The New American Dream Is a Startup and a Downtown Loft
It’s time we acknowledge that the American Dream of a home in the suburbs, with a neatly-manicured lawn, a white picket fence, and a two-car garage, is out of date. Before we lament its decline, let’s acknowledge that it was a historical anomaly that has only existed for the past 50 years or so, or roughly two generations in our nation’s 240 year history. For those of us who need the mathematical assist, that’s barely 20% of our history as an independent nation, romanticized by the Donald Draper’s of Madison Ave, primarily to sell us suburban housing , automobiles, and interstate highways; pushed by a government agenda of deurbanization and decentralization; and always inaccessible to large parts of our population. And yet when we talk about the American Dream in our national discourse, we don’t even bother to define it, implying by omission that everyone already knows what it means.
Let’s start with a bit of history. The phrase “American Dream” was coined only in 1931, 155 years after the birth of our republic, by a man named James Truslow Adams, in The Epic of America. Like many epics, from Gilgamesh to the Odyssey, its goal was to advance a particular narrative, to establish and promote a social mythology, rather than to hew to historical accuracy (although it is not barred from doing so). It is the ultimate example of history being written by the victors.
Even Adams, however, would not recognize the white picket fence version of the American Dream that we associate with the phrase today. Adams’ American Dream was more Maslow than material; he defined the phrase he created as
“that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it [1]. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”
The American Dream for today’s young professionals, starting out their careers wide-eyed and dreamy, as well as young parents, dreaming on behalf of their children, is no longer the big house in the suburbs with the white picket fence and the automobiles that carry them to their corporate job. It is the startup, the small business, the entrepreneurial venture, and the ability to live in the vibrant urban core of a big city. Today’s ideal social form is the business startup; our most revered members of society are the entrepreneurs — the Steve Jobs’, Mark Zuckerberg’s, and Elon Musks — and our ideal outcome is to start our own company and be in control of our own destiny. Material success is welcome and certainly desired, but it’s less important than economic independence.
Where do we want to live? Vibrant, dense, cities with public transportation and happening cultural scenes, of course. Reality may price many or even most of our generation out of this dream, leading us to move to the suburbs as we have children, but we go there begrudgingly.
Affordable housing did not make it to the top of the national conversation because of an increase in homelessness among the poorest Americans; that, sadly, has been going on for years and the media class has never paid attention. It made it to the top of the national conversation because young professionals, yuppies, hipsters, gentrifiers, the political class, can no longer afford to live in cities, and they are upset about it. They don’t want to live in the suburbs and have to drive everywhere. The aspiration — the Dream, if you will — is to get rid of the car and the long commute, to live in walkable communities, to get out of the steel boxes and into fresh air.
The American Dream as Dreamed from Abroad
When we talk about the American Dream, we usually do so in the context of how it is dreamed by Americans. But the most powerful aspect of the American Dream is the force it exerts as a tool for attracting the most ambitious from around the world, the ones who dreamed of achieving things their native lands would never permit them.
(here’s a fun aside: the American Dream has been so successful at this that at various times in history governments around the world have been so concerned about the outflow of their citizens to the United States that they resorted to distributing anti-emigration propaganda such as this 1869 Swedish anti-emigration poster contrasting the dream of the American idyll (left) and the reality of life in the wilderness (right), complete with mountain lion, giant snake, and Indians in the middle of scalping and disembowelling some poor soul).
The research that has been done to show the outsized role that immigrants play in driving the American economy is legion so I’m going to list some of it here and not try to argue the point: The foreign-born population of the US has averaged 10.5% since 1850 and is currently around 13%, yet 40% of the Fortune 500 was founded by immigrants and first-generation Americans. Immigrants launched 29% of new businesses in 2014. More than 20% of the Inc 500 CEOs are immigrants, and immigrants are twice as likely to start new businesses as native-born Americans. A post I wrote in 2012 that includes a list of the immigrant founders of some of America’s largest tech companies.
Why did I write this post?
Because in this July month, 12 days after we celebrated our day of national independence and only a week after we felt our nation torn apart by the police shootings of black men and the ‘revenge’ shooting of white police officers in Dallas, it’s important to remember that the American Dream has not been lost[2]; the flow of immigrants from around the world coming here to realize their ambitions is holding steady (except, ironically, from Mexico). It is still present for those already within the United States too; it has merely changed. It’s time now for us to let go of the previous model of the Dream, to stop this myopic clinging which portrays the country as going downhill and only does us damage, and more forward into the New American Dream of entrepreneurship and vibrant urban living.
[1] Apparently in 1931 people were already cynical about the American Dream. One might think that this was because of the Great Depression, but even in the roaring 20s the classic Great Gatsby was satirizing the American Dream.
[2] Granted the new American Dream is out of reach for huge swaths of society, including poor African-Americans. But it’s important to realize that the old American Dream was off limits to Blacks as well.
Thank you to Joe Medved and Jessi Hempel who read versions of this post and provided feedback.
