The American Dream

The American Dream appears across Kyle’s reading as the belief in upward mobility — and a recurring question about whether the conditions that made it real are eroding. Its origin story, in Kyle’s notes, is Benjamin Franklin: the “vision of America as a nation where people, whatever their birth or social class, could rise (as he did) to wealth and status based on their willingness to be industrious and cultivate their virtues.” Franklin embodies the rise-by-industry-and-virtue version (“What can he do?”), set against an aristocratic Europe where a printer’s foreman “would never have been able to rise so high.”

The New Urban Crisis then documents its erosion. Richard Florida ties the Dream to the postwar middle class and its “sturdy middle-class neighborhoods that literally defined the American Dream” — now hollowed out as neighborhoods divide into “concentrated disadvantage” and “concentrated affluence.” Crucially, he argues the suburban growth model that “once fueled the American Dream” has become “a fetter on economic growth,” no longer “the apotheosis of the American Dream.” This connects to Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires (the self-image of future riches as the operative American Dream myth — success as a question of when, not if) and to Thomas Piketty, whose work suggests the Dream was “very real” for much of US history precisely because a new country had less time to accumulate a rentier class — implying that as r > g compounds, the mobility premise weakens.

Context: “The American Dream” — the ideal that anyone can achieve prosperity and upward mobility through hard work regardless of birth — was popularized as a phrase by historian James Truslow Adams in 1931, though, as these sources show, its roots are traced back to figures like Benjamin Franklin.

Where this appears

• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life — Franklin as the origin archetype: rise by industry and virtue rather than birth (“What can he do?”).
• The New Urban Crisis — the middle-class neighborhoods that “literally defined the American Dream,” now hollowed out; suburbia as a “fetter” rather than its apotheosis.
• Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires — the Dream as the self-image of future riches (success as when, not if).
• Thomas Piketty — the Dream “very real” historically because a new country accumulated a rentier class more slowly.