ABSTRACT
American influence on the world community, for better or worse, has been a significant factor in global affairs for more than a century, since at least the turn of the nineteenth-century war with Spain. While it has not always been so, in recent decades many countries view the United States’ influence as primarily pernicious—largely a form of economic, political, and military imperialism. The foregoing now permits the authors to comprehend the intertwined relation between the American dream ideology and the actual institutional structures that form contemporary American society. Those institutions, as numerous commentators attest, are primarily economic institutions that offer economic solutions to service the gap between aspiration and fulfillment. The American model of home ownership through mortgage debt, perhaps inspired and certainly intensified by aspirations to live the American dream, has been largely adopted by industrialized societies around the world since the end of World War II.
