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For our first real "topic" episode, we decided to start with the American Dream.
Maybe we chose it because we thought it’d be a hopeful topic and we want this podcast to be hopeful. But we also quickly got to the dark underbelly of the subject and that also just feels real for our times.
But let’s back up and begin with a question.
What is the American Dream? It’s a phrase so woven into our cultural fabric that we rarely stop to ask where it actually came from — or what it originally meant.
The term was coined by a historian named James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America. And, notably, Adams wasn’t talking white picket fences. He was describing something closer to a social promise — a society where every person, regardless of where they were born or who their parents were, could reach their fullest potential. A better life — with the emphasis on life, not on the material trappings of it.
So we dive in to reviewing what this idea holds for each of us personally — and then explore how alive it is at large in the American consciousness today. We get into what it can ignite in us, and the vulnerabilities it can exploit or lay bare.
Just a quick reminder that this episode was still quite early in our process, so you’ll still hear a lot of behind-the-scenes, working out our process talk but we wanted to leave that in because well — quite frankly we think it can be valuable to get a glimpse at us, working out our own dream of making this podcast a reality, in our own raw and vulnerable way.
Deeper Learning Points
- The concept of The American Dream: “In 1931 a historian named James Truslow Adams set out to make sense of the crisis of the Great Depression, which in 1931 was both an economic crisis and a looming political crisis…for Adams, worshipping material success was not the definition of the American dream: It was, by contrast, the failure of ‘the American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank.’ Adams did not mean “richer” materially, but spiritually; he distinguished the American dream from dreams of prosperity. It was, he declared, ‘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 Statue of Liberty History
- The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus: “...Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
- A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
- Perception of America in the World: “The share of the public who considers the U.S. a reliable partner has declined steeply in many countries since we last asked this question in 2022, during Joe Biden’s presidency.”
- Income Inequality Statistics: “Over the past four decades, the very richest Americans have enjoyed by far the fastest income growth. Between 1979 and 2022, the average income of the richest 0.01 percent of households, a group that today represents just over 13,000 households, grew over 12 times as fast as the income of the bottom 20 percent of earners.”
- Raj Chetty: The Fading American Dream: “We find that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s.”
- Fundamental Attribution Error: “People have a cognitive bias to assume that a person’s actions depend on what ‘kind’ of person that person is rather than on the social and environmental forces that influence the person.”
- “OK, Boomer”
- Post Traumatic Growth
- 🧰 Dialectic Behavioral Therapy Handbook
- The Dark Side of Meritocracy, with Michael Sandel
- 🧰 The Psychological Benefits of Engaging With History
- 🧰 Splitting Defense
- 🧰 Magical Thinking Defense
- Erik Erikson’s America
- 🧰 Selection bias
- Sheryl Sandberg and Leaning In or Out?
- “Good Enough Mothering”
