The New American Dream

A theme Kyle tags across three long reads, pulling in two directions: the building version and the owning version. In It’s Time To Build, Marc Andreessen’s argument is that we should “reboot the American dream by breaking the price curves of housing, education, and healthcare” — the things we build in quantity (computers, TVs) get cheaper, while the things we don’t (homes, schools, hospitals) skyrocket; the fix is desire and will, not money or capitalism. In On the Nature of Long-Term Holds, the same tag attaches to the entrepreneurial-ownership version: being “a material owner in a superb business… compounding equity at desirable rates” is “the capitalist and entrepreneurial dream,” and you should “hold on for dear life.”

Where Do We Go Next? supplies the dark mirror — the eroded dream. There, populism is read as a response to a middle class that “feels locked out”: behind free-trade agreements and GDP growth, gains flow to “untrustworthy elites,” manufacturing jobs leave, banks get bailed out, and “faith in the American Dream eroded.” Taken together, Kyle uses “The New American Dream” to mark the project of rebuilding economic faith — through building things that lower cost of living, and through ownership/compounding as the path to wealth.

Context: “The American Dream” classically denotes upward mobility and homeownership through hard work; contemporary writers (Andreessen, Progress Studies adjacents) increasingly reframe it around the falling-cost-of-living and abundance agenda, while populist critiques emphasize its perceived erosion for the middle class.

Where this appears

• It’s Time To Build — reboot the American dream by breaking the housing/education/healthcare price curves
• On the Nature of Long-Term Holds — substantial business ownership compounding equity as “the capitalist and entrepreneurial dream”
• Where Do We Go Next? — populism as a response to a locked-out middle class and eroded faith in the American Dream

From Roam

Roam page metadata — Source: https://www.perell.com/blog/new-american-dream · Thread: https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1216751376182759425

• Author: David Perell
• Notes

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