# data[].attributes.body
An iconic image from the Great Depression recording the irony behind the American Dream.

# data[].attributes.body
It’s a portrait of an economy that disappoints a huge number of people who have heard that they live in a country where life gets better, only to experience something quite different.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The phrase "American dream" was invented during the Great Depression. It comes from a popular 1931 book by the historian James Truslow Adams, who defined it as "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone."

In the decades that followed, the dream became a reality. Thanks to rapid, widely shared economic growth, nearly all children grew up to achieve the most basic definition of a better life - earning more money and enjoying higher living standards than their parents had.

These days, people are arguably more worried about the American dream than at any point since the Depression. But there has been no real measure of it, despite all of the data available. No one has known how many Americans are more affluent than their parents were - and how the number has changed.

It's a thorny research question, because it requires tracking individual families over time rather than (as most economic statistics do) taking one-time snapshots of the country.

The beginnings of a breakthrough came several years ago, when a team of economists led by Raj Chetty received access to millions of tax records that stretched over decades. The records were anonymous and came with strict privacy rules, but nonetheless allowed for the linking of generations.

The resulting research is among the most eye-opening economics work in recent years. You've probably heard some of the findings even if you don't realize it. They have shown that the odds of escaping poverty vary widely by region, for instance, an insight that has influenced federal housing policy.

After the research began appearing, I mentioned to Chetty, a Stanford professor, and his colleagues that I thought they had a chance to do something no one yet had: create an index of the American dream. It took them months of work, using old Census data to estimate long-ago decades, but they have done it. They've constructed a data set that shows the percentage of American children who earn more money - and less money - than their parents earned at the same age.

The index is deeply alarming. It's a portrait of an economy that disappoints a huge number of people who have heard that they live in a country where life gets better, only to experience something quite different.

Their frustration helps explain not only this year's disturbing presidential campaign but also Americans' growing distrust of nearly every major societal institution, including the federal government, corporate America, labor unions, the news media and organized religion.

Yet the data also helps point the way to some promising solutions.

It begins with children who were born in 1940, less than a decade after the publication of Adams's book, "The Epic of America." The researchers went into the project assuming that most of these children had earned more than their parents - but were surprised to learn that nearly all of them had, said David Grusky, one of the researchers, also of Stanford. About 92 percent of 1940 babies had higher pretax inflation-adjusted household earnings at age 30 than their parents had at the same age. (The results were similar at older ages and for post-tax earnings.)

The few 1940 children who earned less than their parents were also, for the most part, doing just fine. They were generally earning less because they had grown up rich - children of top corporate executives, say, who became, or married, doctors, lawyers or professors.

Achieving the American dream was a virtual guarantee for this generation, regardless of whether people went to college, got divorced or suffered a layoff. Why? Because they spent their prime working years in an economy with two wonderful features. It was growing rapidly, and the bounty from its growth flowed to the rich, the middle class and the poor alike.

Not even the oldest baby boomers, born in the late 1940s and early 1950s, would be quite so lucky. Economic growth began to slow as they were entering the job market in the 1970s, thanks in part to the energy crises. Still, more than three-quarters of these early Baby Boomers would ultimately make more than their parents.

You can see the effects on the American dream in the charts here. Each line shows the percentage of children born in a given year who out-earned their parents, with children who grew up poor on the left and rich on the right. The line steadily falls over time, across every economic class.

In the 1980s, economic inequality began to rise, a result of globalization, technological change, government policies favoring the well-off and a slowdown in educational attainment and the work force's skill level. Together, these forces pinched the incomes of the middle class and the poor. The tech boom of the 1990s helped - slowing the decline of the American dream - but only temporarily.

For babies born in 1980 - today's 36-year-olds - the index of the American dream has fallen to 50 percent: Only half of them make as much money as their parents did. In the industrial Midwestern states that effectively elected Donald Trump, the share was once higher than the national average. Now, it is a few percentage points lower. There, going backward is the norm.

Psychology research has shown that people's happiness is heavily influenced by their relative station in life. And it's hard to imagine a more salient comparison than to a person's own parents, particularly at this time of year, when families gather for rituals that have been repeated for decades. "You're going home for the holidays and you compare your standard of living to your parents," Grusky, a sociologist, says. "It's one of the few ties you have over the course of your entire life. Friends come and go. Parents are a constant."

How, then, can the country revive Adams's dream of a "better and richer and fuller" life for everyone? The solution has to involve some combination of faster economic growth and more widely shared growth.

