of his longtime collaborators—the Brown University economist John Friedman and Harvard’s Nathaniel Hendren. They walked him around, showing off the finished space, done in a modern palette of white, wood, and aluminum with accent walls of yellow and sage. Later, after Chetty and his colleagues had finished giving a day of seminars to their new staff, I caught up with him in his office, which was outfitted with a pristine whiteboard, an adjustable-height desk, and a Herman Miller chair that still had the tags attached. The first time I’d met him, at an economics conference, he had told me he was one of several cousins on his mother’s side who go by Raj, all named after their grandfather, Nadarajan, all with sharp minds and the same long legs and easy gait. Yet of Nadarajan’s children, only Chetty’s mother
- 23. graduated from college, and he’s certain that this fact shaped his generation’s possibilities. He was able to come to the United States as a child and attend an elite private school, the University School of Milwaukee. New York Raj—the family appends a location to keep them straight—came to the U.S. later in life, at age 28, worked in drugstores, and then took a series of jobs with the City of New York. Singapore Raj found a job in a temple there that allows him to support his family back in India, but means they must live apart. Karaikudi Raj, named for the town where his mother grew up, committed suicide as a teenager. “We are not trying to do something that is unimaginable or has never happened,” Chetty told me. “It happens just down the road.” I asked Boston Raj to consider what might have become of him if that wealthy Indian businessman had not decided, in the precise year his mother was finishing high school, to create a college for the talented women of southeastern Tamil Nadu. “I would likely not be here,” he said, thinking for a moment. “To put it another way: Who are all the people who are not here, who would have been here if they’d had the opportunities? That is a really good question.” Charlotte is one of America’s great urban success stories. In the 1970s, it was a modest-size city left behind as the textile industry that had defined North Carolina moved overseas. But in the 1980s, the “Queen City” began to lift itself up. US Airways established a hub at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport, and the region became a major transportation and distribution center. Bank of America built its headquarters there, and today Charlotte is in a dead heat with San Francisco to be the nation’s second-largest banking center, after New York. New skyscrapers have sprouted downtown, and the city boundary has been expanding, replacing farmland with spacious homes and
- 24. Whole Foods stores. In the past four decades, Charlotte’s population has nearly tripled. Charlotte has also stood out in Chetty’s research, though not in a good way. In a 2014 analysis of the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, Charlotte ranked last in ability to lift up poor children. Only 4.4 percent of Charlotte’s kids moved from the bottom quintile of household income to the top. Kids born into low-income families earned just $26,000 a year, on average, as adults—perched on the poverty line. “It was shocking,” says Brian Collier, an executive vice president of the Foundation for the Carolinas, which is working with Opportunity Insights. “The Charlotte story is that we are a meritocracy, that if you come here and are smart and motivated, you will have every opportunity to achieve greatness.” The city’s true story, Chetty’s data showed, is of selective opportunity: All the data-scientist and business-development- analyst jobs in the thriving banking sector are a boon for out-of- towners and the progeny of the well-to-do, but to grow up poor in Charlotte is largely to remain poor. To help cities like Charlotte, Chetty takes inspiration from medicine. For thousands of years, he explained, little progress was made in understanding disease, until technologies like the microscope gave scientists novel ways to understand biology, and thus the pathologies that make people ill. In October, Chetty’s institute released an interactive map of the United States called the Opportunity Atlas, revealing the terrain of opportunity down to the level of individual neighborhoods. This, he says, will be his microscope. Drawing on anonymized government data over a three-decade span, the researchers linked children to the parents who claimed them as dependents. The atlas then followed poor kids from every census tract in the country, showing how much they went on to earn as adults. The colors on the atlas reveal a
