WSJ Your Money Briefing - Many Feel Living the American Dream Is Unattainable

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

A recent Wall Street Journal/NORC poll indicated a significant gap between people’s wishes and expectations regarding owning a home, having a family, and looking forward to a comfortable retirement. Economics reporter Rachel Wolfe joins host J.R. Whalen to discuss why the pessimism is more pronounced today compared to previous generations. Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zscaler extended its Zero Trust architecture with powerful AI engines trained by 500 trillion daily signals to prevent ransomware and AI attacks that target business. Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI. Learn more at zscaler.com slash Zero Trust AI. Here's your money briefing for Tuesday, September 3rd. I'm JR Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. Living the American dream is a wish for many people, but in a recent poll, a majority of adults said they don't feel they'll be able to achieve it, even with hard work.

They can't plan a wedding, they can't plan for kids, because they need to have the house in order to do all of those things, that they can't hit this first rung on this ladder. And so then they can't keep moving. So they feel pretty stuck. They feel like they had the dream that the country promised them something and then took it away. We'll talk to Wall Street Journal reporter Rachel Wolff after the break. Upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. OCI is the single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic.

Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash wall street, oracle.com slash Wall Street. Living the American dream and being able to achieve financial milestones has been a goal for generations. But few people currently feel they can reach it, according to a recent poll. Wall Street Journal economics reporter Rachel Wolf joins me. Rachel, what do people generally feel the American dream entails? So Americans overwhelmingly still desire all the traditional trappings that we have always associated with the American dream. Think owning a home, having a family, and looking forward to a comfortable retirement. But now the difference is that very few believe they can easily achieve it.

What were they asked in the recent poll and what was the response? A July poll that was a collaboration between the Wall Street Journal and NORC showed a super stark gap between people's wishes and their expectations. So while the vast majority of respondents said that they wanted to own a home, for example, only 10% said home ownership is easy or somewhat easy to achieve.

Financial security and a comfortable retirement were similarly labeled as essential or important by 96% and 95% of people, but then rated as achievable by only 9% and 8%. Struggles to make ends meet and build a nest egg aren't new. Why are these poll results significant? It's never that the American dream has been easy. The point is that it was possible. And if you worked hard, probable that you would ultimately get these things like a house, a family, comfortable retirement, that it was within reach if you followed the rules. 12 years ago when researchers at Public Religion Research Institute asked this question of whether

the American dream still holds true, over 50% of people said, yes, it's still possible. Now that's only about a third of Americans. And so what we're seeing is that this faith that it's out there for people is plummeting. And it's been this steady decline over the past decade. So it's not just that it has gotten harder, which it has, it's that people no longer believe it's not just that it has gotten harder, which it has, it's that people no longer believe it's possible for them. What factors contribute to consumers' feelings about not being

able to achieve financial milestones? So by many measures, economists told me people are actually right to feel that their shot at success has diminished. I spoke to an economist at Washington DC Think Tank, the bipartisan policy center, who pointed to the continued decline of private sector pensions, which has led to their near disappearance and the surge in the cost of home ownership as two of the biggest economic changes over the past decade.

We've also seen economic mobility decrease, which is the odds that you're going to do better than your parents or find a way out of poverty. And we've seen inequality increase. Yeah, we often hear about parents saying they want their kids to be better off than they were. How is that playing out today? If you were born in 1940,

you were almost guaranteed to do better than your parents. Around 90% of children born in 1940 were ultimately better off than them. That's only true for about half of people today. So the chances that you're actually going to out-earn your parents that you're going to have a better life than they had have gotten significantly smaller.

So based on what economists told you, this is not a case of people being overly pessimistic about their finances. The economists that I spoke to were mostly in agreement that people are right to feel that they're shot at the American dream in how it's traditionally defined have gone down. There are some mitigating factors, such as the fact that over the past couple of years wages for the lowest earners have actually outpaced other groups losing a little bit of a turnaround but it has not been nearly enough to compensate for recent decades. How does the way people feel about their finances change their day-to-day living? A lot of people told me about not being able to achieve the financial milestones

they would have expected to and that kind of messing up the rest of their plans. So I spoke to a couple in Louisville who told me that they were surprised when $250,000 wasn't enough for them to buy a starter house and they feel like they can't get engaged, they can't plan a wedding, they can't plan for kids because they need to have the house in order to do all of those things, that they can't hit this first rung on this ladder, and so then they can't keep moving. So they feel pretty stuck.

I also spoke to a family in Mount Vernon who achieved the American dream of home ownership and felt like they were doing it, that they had both risen out of poverty, they both grew up with a ton of siblings, working class, and in more recent years, they've been barely scraping bias expenses for everything have skyrocketed. They feel like they had the dream that the country promised them something and then took it away. That's WSJ reporter Rachel Wolf.

And that's it for your Money Briefing. This episode was produced by Ariana Osborne with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm JR Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.