| 来源类型 | Article |
| 规范类型 | 评论 |
| Public opinion and the American Dream | |
| Karlyn Bowman; Jennifer K. Marsico; Heather Sims | |
| 发表日期 | 2014-12-15 |
| 出版年 | 2014 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Hardly a week goes by without a politician invoking the American Dream and worrying about its demise. That’s not surprising. When you care deeply about Americans’ ability to fulfill their hopes and dreams, it is natural to worry about any deterioration of this essential premise of American life. But what exactly are Americans saying about the dream and how have their views of it changed over time? Do Americans believe the dream is endangered? The answers are more complicated than one might think. The Wall Street Journal conducted the first major survey on the state of the American Dream 30 years ago. Prior to that time, questions had been asked occasionally about achieving the good life, upward mobility, and homeownership, but there was no systematic exploration of the “American Dream.” What the Journal reporters concluded in 1986 will sound familiar today: Changing economic realities in the 1970s and 1980s, combined with shifting social and cultural values, have caused many observers to wonder whether the underpinnings of the American Dream are eroding. Economists report that in constant dollars, median household income peaked in 1973 and has actually declined since. Average weekly earnings were higher in 1962 than in 1985. And the cost of buying a home, a car, and sending one’s child to college have all increased faster than wages. From these and other statistics, many experts have concluded that the American Dream is becoming unattainable for an increasing number of Americans … Indeed, it has become the common wisdom in many circles that the American Dream is either dying or dead. Since the Journal’s survey, pollsters’ interest in the subject has been sporadic, and there are few decades-long trends to measure its health. The way pollsters conceptualize elements of the dream has changed over time, too, and that makes direct comparisons difficult. In a recent question, people were asked whether balancing “work and family life” was a part of the American Dream. While this idea may always have played a role in Americans’ thinking about the dream, it had never appeared in a poll before. Additionally, questions that provide important historical perspective are often missing in discussions of the dream’s health. Eighty-four percent of respondents in the 1986 Journal survey said being able to obtain a high school education was a key ingredient of the dream. Today being able to get a college degree is. Educational advancement undergirds a robust dream. Expectations about what constitutes the American Dream change, and we need to take these shifts into account in order to assess the dream’s health. When Gallup asked fathers in 1946 whether the opportunities for their sons would be greater than the ones they had, 64 percent expected they would. When Gallup repeated the question half a century later in 1997, the results were virtually identical. Gallup also asked mothers about opportunities for daughters in 1946, and their response was similar to the fathers’. But when the pollsters repeated the question in 1997, mothers’ views about their daughters’ opportunities had soared. Eighty-five percent said their daughters’ opportunities would be better than the ones they had. If an element of the dream is extending opportunity, opening once-closed doors for women suggests the dream has been real for more than half the population. Yet another key to understanding Americans’ evolving opinions is provided by a Reader’s Digest survey. When people 30 years of age and older were asked to think back to their teen years, two-thirds reported that when they were young a family with two relatively new cars would have been considered well above average in terms of wealth. But most people said a two-car family would be considered average now. More widely available consumer goods and conveniences is one reason why most people today say their standard of living is better than that of their parents. The dream is alive in that sense as well. Twenty years ago, 63 percent of those surveyed by the National Opinion Research Center said their standard of living was better than that of their parents at the same age. In 2012, 61 percent gave that response. Another sign that the dream’s death has been exaggerated comes from polls showing that a lot of people say they have already achieved the American Dream or will do so eventually. In six identically worded questions asked from 1992 to 2011, between 31 and 45 percent of those surveyed told pollsters they had already achieved it. In three CNN questions between 2009 and 2012, between 40 and 44 percent gave that response, and similar proportions said they would achieve the dream eventually. The editors of the Journal’s report on the dream made several observations we can confirm in our review of more recent survey data. Americans, by and large, believe that they can achieve their own personal version of the dream. This view has changed little over the past 30 years. In the Journal’s 1986 poll, only 13 percent said it had no meaning for them. When a 2013 Washington Post/Miller Center poll repeated the question verbatim, 19 percent gave that response. In these questions asked nearly 30 years apart, more than six in ten said the dream had meaning for them personally. Most Americans believe that this is still a country of opportunity where personal success — material or otherwise — can be achieved with hard work and a little bit of ingenuity. Our review also suggests that people always say the challenges for the next generation will be greater than the ones they have faced. In the 1986 survey report, people believed the dream “was harder to attain than in the past … and will be even harder to attain a generation from now.” Earlier this year, 70 percent of adults ages 34 and older told Pew researchers that young adults today face more economic challenges than they did when first starting out. Millennials agreed. What’s important to people turns out to be stable as well. Certain elements of the dream — an education for oneself and one’s children, freedom to live life on one’s own terms, a home of one’s own — still rank high. Becoming wealthy as a goal almost always comes near the bottom of a laundry list of potential elements of the dream. Americans have long been ambivalent about, but not hostile to, wealth. They don’t believe the rich are happier than they are. Most believe many things are far more important than money. Taken together, these beliefs show that Americans’ individual judgments about the dream still remain largely positive. But the story doesn’t end here. It is the public’s collective judgment about the American Dream that has undergone worrying changes. We put more weight on what people say about their own experiences, but what people think about the average American’s experiences drives our political conversation. And here, as a result of the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath, pessimism about the present and the future is palpable. Recent polls provide a sense of how traumatic the economic turmoil has been. Seventy-one percent told pollsters recently the recession has left us with a permanent change in normal economic conditions, while 29 percent said it had produced a temporary change from which we would recover. In a 2013 Gallup poll, 43 percent said the average person doesn’t have much chance to really get ahead. Only 8 percent gave that response in 1952. In February 2000, during a period of high national optimism, 72 percent told CBS News pollsters that compared to their parents’ generation, their opportunities to succeed were better, while 5 percent said they were worse. This summer 42 percent said they were better, and 32 percent said worse. Only 21 percent in a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll believed that life for the next generation of children would be better than it is for this generation, down from 50 percent in 1990. Twenty years ago, when Pew asked whether most people could make it if they were willing to work hard, 68 percent said they could. Sixty-five percent gave that response this past spring. The importance Americans attach to working hard is as strong as ever. Yet today, many Americans feel that their hard work — their means of pursuing the dream — is not being rewarded. A decade-long Gallup trend provides the evidence. In 2001, 76 percent of Americans said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the opportunity for a person in America to get ahead by working hard. Twenty-one percent were dissatisfied. In 2012, 53 percent were satisfied, while 46 percent were dissatisfied. Where does this leave us today? The dream is badly bruised, and its impending death has become a common refrain. But this sweeping generalization masks the public’s more complicated assessment. The challenges to achieving the American Dream seem greater than they have ever been, yet most people still believe they will achieve their personal vision of it. As the Journal’s 1986 report shows, this is not the first time Americans have expressed these conflicting attitudes. What remains to be seen is how resilient our economy is and with it, Americans’ dreams. Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This article was written with Jennifer Marsico, a former AEI senior research associate, and Heather Sims, an AEI research assistant. For more on public opinion on the American Dream, read AEI’s ebook Is the American Dream Alive? Examining Americans’ Attitudes. |
| 主题 | Politics and Public Opinion ; Economics ; Polls ; Society and Culture |
| 标签 | American dream ; opportunity ; Public opinion polls ; wealth |
| URL | https://www.aei.org/articles/public-opinion-american-dream/ |
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/257870 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Karlyn Bowman,Jennifer K. Marsico,Heather Sims. Public opinion and the American Dream. 2014. |
| 条目包含的文件 | 条目无相关文件。 | |||||
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