Sweden: Home of the American Dream

If you're like most Americans, the America you want is cold weather, blond singing icons, and a robust welfare state. No, wait, scratch that. While there may be varying degrees to which any of that is true, there is more uniformity in the desire to have the Swedish distribution of wealth.

In a survey conducted by a psychologist at Duke University, 7,000 people across America were given three pie charts displaying different distributions of wealth and asked which they thought was the United States. 92 percent chose the distribution of wealth in Sweden (where the top fifth owns 36 percent of the wealth, the bottom fifth owning 11 percent) over that in the United States where the richest fifth owns 83 percent of the wealth, leaving the bottom 40 percent with .3 percent of the wealth. The number that chose the third chart where each fifth held 20 percent amounted to a rounding error.

This makes sense, if you subscribe to the idea that every person has an equal shot at success if they roll up their sleeves and work hard, then you'd expect that a representation of those beliefs in practice would be, at the least, even-ish. But, that's not how it worked out.

Last night on the the PBS Newshour, this issue was discussed in a segment they called "Land of the Free, Home of the Poor." Although the numbers themselves are telling, the voices of people living in the bottom of the distribution send the unmistakable message that wealth is not a proxy for effort:

It makes me feel like the American dream is not just -- is not for me. It's just not for me. Maybe it's for the wealthy, just not for me, because it doesn't matter how high I reach. You know, I'm reaching up my hands, and it seems like it's still -- I'm still -- still very far away from it. It's like someone literally pulling it. As much as I'm running after it, they're running away with it, and I don't get my piece of the American dream, because I work hard in this country, too. I pay my taxes, just like everyone else. I work here. I go to school. And I'm doing my best, but, still, my best is just not good enough.

Experiences like these undermine the spirit of self-determination and belief that where you start out doesn't have to dictate where you end up that animate the American Dream. Yet, these are the experiences that are often dictated by inertia rather than choice. Going to college and building assets, for example, are two things we know help people move up the economic ladder. But in both cases, the greatest predictor of achieving each is having parents who did. There's not a lot of self-determination happening there. And, unfortunately, policies can act to maintain these defaults. There are multiple and generous ways that federal policy, mostly through the tax code, subsidize wealth for those who already have it but there are far fewer ways that support building wealth for those that don't. Policies like The Saver's Bonus and the ASPIRE Act could broaden the base of savers and reward the effort of individuals that invest in their success. Over time, that may help the US reclaim possession of the American Dream.