- 25. generation’s prospects: red for areas where kids fared the worst; shades of orange, yellow, and green for middling locales; and blue for spots like Salt Lake City’s Foothill neighborhood, where upward mobility is strongest. It can also track children born into higher income brackets, compare results by race and gender, and zoom out to show states, regions, or the country as a whole. The Opportunity Atlas has a fractal quality. Some regions of the United States look better than high-mobility countries such as Denmark, while others look more like a developing country. The Great Plains unfurl as a sea of blue, and then the eye is caught by an island of red—a mark of the miseries inflicted on the Oglala Lakota by European settlers. These stark differences recapitulate themselves on smaller and smaller scales as you zoom in. It’s common to see opposite extremes of opportunity within easy walking distance of each other, even in two neighborhoods that long-term residents would consider quite similar. To find a cure for what ails America, Chetty will need to understand all of this wild variation. Which factors foster opportunity, and which impede it? The next step will be to find local interventions that can address these factors—and to prove, with experimental trials, that the interventions work. The end goal is the social equivalent of precision medicine: a method for diagnosing the particular weaknesses of a place and prescribing a set of treatments. This could transform neighborhoods, and restore the American dream from the ground up. If all of this seems impossibly ambitious, Chetty’s counterargument is to point to how the blue is marbled in with the red. “We are not trying to do something that is unimaginable or has never happened,” he told me over lunch one day. “It happens just down the road.” Yet in Charlotte, where Opportunity Insights hopes to build its
- 26. proof of concept, the atlas reveals swaths of bleak uniformity. Looking at the city, you first see a large bluish wedge south of downtown, with Providence Road on one side and South Boulevard on the other, encompassing the mostly white, mostly affluent areas where children generally grow up to do well. Surrounding the wedge is a broad expanse in hues of red that locals call “the crescent,” made up of predominantly black neighborhoods where the prospects for poor children are pretty miserable. Hunger and homelessness are common, and in some places only one in five high-school students scores “proficient” on standardized tests. In many parts of the crescent, the question isn’t What’s holding kids back? so much as What isn’t holding them back? It’s hard to know where to start. The most significant challenge Chetty faces is the force of history. In the 1930s, redlining prevented black families from buying homes in Charlotte’s more desirable neighborhoods. In the 1940s, the city built Independence Boulevard, a four-lane highway that cut through the heart of its Brooklyn neighborhood, dividing and displacing a thriving working-class black community. The damage continued in the ’60s and ’70s with new interstates. It’s common to hear that something has gone wrong in parts of Charlotte, but the more honest reading is that Charlotte is working as it was designed to. American cities are the way they are, and remain the way they are, because of choices they have made and continue to make. Does a professor from Harvard, even one as influential and well funded as Chetty, truly stand any chance of bending the American story line? On his national atlas, the most obvious feature is an ugly red gash that starts in Virginia, curls down through the Southeast’s coastal states—North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama—then marches west toward the Mississippi River, where it turns northward before petering out in western Tennessee. When I saw this, I was reminded of another map: one President Abraham Lincoln consulted in 1861, demarcating the counties with the most slaves. The two maps
- 27. are remarkably similar. Set the documents side by side, and it may be hard to believe that they are separated in time by more than a century and a half, or that one is a rough census of men and women kept in bondage at the time of the Civil War, and the other is a computer-generated glimpse of our children’s future. {To see all charts and maps, use the link in the list of links to readings} Top: A map consulted by President Lincoln in 1861, demarcating the counties with the most slaves. (Library of Congress) Bottom: A detail from Chetty’s Opportunity Atlas, in which areas with poor upward mobility are shown in red. The similarities between the two documents suggest that it will be difficult for Chetty to change the landscape of opportunity. (Opportunity Insights / U.S. Census Bureau) In 2003, after earning his doctorate, Chetty moved to UC Berkeley for his first job. He was, at the time, the only person in his immediate family—his parents and two older