Is the American Dream dead?

[Gregg]

I sometimes wonder if those actually wanting the American Dream are less willing to pay the price of admission.

Exactly the point I was going to raise Rogar. The American dream is there for someone willing to go after it. It might not be easy to get. In fact, if you're coming from some kind of 'disadvantaged' situation it can be damn hard, but its still there. I know a lot of people who are sitting around waiting for a dream to fall in their laps. It won't. The American dream, at least in my version, isn't winning the lottery. I do know a lot of people who hung in there for years and finally got to where they wanted to be (be it financially, socially, emotionally or whatever). In my mind that's the dream.

[SteveinMN]

I sometimes wonder if those actually wanting the American Dream are less willing to pay the price of admission. My grandmother was a single mother, and provided room and board in her home to pay for my mother's college. Who lets rooms or provides room and board these days? Through all of the hard financial times there have been businesses requiring certain skills, like instrumentation technicians for example, who have had trouble finding workers to fill openings. My father was an undertaker, and again, always had trouble finding good help.

I believe those people still exist. However, I think the landscape has changed.

Our parents had the "luxury" of being able to work in the same job at the same company for their entire career if they showed up regularly and kept their noses clean. They did their 40 hours a week and went home (or got paid for staying). Now the constant push for ever more productivity with ever fewer workers has us checking email at 9 pm and working weekends -- usually both halves of a couple. Today businesses come and go very quickly and feel almost no loyalty to their employees. Jobs are pretty much imperiled at all times. Few businesses take a view longer than the next financial quarter or year, sacrificing employees and long-term prospects to stockholders.

We've also spent years denigrating skilled trades. We gutted middle-class manufacturing jobs. Nobody brags about their son the plumber or their daughter the tool-and-die maker. If you're not college material, you're not much. Or so people think.

And, in fairness, those working as undertakers are a special breed. A college roommate of mine was getting his degree to work in the family funeral home business; he was ideally suited to the job but not everyone is. I can see that being a field where it's hard to attract good help

The new owners, a young couple, let her in to look around. They had bought her house for $38,000. Yet the bank would not negotiate a lower interest rate or payment with the divorced mom who had owned that house for 24 years. She is now saving up money hoping to get a trailer and live in a trailer park.

We've discussed that fiasco in other threads. The house I bought for my mom was sold to me for about half of the price they offered the previous owner as a short sale. Beyond whatever it cost to foreclose on the house, seal it up, and then prep it for sale, the lender took a big haircut. You can easily wonder how that makes sense.

Is that a higher standard of living than Zimbabwe? yes is that the bar we've set for life-long working people? Be glad you don't live in a tent??

Yet many of us have heard this for years. Toward the end of my tenure in the working world, the lousy economy was used as the excuse for laying off scores of coworkers in favor of cheaper off-shore workers. We went without raises or training or anything new for two years and now the annual increase "allowed" for a solid, did-what-they-asked worker is a whole 2-3% -- if you're not over the salary-range midpoint. ("You did a fine job this year. Thank you for helping make the company successful. Too bad we can't give you any more than this free pat on the back.") And I worked at one of the better companies. Much of it is cast in the guise of "globalization". Nevermind that the worker they can hire someplace else for $80 a day doesn't have a $1,000 a month mortgage to pay.

[pinkytoe]

This whole thing is such a complex issue. I was thinking about how very few children are taught any sort of financial literacy in public school. Even my own dd with an advanced degree did not seem to understand the consequences of taking on college loan debt. The whole economic system is I believe unnecessarily complicated - perhaps by design. I DO believe there is endless opportunity for those who have the advantages to pursue them - ambition, intelligence, education, connections, family support etc.

[Gregg]

I DO believe there is endless opportunity for those who have the advantages to pursue them - ambition, intelligence, education, connections, family support etc.

+1, but added: All of those are advantages and can afford a shortcut of sorts to the pursuit of the American dream. One of them is the key. You can reach the goal with it and none of the other advantages, but you can't reach the goal without it. Ambition is the key. Everything else only speeds up the process, but none of them are any kind of guarantee of success. I'm sure we all know intelligent, educated people with good family ties who really haven't ever done much with their lives. The ones I know simply lack the ambition. Some folks inevitably site the silver spoon crowd who are born rich and manage to stay that way without ever doing much. Fine, but is that really the American dream?

[Gregg]

I believe those people still exist. However, I think the landscape has changed.

Should society change in relation to "the dream" or visa-versa? I think that those who seek out opportunity do so regardless of the climate. Obviously there are times when it is easier to 'make it' and times when it is extremely difficult. Just as obvious are the advantages some people have over others that gives them a shorter road to their goals. Is there ever going to be a time in human history when those two axioms are not in play? I doubt it.

My grandparents were uneducated, poor dirt farmers in Northwest Oklahoma in the 1930s. No matter what happens with the economy, unemployment or any other 2013 macro-factor they had it worse than anyone in the US today. They went on to have a wonderful life because they didn't lose site of what they wanted when it looked hopeless. The other part of their story is that they never once thought they "deserved" anything. They knew that if they were going to make it they had to do it themselves. Anyone who takes that same approach today is going to be just fine.

[SteveinMN]

Should society change in relation to "the dream" or visa-versa? I think that those who seek out opportunity do so regardless of the climate. Obviously there are times when it is easier to 'make it' and times when it is extremely difficult. Just as obvious are the advantages some people have over others that gives them a shorter road to their goals. Is there ever going to be a time in human history when those two axioms are not in play? I doubt it.

