the edit, vol. 45
what happened to getting ahead?
For generations, the American Dream has been told as a story of expansion: buy a house, build a career, raise a family, retire comfortably, leave your children better off than you were. Increasingly, Americans are describing something more modest: they want to feel secure.
A survey of more than 30,000 Americans conducted this spring by the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation found that 60 percent said a better life three to five years from now would include greater financial security. According to reporting on the survey, roughly four in ten respondents described themselves as financially vulnerable or struggling to meet basic needs. For many, financial security meant something strikingly ordinary: being able to afford housing, food and health care, save for the future and do so without persistent worry.
Another national survey, conducted by CNBC and SurveyMonkey and published in June, arrived at a similar conclusion from a different direction. Asked what they would need to feel they had achieved the American Dream, 72 percent selected financial stability. Homeownership came next, at 58 percent. Only 30 percent included doing better than their parents.
It is difficult to look at those numbers without wondering whether something fundamental is changing. The American Dream has long been associated with the possibility of moving upward. Today, for many Americans, the more immediate aspiration may be the absence of precarity.
from getting ahead to being okay
This is not the same as saying that most Americans are impoverished, or even that most are financially distressed. The Federal Reserve's latest survey of household economic well-being offers a more complicated picture. Seventy-three percent of adults said they were either doing okay financially or living comfortably in 2025. That was unchanged from the year before, though below the 78 percent recorded in 2021.
But beneath that relatively reassuring headline is considerably less room for error.
Only 63 percent of adults said they could cover an unexpected $400 expense entirely with cash, savings or a credit card paid off at the next statement. Fifty-five percent had set aside enough money to cover three months of expenses. Thirty percent said that if their primary source of income disappeared, they could not cover three months of expenses even by combining savings with borrowing or selling assets, and unexpected expenses are not especially unexpected. Fifty-nine percent of adults told the Fed they had encountered at least one major unplanned expense during the previous year. Thirty percent faced a major vehicle repair or replacement. Twenty-two percent dealt with a major home or appliance repair. Twenty-one percent encountered a major unexpected medical expense.
This is one way to understand contemporary financial anxiety. It is not necessarily the experience of having nothing. It is the experience of knowing how quickly what you have could become insufficient. A transmission fails, the rent goes up, a parent needs care, a job disappears, a medical bill arrives. Security, in that context, becomes its own form of wealth.
the milestones are moving
There is another reason Americans may be thinking differently about prosperity: many believe the milestones traditionally associated with economic progress are becoming harder to reach.
In July, Pew Research Center reported that 87 percent of Americans believe buying a home is harder for young adults today than it was for their parents' generation. Eighty-two percent said the same about saving for the future, and another 82 percent about paying for college. Sixty-four percent said finding a job is harder, up sharply from 39 percent when Pew asked the question in 2021. Among adults under 30, 75 percent said finding a job is harder for their generation.
Housing offers perhaps the clearest illustration, partly because the numbers are more complicated than the public mood suggests. The National Association of Realtors' Housing Affordability Index stood at 102.3 in June, up from 95.5 a year earlier. An index of 100 means a median-income family has exactly enough income to qualify for a mortgage on a median-priced home, assuming a 20 percent down payment. By that measure, affordability has improved from last year, but it has also deteriorated sharply since the beginning of this year. The same index stood at 116.5 in January, its highest level since March 2022.
That tension is useful. Housing affordability can improve from a year ago and still leave Americans feeling that homeownership is moving further out of reach. Economic conditions can get better at the margin without restoring a sense that a major life milestone is realistically attainable. The wider cost picture helps explain why. The Fed found that 91 percent of adults considered price increases at least a minor financial concern in 2025, and 58 percent said changes in the prices they paid had made their financial situation worse. Health care is particularly salient. In an April Pew survey, 73 percent of Americans called health-care affordability a very big problem for the country, sixty-six percent said the same about inflation.
Americans have not stopped wanting homes, families, careers, or comfortable retirements, but increasingly, the prerequisite for all of them is commanding the attention. Before upward mobility comes financial survivability.
the cost of not knowing
There is also a difference between high prices and uncertainty about where prices go next; Americans are living with both.
