The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on the 28th (local time) that the number of Americans who believe in the “American dream” of succeeding if you work hard beyond race and class in the United States has sharply decreased.
WSJ released the results of a survey of 1,502 U.S. adults from June 26 to July 8 with the University of Chicago Public Opinion Research Center (NORC).
When asked if the American dream of success if you work hard is valid, 34 percent answered that it is still valid, just one third of the respondents said it is. When the U.S. Institute of Public Religion (PRRI) asked the same question to 2,501 adults 12 years ago in 2012, 53 percent answered that the American dream is still valid. Americans’ expectations for the American dream have been significantly lower than in the past.
In the survey, 49% of respondents said the American dream was “once valid but no longer valid,” and 17% said it was “never valid.”
Americans typically expect to own a home, start a family, and live a comfortable retirement life as a sample of the American dream, but only a few thought they could do so. Eighty-nine percent of the respondents thought owning a home was essential or important to their future, but only 10 percent said owning a home was easy or easy to achieve. In addition, 96 percent and 95 percent said financial stability and comfortable retirement are important, but only 9 percent and 8 percent said it is easy to achieve. The WSJ pointed out that this trend was consistent regardless of gender or party, but it was more pronounced among the younger generation who gave up their homeownership while paying high interest rates and student loans.
Economists have analyzed that economic mobility in the United States has shrunk in recent decades, and it is a natural outcome for Americans to see their chances of success as low.
Emerson Sprick, an economist at the think tank’s Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), said, “The main aspect of the American dream seems to be unreachable unlike past generations,” citing the fact that private pensions have continued to decline over the past decade, almost disappearing, and that the cost of home ownership has soared.
In addition, according to a study by Professor Nassaniel Hendren of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Professor Raj Chetti of Harvard University, about 90 percent of those born in 1940 had a better life than their parents, but this proportion was halved among those born in the 1980s. “Economic mobility would have been at an all-time low in the early 2020s,” Hendren said.
SOPHIA KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