The bad news is that lifting G.D.P. growth is terribly difficult. Trump has promised to do so, but offered few specifics. If anything, he favors some of the same policies (deregulation and tax cuts) that have failed in recent decades.

The better news - potentially - is that lifting growth is the less important half of the equation, notes Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard, another of the researchers: The rise of inequality has damaged the American dream more than the growth slowdown.

One way to think about inequality's role is to remember that the American economy is far larger and more productive than in 1980, even if it isn't growing as rapidly. Per-capita G.D.P. is almost twice as high now. By itself, that increase should allow most children to live better than their parents.

They don't, however, because the fruits of growth have gone disproportionately to the affluent.

The researchers ran a clever simulation recreating the last several decades with the same G.D.P. growth but without the post-1970 rise in inequality. When they did, the share of 1980 babies who grew up to out-earn their parents jumped to 80 percent, from 50 percent. The rise was considerably smaller (to 62 percent) in the simulation that kept inequality constant but imagined that growth returned to its old, faster path.

"We need to have more equal growth if we want to revive the American dream," Chetty says.

Given today's high-tech, globalized economy, the single best step would be to help more middle- and low-income children acquire the skills that lead to good-paying jobs. Notably, most college graduates still earn more than their parents did, other data show - yes, even after taking into account student debt.

But education is not the only answer. Incomes have also stagnated because of the rise of corporate power and the weakening of labor unions, leading profits to rise at the expense of wages. The decline of two-parent families plays a role, too. And tax policy has not done enough to push back against these forces: The middle class, not the affluent, deserves a tax cut.

The painful irony of 2016 is that nostalgia and anger over the fading American dream helped elect a president who may put the dream even further out of reach for many people - taking away their health insurance, supporting ineffective school vouchers and showering government largess on the rich. Every one of those issues will be worth a fight.

If the American dream could survive the Depression, and then thrive in a way few people imagined, it can survive our current troubles.
Kevin Quealy contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline: The American Dream, Quantified at Last. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | The American Dream, Quantified at Last

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The phrase "American dream" was invented during the Great Depression. It comes from a popular 1931 book by the historian James Truslow Adams, who defined it as "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone." In the decades that followed, the dream became a reality.

# data[].attributes.body
In this novel, the migrants thought that the American Dream was such a simple concept: go west, get a job, and become rich. However, they did not realize that an ideal life was nearly impossible and it corrupted the minds of those in search of it. This list of quotes condenses the novel into excerpts that students can use to build their own understanding from a different point of view.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Grapes of Wrath is a novel by John Steinbeck, Nobel-Prize winner for literature. Published in 1939, the novel centers around the Joads, a family of sharecroppers, who journey to California to find a new life amidst the Dust Bowl devastation of the Great Depression. It is considered an American classic.

Quotes from Grapes of Wrath

"Houses were shut tight, and cloth wedged around doors and windows, but the dust came in so thinly that it could not be seen in the air, and it settled like pollen on the chairs and tables, on the dishes."

"Before I knowed it, I was sayin' out loud, 'The hell with it! There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing.'... I says, 'What's this call, this sperit?' An' I says, 'It's love. I love people so much I'm fit to bust, sometimes.'... I figgered, 'Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,' I figgered, 'maybe it's all men an' all women we love; maybe that's the Holy Sperit-the human sperit-the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of.' Now I sat there thinkin' it, an' all of a sudden-I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it."

"They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don't get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat."

"The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it."

"I got thinkin' how we was holy when we was one thing, an' mankin' was holy when it was one thing.

An' it on'y got unholy when one mis'able little fella got the bit in his teeth an' run off his own way, kickin' an' draggin' an' fightin'. Fella like that bust the holi-ness. But when they're all workin' together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the whole shebang-that's right, that's holy."

"It ain't that big. The whole United States ain't that big. It ain't that big. It ain't big enough. There ain't room enough for you an' me, for your kind an' my kind, for rich and poor together all in one country, for thieves and honest men. For hunger and fat."

"Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments."

"Fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live - for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken ... fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe."

"Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours, it would be good - not mine, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But this tractor does two things - it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people were driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this."

"Okie use' ta mean you was from Oklahoma.

Now it means you're a dirty son-of-a-bitch. Okie means you're scum. Don't mean nothing itself, it's the way they say it."

"I know this... a man got to do what he got to do."

"They's a time of change, an' when that comes, dyin' is a piece of all dyin', and bearin' is a piece of all bearin', an' bearin' an' dyin' is two pieces of the same thing. An' then things ain't so lonely anymore. An' then a hurt don't hurt so bad."

"And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed."

"How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other."

