The decline of the American Dream, with David Leonhardt

The Vital Center

David Leonhardt, a senior writer for the New York Times, has tracked the U.S. economy for decades. Starting in the late 2000s, he began to notice that the statistical evidence was telling him a disheartening story about the decline of the American dream. Whether it was stagnating wages for most workers, the decreasing likelihood of children born into each generation to economically outperform their parents, technological slowdowns, or the life expectancy of Americans relative to other high-income countries — by every indicator, the United States as a whole seemed to be losing the sense of inevitable progress that had long defined it. In his magnificent new history, Ours Was the Shining Future, Leonhardt examines how America succeeded in delivering "the most prosperous mass economy in recorded history" starting in the 1940s and how the American Dream receded for most citizens in the 1980s and beyond. Using both economic analysis and deep historical research, Leonhardt uncovers the critical ways in which "democratic capitalism" characterized the U.S. during the presidencies from the 1940s through the 1970s, a period that spanned the terms of Democratic presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson but also Republican presidents like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. A combination of circumstances, policies, and attitudes brought about what historian James Truslow Adams (who coined the term "the American Dream" in the 1930s) envisioned as "a better, richer, and happier life for Americans of every rank." In this podcast episode, Leonhardt discusses how the critical factors of political power, enlightened corporate culture, and government investment operated in a virtuous cycle during the four decades after the end of World War II to bring about widespread prosperity. But after 1980, a reversion to what Leonhardt calls "rough-and-tumble capitalism" meant that these critical factors moved the country into a vicious cycle instead. Leonhardt emphasizes that "the Great Stagnation" of the past four decades — as the working class and lower middle class have experienced it, at any rate — can be overcome. But failure to do so will mean that "every problem we have in our society becomes much harder to solve if we don't solve that."