The American Dream is a Pyramid Scheme

A content warning ahead of reading this post: I’m feeling quite doom and gloom about living in America right now. I’m sure you can understand. (I make no promises about a return to optimism any time soon, but I can promise the imminent return of the weekly money diary, so that’s something.)

Thank you all for bearing with me over the last couple of weeks so that I could spend some time loving my new baby (and my old baby!) and recovering from the shock of it all. There’s definitely some biological trickery that forces you to forget how hard those first few weeks are, otherwise we’d never do it more than once!

Photo by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash

Before moving here, in March of 2020 (I know, I know – read more about how and why that happened here), I pretty much believed in America as the land of opportunity, a phrase widely attributed to writer James Truslow Adams, whose 1931 book, Epic of America: The American Dream, wrote of the US as a country offering opportunity to everyone, according to his (or her) ability or achievement.

I would have denied it, of course; always an avowed cynic, I definitely considered myself too cool to be enamoured with the idea of America, especially the American dream (how gauche! I imagine myself thinking).

And yet: the concept of the United States as a land of opportunity – so much space! so much choice! so many options for work, for play, for achievement – has embedded itself so deeply into the psyches of, I mean, everyone, that it just seems far closer to fact than to idealism.

But the reality is – of course – very different. A lot less idealistic; a lot less dreamy.

The idea of America as a land of opportunity is based on the theory of socioeconomic mobility, or, the ability of individuals to move from one “class” to another.

It’s JD Vance, going from abject poverty in the Appalachians to the hallowed halls of the White House (where does the Vice President live, I suddenly realise I have no clue); it’s Henry Ford, one of eight children who went from working his Irish immigrant parents’ farm to apprenticing with a machinist and, ultimately, heading up the motor company that bears his name; it’s Serena and Venus Williams, whose sharecropper father homeschooled his daughters so that they could focus on tennis, a decision that led to them becoming two of the best players in history.

But for every Henry Ford, there are 100,000 Demon Copperheads, the titular character of Barbara Kingsolver’s 2022 novel. Based on Dicken’s David Copperfield, Kingsolver’s novel follows Demon as he grows up in the Appalachian mountains – echoes of Vance’s own story, but with a distinctly more pedestrian conclusion.

And, though Vance portrays himself as a working-class boy who clawed his way to success, in reality his elevation was thanks to “policies and programs that support working-class people”; he received a scholarship to go to Yale, for example, something that is simply not available to the vast majority of kids who dream of escaping their circumstances by means of education and hard work.

There are a lot of things – most of which I’m sure I don’t understand, having been here for five years now, and having limited experience with a lot of the systems, policies and procedures that govern the economic realities of most Americans (for one thing, I’m a freelance writer, and don’t have to grapple with working full-time for an American corporation) – that seem to exist almost exclusively to keep Americans stuck in their current situations, or, I’d argue, to push them further down that famed ladder of opportunity.

It is easier, I’d argue, to get really, really poor in America, than it is to “make it”, whatever that might mean to you: a house in the suburbs, maybe, or a million dollars squirreled away in “savvy” investments.

For one thing, you’re only ever one car accident away from medical bankruptcy, no matter how good your insurance is. By the end of last year, we had reached our insurance deductible, but the birth of our son still ended up costing us $1,600 (so far… there are, I’m sure, more bills to come). When I broke my ankle, I paid $1,000 for the privilege; a trip to A&E last October cost $915. And we’re insured; we pay around $600 per month towards our health insurance. These costs are on top of that, after insurance has kicked in.

Right now, I’m paying $270 per month off the total I owe to our local hospital, both for Roman’s birth and for two earlier pregnancy-related visits to the ER; I haven’t called to negotiate a payment plan for a more recent bill, for $960.

These examples are anecdotal, of course – my experience is not everyone’s experience, I know – but medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States, with 6% of the population owing more than $1,000 in medical debt, and 1% owing in excess of $10,000.

And it’s not just medical debt; America has such an ingrained culture of debt, generally speaking, that you are not just encouraged to get into debt, but it is an intrinsic part of functioning as an adult here. Without a history of debt, whether that be car loans or credit cards, you will not be able to get a mortgage, or a credit card; your credit score, something that doesn’t really exist in Ireland, is really, really important, and you can’t increase it without borrowing money. (It’s so important, in fact, that one of Love is Blind’s marriages broke down when the woman involved realised that her future husband had never had a credit card and, as a result, had a terrible credit score, which caused a huge rift between them as she had spent the better part of a decade working to increase her own.)

Mind you, it is incredibly easy to get into debt. Step into any American shop, and you’ll be asked if you’d like to open a credit card for that store, often with a tempting intro offer. “Would you like to open an Old Navy credit card for 40% off your total today?” is a sample pitch. (Full disclosure: I have credit cards with Old Navy, Target and Apple. I am weak-willed, and love a discount.)

Furthermore, any big-ticket item you buy will be offered to you with a “buy now, pay later” option, almost always with 0% interest if you make your payments on time. We bought a mattress this way, and a couch, and I availed of 0% offers to buy my phone and my watch. It’s a great way of holding on to your money for as long as possible, but miss a payment and the interest can quickly go from 0% to astronomical figures, thanks to compound interest rates that will never work in your favour.

Of course, if you’re smart, you’ll open up a credit card that you pay off each month; you’ll get into debt and immediately get out of it; you’ll keep your debt-to-available-credit ratio low, which will boost your credit score, and you’ll use your higher credit score to avail of better interest rates.

But it’s so easy to spend just that little bit more than you meant to (or, you know, in my case, much more), especially when you’re mired in a culture of consumerism that is, honestly, impossible to escape.

In a way, it explains the success of MLM marketing in the US – the idea that massive success is right around the corner, but you just have to spend a little more than you imagined, in order to get yourself on the right path. Just spend $300, and then recruit 10 other people to spend $300, and you could find yourself on the path to becoming the top Lularoe seller in your state! Or something.

(I can’t help but wonder: is the American Dream just a great big pyramid scheme?!)

Of course, there are advantages to living in America; there are opportunities out there, for those who are primed to take advantage of them (or, you know, for white men, as current political shenanigans are demonstrating very clearly).

There’s a kind of wide-eyed optimism and enthusiasm for life that comes from being told that the world is yours for the taking; there’s a confidence that seems to be instilled in Americans, from birth, a willingness to take up space, to be heard, to amplify their own voices, that simply isn’t there, in Irish culture (or is squashed, if detected); and there’s always somewhere open to get a cup of coffee (and you can probably apply for a new credit card to pay for it, no matter how late the hour, and be approved in minutes!).

But it feels a bit like buying into the idea of America as the land of opportunity is akin to making a deal with the devil – buying in to a system that is much more likely to drag you under than it is to raise you up. And no number of drive-thru lattes are going to make that truth any easier to swallow.

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