sisters, both biomedical researchers—who had not published a paper. Education was highly prized. He was taught that it would be sacrilege to ever step on a book. When he visits his parents at their home, north of Boston, his mother still makes him a favorite dish with bhindi (Hindi for “okra”), which, she told me, is supposed to be good for the brain. Both of Chetty’s parents descend from the Chettiar caste, a mercantile group historically involved in banking, and the kids were raised to carry on their cultural heritage. They learned Tamil in addition to Hindi. Chetty’s sisters married men with Chettiar backgrounds. Chetty rejects the caste system, though he first met his wife, Sundari, after one of his sisters got to know her through the Chettiar community. (Sundari is a stem-
- 28. cell biologist.) Chetty had always been drawn to public economics—the study of government policy and how it might be improved. And, as it happened, he was embarking on his career as a revolution in the field was under way. In the past, economists had to rely heavily on surveys, but the advent of cheap, powerful computing allowed for a new kind of economics—one that drew on the extensive administrative data gathered by governments. Survey participants number in the hundreds or thousands; administrative data can yield records in the hundreds of millions. In November 2007, Chetty came across an ad from the IRS seeking help organizing its electronic files into a format that would be easier to use for research. He immediately recognized that completing the job would make it possible for scholars to go far deeper into tax data. He and John Friedman began the process of registering to be federal contractors—which involved, among other things, certifying that their workplace met federal safety standards, and calling on Friedman’s brother, who lived in Washington, D.C., to take a cab out to Maryland to hand-deliver their application materials, in triplicate. Like many good ideas, the project seems obvious in retrospect, but the truth is that nobody could have known how useful the data would prove to be—and it worked only because Chetty and his colleagues have an almost superhuman degree of patience. Nathaniel Hendren, who has known Chetty for seven years, told me he’s never seen Chetty happier than one Friday evening in the summer of 2014, when they were sitting in some IRS cubicles at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in downtown Boston. (The only way to access the government’s data was inside a federal building, on secure servers, with the computers logging their requests.) That night, Chetty and Hendren were wrestling with thousands of lines of code designed to pull together responses scattered across hundreds of millions of
- 29. 1040s, W2s, and other forms (taxpayer names are kept separate to protect privacy), while ensuring that nothing in the code introduced errors or subtle biases. At some point, Hendren recalled, he heard Chetty yell “Sweet!” Hendren looked over and Chetty, smiling, explained that his flight out of Logan airport that night had just been delayed: more time to work. Over the past two decades, economists have tried to structure their work, as much as possible, to resemble scientific experiments. This “credibility revolution” is an attempt to explicitly link causes to effects, and sweep aside the old criticism that correlation is not the same as causation. One of the advantages of the large tax database Chetty and his colleagues constructed is that it allows “quasi-experiments”— clever statistical methods that approach the power of a true experiment without requiring a researcher to, say, randomly assign children to live in different cities. For example, Chetty and Hendren looked at children who changed cities. They found that the later a child moved to a higher-opportunity area, the less effect the move seemed to have on future earnings. But they also devised additional tests to ensure that the effect was causal, such as looking at siblings who moved at the same time: a quasi-experiment in which two children grew up in the same family, but were exposed to a new area for a shorter or longer period depending on their age at the time of the move. The result was a highly credible conclusion, based on millions of data points, that moving a child to a better neighborhood boosts his or her future income—and the younger the child, the greater the benefit. There was, however, a significant problem: Their conclusion contradicted one of the most influential poverty experiments of recent decades. In the 1990s, the federal government launched Moving to Opportunity, a program designed to relocate families living in public housing to safer neighborhoods, where they had
