Who Killed the American Dream?

We take it for granted that good neighborhoods — with good schools and good housing — are only accessible to the wealthy. But in America, this wasn’t always the case. Although for most of most of world history, your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary idea: If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency, and that remarkable mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity. As historian and journalist Yoni Appelbaum will argue, however, this idea has been under a sustained attack. Legal segregation, enforced through the implementation of aggressive zoning laws has raised housing prices, deepened political divides, emboldened bigots, and trapped generations of people in poverty.

The result is that today people can’t move as readily as they once did. They are stuck. But it doesn’t have to be this way. After telling the story of the people and ideas that caused our economic and social sclerosis, Appelbaum will introduce common-sense ways to get Americans moving again.

Biography

Yoni Appelbaum is deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and a social and cultural historian of the United States. Before joining The Atlantic, he was a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University. He previously taught at Babson College and at Brandeis University, where he received his Ph.D. in American history. When he visits CGH, Appelbaum will draw from his book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

Suggested Reading

Appelbaum, Yoni. Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Random House, 2025.