What do we define as "The American Dream"? The house, the yard, the picket fence, the 2.5 kids, and the dog? Or just the ability to find your niche and run with it? I think that makes a difference in this discussion. I believe society changes in relation to The Dream whether or not they want to. The Dream of working at one career anymore is, I think, dead. The Dream of working to live (rather than living to work) is dying. And I think we've been creating a chasm of social mobility that soon will be difficult or impossible to cross. America already offers less social mobility than many other countries.

The other part of their story is that they never once thought they "deserved" anything. They knew that if they were going to make it they had to do it themselves. Anyone who takes that same approach today is going to be just fine.

Entitlement -- the belief that you did deserve something -- is a change that started with our parents, who expected Social Security and Medicare to pay out well beyond anything they had paid in. It's an expectation brought on by a long tail of prosperity fueled by cheap resources that led workers to believe they would always be paid more next year.

I agree that anyone who thinks they don't deserve anything probably will do fine. But when people attend Tea Party rallies and carry signs telling the government to keep its grubby hands off their Medicare, or when farmers can't even tell you how much they get in federal crop supports but keep electing know-nothings like Michelle Bachmann, entitlement has set in to a level that people consider structural. Removing such supports will not be a popular endeavor.

[Spartana]

Something I just noticed as I left this site and moved on over to yahoo to check my email - on the yahoo news page there was a piece about the "jaw dropping homes of the stars." Get real, how many people are going to have that in their lives, honestly? As a society it might be better if we focused more on the paid off double wide on an acre of land that is organically farmed somewhere with fairly cheap land, say in some part of Texas that still gets rain? Or maybe Kansas?

My point is that it might be wiser to focus on more realistic expectations for the future. Rob

I blame the darn TV for changing the American Dream ;-)!

Seriously, I think you hit on a point that is very true. That now with TV and other media forms that were not available thru out much of history we can see how "the other half (the "better" half??) lives, and we lust for the same thing. Our desire for "more, bigger, better, fancier, prettier, etc..." has grown. We are told that is what we (society) should want and strive for for ourselfs - and you can bet there are a lot of people out there who will loan us the money to make it happen too!

While I don't feel the past was a better place to live in for many other reasons, I do feel that the life goals that many middle class and working class people had were less money/stuff focused then they are now. I see those same old-school financial values in the asian immigrant community I live in. The willingness to live small, often in larger family groups to save money by splitting expenses, the desire to work a hard menial labor low income job (or two) while they strive to improve themselves with education for a better job, and, most importantly, delaying gratification until they can actually afford anything new and shiney and then paying cash for it. Most house bought by the people in my community are paid for with cash earned over many years of sacrifice and communal living.

That of course will change once they become more Americanized (just as they are getting much bigger and fatter from all our crappy food :-)!) and begin desirering those things only the wealthier people can really afford without getting in debt. But for now the older values of frugality, being debt free, and living within your means seems to be the way they live - even if those means are small. The kids are happy to continue to live at home while in collage and will continue to hold a job at the same time to pay for that college. They often continue in to live at home after they are married, even when they have kids, in order to save money in order to buy their own house someday (how many americans 20-somethings would do that? They want there own place and they want it now and will pay half of their income to get an apt at 18!!). Often both spouses will be working 2 jobs each in order to save money while the retired grandparents (most have 3 generations of families members living together) watch the kids. This is how many american families lived just a generation ago.

[ApatheticNoMore]

I DO believe there is endless opportunity for those who have the advantages to pursue them - ambition, intelligence, education, connections, family support etc.

Noone actualy has all these advantages do they? Maybe Mitt Romney? Life is not like that for pretty much anyone, so I don't think that theoretical situation is what anyone actually deals with on the day to day. Hey one might be lucky to have one of them (ok I'm probably reasonably intelligent ).

As for whether or not one can suceed if they have boatloads of amibition etc.. ... it's kind of irrelevant to the question of whether life is getting harder for most people. And that's kind of an important question isn't it? In fact it's pretty much the whole question is it not? Or is this life itself just some afterlife where we spend eternity in tormented contemplation of whether or not we deserve our fates.

Mind you I probably wouldn't enjoy the show. So just profiling a bunch of people and how much their lives suck? You know I can grant that it might not be their fault that their lives suck, that life is bigger than them, that the economic system stinks etc. etc. but still .... A eulogy for manufacturing? Yea but unless anyone has any plans to bring it back (small scale manufacturing etc. might bring it back), it's gone baby gone. And eulogies for the dead are easy to write, what's harder is current politics and figuring out what the next manufacturing (ie the next field that will leave the country) is and what can be done about it.

[bae]

Noone actualy has all these advantages do they? Maybe Mitt Romney? Life is not like that for pretty much anyone, so I don't think that theoretical situation is what anyone actually deals with on the day to day. Hey one might be lucky to have one of them (ok I'm probably reasonably intelligent ).

I was born in a US Naval hospital to an enlisted man and a RN, both hillbillies from Ohio/Kentucky. Several of my grandparents lived in trailers in the woods, the rest in old run-down farmhouses.

My father was bankrupt several times before I reached adulthood.

I was the first member of my family to graduate from college. And not Ozark Community College, but an Ivy League institution.

I "retired" when I was 36, with a significant amount of capital.

And my last name isn't Romney.

[puglogic]

It seems the pursuit of the American Dream is still there, for those who want it, but it is getting quite a lot harder to actually catch for most people (notwithstanding those who have always existed who want a free ride). I too worked damned hard to get where I am in life, but I'm not sure I would have the same results in these times, no matter how much blood, sweat and tears I was willing to shed.

Time to change the dream, perhaps.