- 30. access to better jobs and schools. Thousands of families in five cities were randomly selected to receive housing vouchers and support services to help them move to lower-poverty areas. After a decade of study, researchers concluded that while these “mover” families experienced some physical and mental-health benefits, test scores among the kids didn’t rise, and there were no signs of financial benefit for adults or older children. In 2014, Chetty, Hendren, and the Harvard economist Lawrence Katz asked the IRS and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had overseen the program, for permission to take another look at what had happened to the children. When the earlier follow-up had been done, the youngest kids, who had moved before they were teenagers, had not yet reached their earning years, and this turned out to make all the difference. This young group of movers, the economists found, had gone on to earn 31 percent more than those who hadn’t moved, and 4 percent more of them attended college. They calculated that for an 8-year-old child, the value of the extra future earnings over a lifetime was almost $100,000, a substantial sum for a poor family. For a family with two children, the taxes paid on the extra income more than covered the costs of the program. “The big insight,” Kathryn Edin, a sociology professor at Princeton, told me, “is that it took a generation for the effects to manifest.” Last july, I took a tour of Charlotte with David Williams, the 34-year-old policy director of Opportunity Insights and the man responsible for translating Chetty’s research into action on the ground. Williams and members of his team crammed into the back of a white Ford Explorer with color printouts of various Charlotte neighborhoods as they appear on the atlas. Brian Collier, of the Foundation for the Carolinas, sat in the front seat, serving as a guide. As the driver headed northeast, the high-rises of “Uptown”
- 31. shifted abruptly to low-slung buildings and chain-link fences. Collier pointed out a men’s shelter in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Lockwood, where he’d recently seen a drug deal go down a block away from a house that had sold for half a million dollars. We continued on to Brightwalk, a new mixed-income development with long rows of townhomes, before turning west for a loop around West Charlotte High School, a once-lauded model of successful integration. In the 1990s, though, support for busing waned, and in 1999, a judge declared that race could not be used as a factor in school assignment. Now the student population is virtually all minority and overwhelmingly poor, and the surrounding neighborhood is deep red on the atlas. The homes are neat, one-story single families, a tad rough around the edges but nothing like the burnt-out buildings in Detroit, where Williams previously worked on economic development for the mayor. “It reminds you how hard it is to tell where real opportunity is,” Williams said. “You can’t just see it.” Opportunity is not the same as affluence. Consider a kid who grows up in a household earning about $27,000 annually, right at the 25th percentile nationally. In Beverly Woods, a relatively wealthy, mostly white enclave in South Charlotte with spacious, well-kept yards, he could expect his household income to be $42,900 by age 35. Yet in Huntersville, an attractive northern suburb with nearly the same average household income as Beverly Woods, a similar kid could expect only $24,800—a stark difference, invisible to a passing driver. This dynamic also functions in poorer areas. For a child in Reid Park, an African American neighborhood on the west side of Charlotte, near the airport—a place that has struggled to recover from a crime epidemic in the 1980s—the expected household income at age 35 is a dismal $17,800, on average. But in East Forest, a white, working-class neighborhood in southeast Charlotte, the expected future income jumps to $32,600.
- 32. There are places like East Forest in cities around the country. Chetty and his team have taken to calling them “opportunity bargains”: places with relatively affordable rents that punch above their weight with respect to opportunity. He doesn’t yet know why some places are opportunity bargains, but he considers the discovery of these neighborhoods to be a breakthrough. John Friedman told me that if the government had been able to move families to opportunity-bargain neighborhoods in the original Moving to Opportunity experiment—places selected for higher opportunity, not lower poverty—the children’s earnings improvements would have been more than twice as great. In the crimson sectors of Chetty’s atlas, the problem is both the absence of opportunity and the presence of its opposite: swift currents that can drag a person down. Chetty’s team has already begun to apply this concept in another of its partner