Tag Archives: instability

American Dream past and future about status? Stability?

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What is the American Dream actually about? An editorial in the Chicago Tribune considers how younger Americans see the American Dream:

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Lower marriage rates and lower homeownership among younger adults seems to indicate the increasing elusiveness of what we have long considered the American Dream of owning your own place and building a family.

So what’s going on? Is this a generational shift in values — or the predictable result of a system that’s become too expensive and too precarious for anyone to gain a foothold?…

So is the American Dream disintegrating? Or is it changing shape?

We think the answer is a bit of both. Affordability plays no small role in explaining why fewer young people buy a home or choose to go into debt for a degree…

If Gen Z does bring marriage back into fashion, it won’t be a return to tradition so much as a reinvention of it — one that values stability, yes, but also flexibility and purpose. That’s the American Dream now.

The suggestion above is that the American Dream involved (1) homeownership and (2) having a family. Have these two things and you have made it. The contrast is provided at the end. Younger Americans perceive more instability in the economy and in relationships. The old path of securing a home and family is not as easy. They want something different: “flexibility and purpose” rather than “stability.”

How much of a change is this? The key might be getting at the motivations behind achieving these goals. What was having a home and family about? Reaching a certain middle-class status? Keeping up with the Joneses? The shift toward “flexibility and purpose” is about what exactly: self-sufficiency? Status? A better sense of self?

In other words, I wonder if this is more about changing methods to achieve the American Dream rather than a shift in goals. As noted in the editorial, many younger Americans still want to own a home. Many will pursue relationships. But the means to getting here may have changed. There is a narrative now that this former path was easy: the decades after World War Two provided easy opportunities for many Americans to buy a home and start a family. Perhaps this was a unique time in history with relative prosperity and the conclusion of a major war where the United States emerged as a winner.

Imagine several decades from now when the postwar era is one hundred years ago. Americans may still want the same things – purpose, a sense of achievement, a certain status – but what form that takes may have changed. What marks a middle-class life may look different. Feeling accomplished or stable may take a different form.

IMF warns of social consequences of global recession

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A new report from the International Monetary Fund and the International Labour Federation suggests the recent global economic crisis could lead to social instability:

A joint IMF-ILO report said 30m jobs had been lost since the crisis, three quarters in richer economies. Global unemployment has reached 210m. “The Great Recession has left gaping wounds. High and long-lasting unemployment represents a risk to the stability of existing democracies,” it said.

The study cited evidence that victims of recession in their early twenties suffer lifetime damage and lose faith in public institutions. A new twist is an apparent decline in the “employment intensity of growth” as rebounding output requires fewer extra workers. As such, it may be hard to re-absorb those laid off even if recovery gathers pace. The world must create 45m jobs a year for the next decade just to tread water.

The Telegraph headline say this social instability was termed a “social explosion.”

So what kind of social consequences are these groups talking about? A number of commentators have noted how such recessions affect future behaviors, particularly among younger generations who become scarred by such experiences. But when a term like “social explosion” is used, it suggests images like riots, labor strikes, labor demonstrations, perhaps even the collapse of democracies in the face of pressure from angry citizens. In the United States, it is hard to imagine this. (Indeed, it is an interesting question to ask: what would have to happen for a majority of Americans to participate in more demonstrative collective action?) Even the Great Depression didn’t lead to many violent or excessive disruptions (or at least the history books don’t discuss much of this).

I wonder how much of this language is prompted by particular political viewpoints. The Telegraph hints at this:

“Most advanced countries should not tighten fiscal policies before 2011: tightening sooner could undermine recovery,” said the report, rebuking Britain’s Coalition, Germany’s austerity hawks, and US Republicans. Under French socialist Strauss-Kahn, the IMF has assumed a Keynesian flavour.

The whole situation bears watching – how will average citizens respond?