Consumer prices in June were 3.5 percent higher than a year earlier. The Federal Reserve's preferred inflation measure, the personal consumption expenditures price index, was up 3.7 percent over the same period. Both remain above the Fed's 2 percent inflation goal, but the recent story is not simply that inflation is moving relentlessly upward. The PCE price index actually fell 0.1 percent from May to June, while the CPI fell 0.4 percent. The larger issue is unpredictability.
The Federal Reserve has said tariff increases contributed in part to the rise in consumer-goods inflation last year. This year, the conflict in the Middle East produced another supply shock, driving energy prices higher. In its July report to Congress, the Fed described an economy still expanding at a solid pace, but doing so amid "elevated uncertainty."
For households, uncertainty has its own price. A family considering a mortgage is not thinking only about today's payment. A worker considering a new job is not thinking only about today's salary. A couple deciding whether they can afford a child is making assumptions about years of housing, health care, food and child-care costs that cannot be known in advance.
The current administration's trade policies have added another variable to an economy already adjusting to years of elevated prices and borrowing costs. Economic planning becomes harder when households are uncertain not only about what things cost today, but about what the prices and economic conditions around them may look like tomorrow. When the future feels predictable, ambition is easier. You can borrow, move, change jobs, start a business, or have a child with some confidence in the assumptions underneath the decision.
When the future feels less predictable, the calculation changes. The goal becomes having enough margin that being wrong will not ruin you.
the economy and the experience of it
This helps explain one of the persistent puzzles of American economic life: why national statistics and household sentiment can seem to tell different stories.
They do not actually measure the same thing; the economy grew at a 1.5 percent annual rate in the second quarter. A national economy can expand while an individual household feels exposed. Markets can rise while groceries remain expensive. Someone can be employed and still worry about what happens after one large medical bill.
The Federal Reserve's household survey captures that tension particularly well. Nearly three-quarters of adults described their own finances as at least okay. Yet only about one-quarter rated the national economy as good or excellent, 24 percentage points below the share who said so in 2019.
That disconnect is sometimes treated as evidence that Americans misunderstand the economy. Perhaps it is telling us something else. People do not experience GDP. They experience margins. The relevant economic question in an ordinary household is rarely whether aggregate output increased this quarter. It is whether there is enough money left after housing, insurance, groceries and child care to absorb whatever happens next. For younger Americans, even that margin can depend on family support. Forty-seven percent of adults ages 18 to 29 told the Fed that someone outside their household had helped them pay an expense in the previous year. Phone bills, general expenses and housing costs were among the most common forms of help. Families have always helped one another. But the figure complicates a national story built around independence and self-sufficiency. If adulthood increasingly requires not only income but a private safety net, then opportunity depends partly on whether there is someone available to catch you.
a smaller dream, or a different one?
We should be careful not to romanticize the old American Dream. Homeownership was never universally accessible. Economic mobility has never been distributed equally. Financial security has always mattered, especially to families who had very little of it. Nor can a handful of contemporary surveys prove that Americans have collectively abandoned ambition, but the language is worth noticing.
When people are asked what a better life looks like, they increasingly answer with things that sound less like accumulation and more like protection: stable housing, affordable health care, enough savings, reliable work, room to breathe.
There is something politically important in that shift. For decades, economic success has been discussed in the language of opportunity: jobs, growth, investment, wealth, mobility.
Those things still matter, but opportunity can feel inadequate if people believe that one accident, rent increase, policy change or layoff could undo years of progress. A society can offer people a ladder. It can also determine how frightening the fall from it feels.
The old American Dream was built around the confidence to take risks: buy the house, leave the job, start the company, raise the family, imagine that the next generation might go further. The emerging one may be built around having enough security to survive those risks.
The old question was whether you could climb. The new one may be whether, once you have climbed somewhere, you can afford to stay there, and perhaps that is why financial security now feels less like the foundation beneath the American Dream than the dream itself.