cities, Seattle, working with two local housing authorities to navigate the thorny process of translating research into measurable social change. It’s hard for poor families to manage an expansive housing search, which requires time, transportation, and decent credit. The group created a program with “housing navigators,” who point participants toward areas with relatively high opportunity, help with credit- related issues, and even give neighborhood tours. Landlords need encouragement as well. They can be wary of tenants bearing vouchers, which mean government oversight and paperwork. The Seattle program has streamlined this process, and offers free damage insurance to sweeten the deal. Tenants have just started moving, but the program is already successful: The majority of families who received assistance moved to high-opportunity areas, compared with one-fifth for the control group, which was not provided with the extra
- 33. services. Chetty estimates that the program will increase each child’s lifetime earnings by $88,000. In February, President Donald Trump signed into law a bill that provides $28 million to try similar experimental programs in other locations. The bill enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support, and this spring Chetty was invited to brief the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He told me he’s hopeful that the program can be expanded to the 2.2 million families that receive HUD housing vouchers every year. “Then you’d actually be doing something about poverty in the American city,” he said. “What I like about this is it’s not some pie-in-the-sky thing. We have something that works.” Charlotte is among the cities interested in implementing the Seattle strategy, but officials also want to use the atlas to select better building sites for affordable housing. In the past, much of the city’s affordable housing was constructed in what Chetty’s data reveal to be high-poverty, low-opportunity areas. “Let’s not just think about building X units of new affordable housing,” Williams said. “Let’s really leverage housing policy as part of a larger economic-mobility agenda for the community.” Opportunity bargains, however, are not an inexhaustible resource. The crucial question, says the Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, is whether the opportunity in these places derives from “rival goods”—institutions, such as schools, with limited capacity—or “non-rival goods,” such as local culture, which are harder to deplete. When new people move in, what happens to opportunity? And even if an influx of families doesn’t disrupt the opportunity magic, people aren’t always eager to pick up and leave their homes. Moving breaks ties with family, friends, schools, churches, and other organizations. “The real conundrum is how to address the larger structural realities of inequality,” says the Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson, “and not just try to move people around.”
- 34. For all he’s learned about where opportunity resides in America, Chetty knows surprisingly little about what makes one place better than another. He and Hendren have gathered a range of social-science data sets and looked for correlations to the atlas. The high-opportunity places, they’ve found, tend to share five qualities: good schools, greater levels of social cohesion, many two-parent families, low levels of income inequality, and little residential segregation, by either class or race. The list is suggestive, but hard to interpret. For example, the strongest correlation is the number of intact families. The explanation seems obvious: A second parent usually means higher family income as well as more stability, a broader social network, additional emotional support, and many other intangibles. Yet children’s upward mobility was strongly correlated with two-parent families only in the neighborhood, not necessarily in their home. There are so many things the data might be trying to say. Maybe fathers in a neighborhood serve as mentors and role models? Or maybe there is no causal connection at all. Perhaps, for example, places with strong church communities help kids while also fostering strong marriages. The same kinds of questions flow from every correlation; each one may mean many things. What is cause, what is effect, and what are we missing? Chetty’s microscope has revealed a new world, but not what animates it—or how to change it. Chetty has found that opportunity does not correlate with many traditional economic measures, such as employment or wage growth. In the search for opportunity’s cause, he is instead focusing on an idea borrowed from sociology: social capital. The term refers broadly to the set of connections that ease a person’s way through the world, providing support and inspiration and opening doors.
