Is the American Dream Dead? | Mark Matson

Welcome to Behavioral Groups, the podcast that explores our human condition. I'm Kurt Nelson. And I'm Tim Houlihan. We talk with researchers and other interesting people to better understand why what we why we do what we do, and we do it by using a behavioral science lens. In this episode, we spoke with Mark Madsen.

He is the author of several books, and his most recent one that we talked to him about is called experiencing the American Dream. Now, Mark has some reservations about how people in the United States think about what has been referred to as the American dream. And we'll get into that in the conversation that we have with him. But we took a look back on this and we did some research on our own.

And from what we can tell, the idea of the American Dream was first written about in 1931 by a historian named James Truslo Adams. And James wrote that the American dream is, quote, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement, end quote. Although he coined the term American dream in his 1931 book, The Epic of America, Adams really wasn't bringing up a new idea. The concept itself had actually been around long before Adams wrote about it. You can see actually you can see inferences of liberty and upward mobility in writings from the founding fathers of our country.

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