"We're Joads. We don't look up to nobody. Grampa's grampa, he fit in the Revolution. We was farm people till the debt. And then--them people. They done somepin to us. Ever' time they come seemed like they was a-whippin' me-all of us. An' in Needles, that police. He done somepin to me, made me feel mean. Made me feel ashamed. An' now I ain't ashamed. These folks is our folks--is our folks. An' that manager, he come an' set an' drank coffee, an' he says, 'Mrs. Joad' this, an' 'Mrs. Joad' that-an' 'How you getting' on, Mrs. Joad?'" She stopped and sighed. "Why, I feel like people again."

"The migrant people, scuttling for work, scrabbling to live, looked always for pleasure, dug for pleasure, manufactured pleasure, and they were hungry for amusement."

"In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

"Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an' he foun' he didn't have no soul that was his'n. Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole."

"Whenever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Whenever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there... I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad an'-I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready.

An' when our folks eat the stuff they raise an' live in the houses they build-why, I'll be there."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Quotes from Epic Depression Novel The Grapes of Wrath

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Grapes of Wrath is a novel by John Steinbeck, Nobel-Prize winner for literature. Published in 1939, the novel centers around the Joads, a family of sharecroppers, who journey to California to find a new life amidst the Dust Bowl devastation of the Great Depression. It is considered an American classic.

# data[].attributes.body
This graphic novel emphasizes the gritty-side of America that people wish to ignore. Watchmen documents the common behavior to look only to lofty aspirations and to move ahead in the world and achieve dreams. But most people try to forget that their dreams can come with a price, and they do pay in the end with either their morals or their lives. This is a modern interpretation of the cost of attaining the American Dream.

# data[].attributes.body
This is an image representing the words often associated the American Dream. Students can view this and draw their own conclusions regarding their own word associations.

# data[].attributes.body
According to Courtney Martin, this is the first time in recorded American history where the majority of American parents don't think their kids will be better off than they were. Martin's Ted Talk emphasizes that this shouldn't be a cause for alarm, and instead, it's an opportunity to define a new approach to work and family that stresses community and creativity. This gives students an opportunity to conceptualize new ideas to combat the relatively bleak outlook on the idea of the American Dream.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Courtney E. Martin: The new American Dream

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For the first time in history, the majority of American parents don't think their kids will be better off than they were. This shouldn't be a cause for alarm, says journalist Courtney E. Martin. Rather, it's an opportunity to define a new approach to work and family that emphasizes community and creativity.

# data[].attributes.body
This is another image representing the quintessential "American Dream." Students can analyze the image and make inferences as to what the American Dream is "supposed" to look like.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a picture of a "fractured" American Dream. This can be used to offer a point of perpsective through art as to how the American Dream looks to some.

# data[].attributes.body
This speech was chosen because it sheds light on a prominent political figure’s view on the American Dream. This will deepen students' understanding of the essential question that the American dream may not exist for all. In the form of a picture book, students can tackle a large speech in the form of a schema already established.

# data[].attributes.headline
What Does The American Dream Mean to You?

# data[].attributes.subject
What Does The American Dream Mean to You?

# data[].attributes.body
This video showcases interviews of high school students. Students are asked the essential question at hand. By providing this text to students, they will be able to further develop their understanding of their own interpretation of what the American Dream means to them as an individual.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Big Question: What Does The American Dream Mean To You?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fusfoo hits Times Square in NYC to ask high school students what the American dream means to them.

# data[].attributes.body
The Great Gatsby is a more modern, canonical text that refers to the pursuit of the American Dream. The movie, in particular, showcases a slew of visual symbolism that students can interpret and work with in order to understand the role that the American Dream plays in the film and apply this to their own lives.

# data[].attributes.body
Similar to the analysis of MLK's speech and the Gettysburg Address, this article provides even more insight into a particular point of view from a historical source. Providing canonical texts as such gives students background information in order to come to a conclusion regarding the  essential question. http://teacher.scholastic.com/rosa/interview.htm

# data[].attributes.body
This speech offers yet another point of view for the American Dream in history. This provides scaffolding for students when analyzing the essential question in context.

# data[].attributes.body
Alfred Tatum reiterates the importance of students finding purpose in their reading. This is an example of a pop culture reference of American Dream, allowing students to interact with the essential questions in ways that are relevant to their everyday lives.

# data[].attributes.headline
Essential Questions:   1. Does the American Dream Exist for All?    2. What Does the American Dream Mean to You? 

# data[].attributes.subject
Essential Questions:   1. Does the American Dream Exist for All?    2. What Does the American Dream Mean to You? 