The American Dream is increasingly looking like a mirage, especially to low-income Americans. Fewer and fewer Americans believe the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is accessible to them.
In an April 2026 survey from AP-NORC, only one third of Americans believe that the American Dream still holds true. This finding is consistent with other polling in recent years, such as a 2025 survey from The Wall Street Journal and NORC.
Low-income Americans are even less likely to believe in the American Dream. A recent YouGov survey found Americans with incomes below $50,000 were 32 percentage points less likely (40 percent vs 72 percent) to believe in the American Dream than people in families with incomes above $100,000. In the above WSJ-NORC survey, 75 percent of respondents were at least somewhat concerned about “the pace at which wages rise for average workers.”
With so few Americans believing in the promise of upward mobility, it is at risk of becoming a mirage, at which point it dies. The political result is clear: a dangerous combination of populism from both the left and the right and demands for redistribution that stifles growth and hurts the very people it is meant to help.
Policies like guaranteed income seem attractive, in theory. The idea is simple: give people a monthly payment to support them, regardless of whether or how much they work, to replace or augment their income. Unfortunately, in the most rigorous pilot programs in Illinois and Texas, the results were unequivocally bad for participants: their labor force participation declined by 4.1 percentage points, earned income dropped by $1,800 per month, and hours worked declined for everyone in the household. When people leave the labor force, it’s harder to reenter later as their skills atrophy and potential employers wonder about the gap in their resume.
There’s a better way to ensure low-income Americans thrive.
As America’s 250th birthday approaches, nothing could be more important than restoring Americans’ belief in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, especially for those most in need. The best way to accomplish this is to pursue “opportunity abundance”: an abundance of training, jobs, housing, support, relationships and other things people need to achieve upward mobility.
Opportunity abundance has three parts: establishing the conditions for opportunity, removing barriers to opportunity, and ensuring access to opportunity. There is unquestionably overlap across the three, and these distinctions are helpful.
Americans need an economic system that creates the conditions for as many people as possible to thrive and prosper. At the macro-level, there is only one proven vehicle to accomplish this: the free enterprise system.
For tens of thousands of years, almost everyone everywhere was dirt poor, except for a small number of privileged people. Then, a few centuries ago, a magical thing happened: in a few countries, such as the United Kingdom, prosperity began to skyrocket. It’s called “history’s hockey stick,” because that’s exactly what it looks like on a graph. More recently, countries like China and India have seen the same effects after starting to follow suit.
What happened, exactly? Capitalism, free markets, property rights, and the rule of law took hold, individuals flourished, and prosperity spread far and wide.
While the free enterprise system best delivers the macro-conditions for opportunity, that does not mean at the micro-level that everyone is better off. Indeed, the creative destruction and innovation that drive progress forward leave some people worse off, losing their jobs or even seeing their entire industries eliminated. They justifiably feel unfairly left behind.
The answer, however, is not to eschew the free enterprise system in favor of government control. Instead, policymakers need to recognize and understand people’s lived experience and suffering. They also need to establish structures to ensure affected individuals can thrive after the disruption.
The social conditions for thriving are well-established, too. Many of them are captured in what’s called the “success sequence”: finish high school, get a job, get married, then have kids; in that order. People who follow these steps have about a 98 percent chance of avoiding poverty and a 72 percent chance of joining the middle class.
Education is supposed to provide people the skills they need to get a job and grow professionally to climb the economic ladder. Work is a source of dignity, independence, and earned success. Marriage allows two people to enter into a permanent, stable relationship. And when children are born in an environment where their parents completed a certain level of education, work, and are married, they are significantly more likely to thrive.
It is not enough, though, to simply create and understand the conditions for opportunity. Policymakers must address and remove the barriers to opportunity.
Far too many Americans, especially those with lower-incomes, face economic and social barriers to opportunity, many of which are driven by bad government policies. Occupational licensing is a prime example.
An occupational license is a government-issued permission slip to work in a sector. In professions like medicine and law, the requirement is understandable. In many other fields, from cosmetology to working in cemetery customer service, the burdens are too big or altogether unnecessary. They also disproportionately hurt poor people and ethnic minorities. Too often, these barriers are propped up as a mechanism to protect entrenched interests and holding others down by design.
Other structures inadvertently create barriers to opportunity. Consider benefit cliffs, a structural flaw in the safety net where even a small pay raise of $1 per hour can trigger a loss of thousands of dollars of social welfare benefits. These cliffs have made it economically rational and psychologically understandable for poor people to reject upward mobility.
These policy-driven economic barriers have straightforward, if not simple, remedies. The social barriers to opportunity are more complicated.
Consider how important place is. Research from Raj Chetty and others has shown that whether a child grows up in an environment where adults work is perhaps the biggest driver of whether they experience social mobility. When children aren’t exposed and socialized to the norms surrounding work and professionalism, it creates an unseen barrier to opportunity.
Even if the conditions for opportunity exist, and barriers are removed, not every individual can rise. That requires more.
While education is supposed to prepare students for work and building an enriched life, the current system is failing to do so for far too many young learners. Policymakers mistakenly prioritize degrees over careers. While the system saddles students with debt, schools fail to deliver the skills students need to thrive professionally. That’s why educators need to reorient school systems to be career-first and discard our broken degree-first system.
A career-first system would prioritize experiences like apprenticeships and other workforce learning. Such a system would allow individuals to enter a wide range of sectors much more quickly, with skill development tailored around the needs of future employers. Such a focus isn’t limited to traditional fields in the trades such as plumbing and electricians. Jobs like IT project managers, bank branch managers, and application developers are all apprenticeable and can pay six-figure salaries.
It’s still not enough, though, to give people access to the jobs of today. America needs a nimble workforce development apparatus that is sensitive to the future of work. Changes in the economy arising from technological innovation, AI, machine learning, and other advancements are quickly changing the nature of work. Policymakers need to ensure that people can be equipped to work more effectively with technology, or train to enter new fields if their profession shrinks or is eliminated due to innovation. Americans should not reject or fear progress; they should be empowered to embrace and navigate it with foresight and compassion.
An underappreciated aspect to upward mobility is ready access to where jobs are, which implicates the ongoing housing crisis. Without access to housing that’s affordable and located close enough to economic and social opportunities, people struggle to thrive professionally and personally. Housing abundance, then, requires building more housing of all shapes and sizes to meet the needs of communities.
An America with true opportunity abundance would look something like this: An 18-year-old graduating high school would find an economy strong and growing, with businesses creating jobs and innovating. If his family struggled to make ends meet at times, his parents always supported him, worked hard, and showcased the habits and values that would serve as the foundation for his future success. His school gave him the education to go to college, if he chooses, but also prepared him to get a job by allowing him to try out different careers through internships. He could decide to become an electrician and begin an apprenticeship right out of high school. Either way, he’ll be able to start a career in a well-paying job to support himself and those he cares about. In time, he’ll be able to get married and start a family of his own. He can stay in his hometown, where there are opportunities for both work and affordable housing and he can be near his parents and other family.
Opportunity abundance is not about creating one path to success; the goal is to provide a number of avenues for Americans to live the lives they envision for themselves. Not everyone’s American Dream will look the same, but policymakers can give each American the opportunities to pursue their version of happiness.