In President Obama’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday, he mentioned the American Dream, without using it’s name, and how many have lost faith in it. I can’t help but question, like many before me, what exactly the American Dream is. The President defined it as “ the simple, profound belief in opportunity for all – the notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can get ahead.”
My personal understanding of the American Dream is similar to Mr. Obama’s definition. The American Dream is this idea that in this country, the United States of America, if one works hard enough, one will succeed. I do not want to argue about whether this is true or not. What I really want to explore is how we define “success” and “quality of life” in the United States.
This may seem rather simple, however, in the past few weeks my notions of these things have been challenged. I started to reflect on my idea of success after seeing The Wolf of Wall Street at the movies and being disgusted and fascinated all at once. If you haven’t seen the movie, it is the story of an American who makes millions of dollars by steeling other people’s money and he lives a really extravagant and reckless lifestyle until he gets arrested. My immediate question after the conclusion of the film was “is this really how we see success?” Now perhaps the film is a bad example because the guy ends up going to jail, however there are people out there who earn just as much money or more in a legal way who don’t end up going to jail. So back to my question. Do we define success by how much money someone earns? If we were to poll the American public on the matter I would guess that most people would say yes. I must admit that when I hear someone say something like “he is pretty successful” my immediate thought is that this person makes a lot of money and can buy himself a lot of nice things. Is that how we measure success? Yes. What does this say about American values? I am not really sure.
Success goes hand in hand with quality of life. The more successful someone is, the higher quality of life we would expect that person to have. But again, how do we define quality of life? In economics one of the first things you learn is that quality of life is defined by the number of goods and services you can buy. The more you can buy, the better quality of life you have.
I agree with this statement to a certain extent because one needs a certain amount of goods and services such as shoes for their feet, clothes for their back, a roof over their head, food in the fridge, health care services at their disposal etcetera in order to live. In the United States however, we tend to think in excesses. We don’t simply need a few pairs of shoes, we need 15 pairs. We don’t just need a few articles of clothing but closets full. We don’t need a simple roof over our heads but the largest house we can afford to buy. We also go to excess in the food department.
What about the person that has all that and much more but has no one to share it with? Do they have a high quality of life and are they successful? By the definitions above, yes. What if we defined “success” and quality of life by the quality of friendships and family relationships one has (although these are hard to measure)? Would that same person be considered successful? No.
When I think of the question of success it makes me think of my education. The overall point of getting a college education is to go on to get a job, have a career and be successful in that career. Does that mean making millions of dollars every year, owning two houses, four cars and a yacht? Is that what the American dream has evolved to? It kind of seems like it.
Ps. I know this isn’t exactly related to my policy paper, but I will be going back to that next week Image may be NSFW.
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Transcript of the State of the Union Address
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obamas-2014-state-of-the-union-address-full-text/
