ABSTRACT
Pursuit of material well-being simultaneously betrays and upholds James Truslow Adams’s original use of the term. In The Epic of America, Adams’s broad view of the American dream envisioned a “land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement”. A more realistic framing of the concept, to the extent it exists, locates it within the pervasive social inequality characterizing American society. Research on intergenerational mobility in the United States gives further pause to overoptimism in regards to its possibility, pointing, overall, to decreasing chances for children since the early decades of the twentieth century. Hochschild’s fears speak to the seriousness of social inequality and the American dream’s relationship to it. By social inequality is meant the disproportionate and systematic hoarding of resources by society’s upper echelons, with the much larger numbers of people below them routinely receiving a much smaller share of these resources.
