The American Dream: Built by Freedom, Fueled by Opportunity, Sustained by Prosperity (The American Dream was never about "Optimization")

An Essay by Erin Conrad

What if the greatest threat to the American Dream is not a lack of opportunity, but our misunderstanding of prosperity itself? As we approach 250 years of independence, we celebrate a nation built upon extraordinary ideas including liberty, personal responsibility, self-governance, free enterprise, strong communities, and the belief that ordinary people could build meaningful and prosperous lives. In our pursuit of prosperity, however, have we slowly detached it from the very conditions that made it possible? The American Dream was never intended to become a relentless race after wealth, or optimizing productivity for efficiency's sake, but at its very heart, about coordinating freedom and opportunity, responsibility and virtue, family and community, ambition and meaning: the very things that lead people and a nation to flourish and live prosperously. Prosperity was not the single goal of the American experiment, but a natural fruit that it grew.

Before the Founding Fathers crafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, people found themselves on American soil in search of freedom, escape of religious persecution, independence from government overreach, and opportunity to use the innate God-given power and gifts from within and amongst themselves, as well as resources at hand, to create a life truly designed of their own volition. Success, as these early Americans saw it, included organized freedoms, rights with which we as human beings are endowed by our creator, and ability to reward ourselves for hard work. As a people, they wanted the ability to govern themselves, build community, protect themselves from harm imposed by others, and to take advantage of utilizing the resources accessible to them. This was the fundamental foundation forming the thought process of a group of men who united from the different colonies as the Continental Congress, and which lead to the writing of the Declaration of Independence.

Prosperity that built the American Dream was the ability for ordinary people to build meaningful lives free from tyranny. It was generally believed that prosperity emerged when several conditions existed: people are free to work, invent, trade, and build, property rights were protected, citizens practiced responsibility, self-discipline, and virtue, government power was limited and held accountable, and communities and families remained strong and intact. For those early Americans, prosperity was inseparable from independence. Someone who owned property, operated a business, was skilled in a trade, or maintained a farm was not merely wealthy, they were free.

The right to "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" was not simply an idea against tyrannical government imposing too many taxes and restrictions on trade, but spoke to the ability to pursue one's calling, provide for one's family, acquire property, participate in civic life, and overall flourish as a human being. The American Dream emerged from that radical, yet simple, proposition that, ordinary people, not just royalty and aristocrats, could build extraordinary lives.

Dick Grasso, former Chairman and CEO of the New York Stock exchange, for example, may be a quintessential illustration of the American Dream. He not only championed fair markets and trade, but also people above commerce. He not only ran the NYSE, but helped to demystify capitalism itself with transparency, and opened the doors of one of America's most elite institutions so that ordinary Americans could participate in, understand, and trust the system that underpinned the nations prosperity. He was, himself, proof that it works, having come from humble beginnings and becoming the first to lead the NYSE by rising through the ranks within the organization with hard work, grit, and persistence. Grasso was not a success because he pursued prosperity and wealth, but because he pursued opportunity, participation, access, responsibility, and stewardship. Prosperity emerged for him as a byproduct.

Reflecting on modern markets, Grasso once offered a striking observation: "A fast market is not necessarily a fair market." While he was referring to financial markets, it raises a much larger question about American life itself. Prosperity today is often viewed differently from those who built the framework for our liberties. We have become so adept at optimizing parts of prosperity such as income, efficiency, status, and consumption, that we may have forgotten how to coordinate it with family, community, virtue, meaning, and freedom. Have we come to believe that faster is always better, that more production and more consumption is always more prosperous? Is prosperity today only a measurement of a certain lifestyle attainment? Largely, it seems, prosperity has turned into a never-ending quest for efficiency, productivity, and optimization as the ultimate measure of success. But could we be optimizing life out of our lives? The greatest challenge of modern life is not in achieving success and prosperity. The greatest challenge is preventing success from pulling our life apart.

The American Dream was never intended to maximize prosperity for prosperity's sake or productivity for efficiency's sake. We tend to treat prosperity as a right rather than an outcome from hard-fought liberty, work, personal responsibility, and values. The American Dream was built upon a coordinated system of freedoms and shared purpose that allowed individuals and nations to flourish. Today, we have an uncomfortable question to ask. Have we optimized the life out of the American Dream and, in our pursuit, removed it from the very conditions that made it possible?