Giving Compass' Take:

• Arielle Dreher explains how the idea of the American Dream sets kids up for failure and can rob them of their happiness. Redefining the idea can improve outcomes for students in an age of automation. 

• How can funders work to drive this shift? What would a better American Dream look like? 

• Learn more about the shifting idea of the American Dream. 

The “American Dream” is a deep part of the American psyche. Candidates announcing their 2020 presidential runs are already using the term to rally supporters, which Merriam-Webster defines as “a happy way of living that is thought of by many Americans as something that can be achieved by anyone in the U.S. especially by working hard and becoming successful.”

But the concept meant quite the opposite a century ago.

“The original ‘American Dream’ was not a dream of individual wealth; it was a dream of equality, justice and democracy for the nation,” Sarah Churchwell, professor of American literature and public understanding of the humanities at the University of London, told Smithsonian Magazine last year. “The phrase was repurposed by each generation, until the Cold War, when it became an argument for a consumer capitalist version of democracy. Our ideas about the ‘American Dream’ froze in the 1950s. Today, it doesn’t occur to anybody that it could mean anything else.”

The estimates of just how many jobs will be lost in the name of technological advancement vary — a 2017 McKinsey Global Institute report suggests that by 2030, anywhere between 10 million and 800 million jobs will be displaced globally by automation — but there is little doubt that automation will certainly necessitate the adaptation of future American workers. Price Waterhouse Cooper estimated in 2017 that about 38 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of automation by 2030.

While the modern idea of the American Dream is galvanizing, it could also be a perilous one because its likelihood of realization is low. Social mobility rates in the United States are the lowest across developed countries — an American child born in poverty is more likely to stay poor than her counterpart in a similar country, according to research by the Brookings Institution. Additionally, for non-white Americans, burdens to the American Dream are even more difficult to overcome due to factors like the racial wealth gap, which can persist even after higher education is attained.

And current and future students are poised to enter the most automated and fast-moving economy the country has ever seen by the time they hit the job market.

Read the full article about redefining the American Dream by Arielle Dreher at The 74.