- 35. Chetty believes that if upward mobility can be measured with enough precision, it can be understood. “The big-picture goal,” he told me, “is to revive the American dream.” (Carlos Chavarría) Economics has long played the role of sociology’s annoying older brother—conventionally accomplished and wholeheartedly confident, unaware of what he doesn’t know, while still commanding everyone’s attention. Chetty, though, is part of a younger generation of scholars who have embraced a style of quantitative social science that crosses old disciplinary lines. There are strong hints in his research that social capital and mobility are intimately connected; even a crude measure of social capital, such as the number of bowling alleys in a neighborhood, seems to track with opportunity. His data also suggest that who you know growing up can have lasting effects. A paper on patents he co-authored found that young women were more likely to become inventors if they’d moved as children to places where many female inventors lived. (The number of male inventors had little effect.) Even which fields inventors worked in was heavily influenced by what was being invented around them as children. Those who grew up in the Bay Area had some of the highest rates of patenting in computers and related fields, while those who spent their childhood in Minneapolis, home of many medical-device manufacturers, tended to invent drugs and medical devices.* Chetty is currently working with data from Facebook and other social-media platforms to quantify the links between opportunity and our social networks. Sociologists embrace many ways of understanding the world. They shadow people and move into communities, wondering what they might find out. They collect data and do quantitative analysis and read economics papers, but their work is also informed by psychology and cultural studies. “When you are released from the harsh demands of experiment, you are allowed to make new discoveries and think more freely about what is
- 36. going on,” says David Grusky, a Stanford sociology professor who collaborates with Chetty. I asked Princeton’s Edin what she thought would end up being the one thing that best explains the peaks and valleys of American opportunity. She said her best guess is “some kind of social glue”—the ties that bind people, fostered by well-functioning institutions, whether they are mosques or neighborhood soccer leagues. The staff at Opportunity Insights has learned: When an economist gets lost, a sociologist can touch his elbow and say, You know, I’ve been noticing some things. In charlotte, Chetty still aspires to practice “precision medicine,” but he told me his initial goal is more modest: to see whether he and his team can find anything that helps. Opportunity Insights is planning housing and higher-education initiatives, but social capital is at the center of its approach. It is working with a local organization called Leading on Opportunity, and looking at nonprofits that are already operating successfully, including Communities in Schools, a national group that provides comprehensive student support, as well as a job-training program called Year Up. Chetty is also using tax data to measure the long-term impacts of dozens of place-based interventions, such as enterprise zones, which use tax and other incentives to draw businesses into economically depressed areas. (He expects to see initial results from these analyses later this year.) Chetty may not have many answers yet, but he is convinced that this combination of data, collaboration, and fieldwork will make it possible to move from educated guesses to tailored prescriptions. “There are points when the pieces come together,” Chetty told me. “My instinct is that in social science, this generation is when that is going to happen.” Chetty’s pitch to the nation is that our problems have technocratic solutions, but at times I sense that he is avoiding an argument. Surely our neighborhoods can be improved, and
- 37. those improvements can help the next generation achieve better outcomes. But what of the larger forces driving the enormous disparities in American wealth? Poor people would be better off if their children had better prospects, but also if they had more money—if the fruits of our society were shared more broadly. “I can take money from you and give it to me, and maybe that is good and maybe it is not,” he said. “I feel like there are a lot of people working on redistribution, and it is hard to figure out the right answer there.” To focus on the question of who gets what is also, of course, politically incendiary. Chetty believes there is more progress to be made through a moral framing that is less partisan. “There are so many kids out there who could be doing so many great things, both for themselves and for the world,” he said. Chetty’s challenge to the system is measured and empirical; it’s one that billionaires and corporations can happily endorse. But his stance is also a simple matter of personality: Chetty is no agitator. He told me, “I like to find solutions that please everyone in the room, and this definitely has that feel.” In Charlotte, even the circumscribed version of social change that Chetty is attempting looks daunting. Last summer, before the Opportunity Insights team came to town, I drove around to the back of West Charlotte High School, to a hamlet of pale- yellow temporary-classroom buildings, each set on concrete blocks. One building has been given over to Eliminate the Digital Divide, known as E2D, a nonprofit that takes donations of old laptops, then refurbishes and distributes them for $60 apiece to students who have no computer of their own. According to E2D, half of the county’s public-school students have been unable to complete a homework assignment because they don’t have access to a computer or the internet. Inside the E2D building is a bright room ringed by a series of workstations where West Charlotte student-employees inspect
