Economy
Where the American Dream Lives and Dies
The urban-rural divide is real, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Rags-to-riches stories, like Benjamin Franklin’s, have always captured the American imagination. They feed the narrative of the American Dream—that from humble beginnings, a scrappy, hardworking person can become prosperous, and afford opportunities his or her parents did not have. Through booms and recessions, people have bought into this myth.
The problem is: The American Dream lives and dies at the local level. Stanford* economist Raj Chetty has shown that conditions in our neighborhoods are really what shape our ability to escape poverty and determine if we will fare better than our parents. A new analysis by the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public policy organization, builds on that finding.