- 38. laptops, set up hard drives, and test the final products. Whiteboards, photos, and posters with inspirational phrases like college bound! cover the walls. By the door, a pair of yellow couches serve as a waiting area. When the boys get their computers, they work hard to suppress a smile, whereas the girls are prone to let loose. Sometimes they jump up and down, and sometimes they cry. I met Kalijah Jones, a young black woman in a pale-pink sleeveless blouse and matching skirt. She had started working at E2D during her senior year, in 2017. Not long into our conversation, she said, “I love my life!”—this despite the fact that she was living in a homeless shelter at the time. For Jones, the biggest benefit brought by E2D was not the computer or the job, but the social capital the program provided. Last year, she said, E2D’s West Charlotte lab was recognized with a local technology award, and the founder invited Jones and some of her co-workers to join him for the awards ceremony at the Knight Theater, where the Charlotte Ballet performs. One of the other honorees was Road to Hire, a program that pays high-school graduates as it trains them for jobs in sales and tech. The head of Road to Hire was at the ceremony, and he gave Jones a business card, which led to a paid spot in the program’s training program. But in the crimson sectors of Chetty’s atlas, the problem is both the absence of opportunity and the presence of its opposite: swift currents that can drag a person down. There are, in these places, a few narrow paths to success, and 99 ways to falter. Jones made it through high school despite living in a shelter, and was accepted to Western Carolina University with financial aid. But she decided not to go, in part because she couldn’t imagine leaving her struggling mother and sister behind to live on a campus three hours away. Last winter, the three of them left Charlotte, and the prospects that were beginning to open up
- 39. for Jones there, and moved to New Jersey, where she grew up. When I last spoke with her, she’d found work at an Amazon warehouse. One friday evening, I was in Chetty’s Stanford office when a ballerina arrived. Sanvi, Chetty’s 3-year-old daughter, wore a pink tutu with matching hair ribbons and tights. She declined— vigorously—the white sweater offered to ward off the evening chill. Chetty and I had spent hours discussing his research, but when the nanny dropped Sanvi off, it marked the end of the day. Chetty gathered his things and whisked her up in his arms. “Hold me properly, Appa,” Sanvi admonished. Outside, we got into Chetty’s aging silver Acura and headed to an Indonesian restaurant for takeout. Sanvi bubbled with enthusiasm. “I want to be a fairy princess,” she announced from the back seat. “Can I be a fairy princess?” Chetty glanced in the rearview mirror and assured Sanvi that when she grows up, she can be whatever she wants. After stopping for the food, we pulled up to a light-brown ranch house, with beautiful plantings out front. Inside, the house was clearly Sanvi’s. Taking a seat in the open kitchen, I was surrounded by a tapestry of exuberant finger paintings taped to the walls, interspersed with pages neatly torn from coloring books (penguins, parrots, bunnies, each splashed with color). A pair of persimmon trees were fruiting out back. Chetty told me that his interest in poverty dates back to the horrifying want he observed on the streets of New Delhi. But only when he built the first version of his atlas did he see what he should do about it. “I realized,” he said, “we could have the biggest impact on poverty by focusing on children.” Chetty thinks about revolution like an economist does: as a compounding accumulation of marginal changes. Bump the interest rate on your savings account by one notch, and 30 years
- 40. later, your balance is much improved. Move a family to a better zip code, or foster the right conditions in that family’s current neighborhood, and their children will do better; do that a thousand times, or ten thousand, and the American dream can be more possible, for more people, than it is today. In the 1930s, the poet Langston Hughes published what remains one of the most honest descriptions of that dream: A dream so strong, so brave, so true That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That’s made America the land it has become The poem, though, is laced with a counterpoint of protest: “America was never America to me”—not to the “man who never got ahead”; “the poorest worker bartered through the years”; or “the Negro, servant to you all.” Still, for all its outrage, the poem ends with a paradoxical yearning: “O, let America be America again,” Hughes wrote. “The land that never has been yet.” Hearing stories of the American dream as a boy in New Delhi, Chetty adopted the faith. When he became a scientist, he discerned the truth. What remains is contradiction: We must believe in the dream and we must accept that it is false—then, perhaps, we will be capable of building a land where it will yet be true. This article appears in the August 2019 print edition with the headline “Raj Chetty’s American Dream.” * This article originally stated that Minneapolis was the home of the Mayo Clinic. Gareth Cook is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine.