‘Big Woe’ Wants You To Believe The American Dream Is Dead

Everyone says you can’t get ahead these days.

That’s a lie that’s been told for 300 years. It wasn’t true then. It’s even less true now. Getting ahead is easier than ever.

Notice, I did not say “Everyone can get ahead.” That is not true. I said you. Doing what it takes requires less, pays out more, and the payments last longer than at any time in history. You, however, must be willing to do all those Go Ahead things that actually worked when others won’t. Take the right risks, and the odds are ridiculously in your favor.

The good old days sucked, no matter when those days were. Do you have a fondness for Colonial Williamsburg and scrappy immigrants with rap skills? Great. Me too. But early America was a terribly hard place to get ahead.

American colonists were pretty grumpy about how hard it was to Go Ahead. The governor of Virginia could barely sleep at night. “Oh how miserable is that man who must govern a people who six parts of seven are poor, in debt, discontented, and armed!” Armed indeed. They burned his colonial capital to the ground 100 years before the Revolution. Americans were angry about not getting ahead from the very beginning.

You could take risks, but if they didn’t work out, you might find yourself in jail. Yes, jail. People went to prison for being broke in the 1700s, and this happened regularly. Worse, if a man went bust, his wife and kids were imprisoned, too. They forgot to put that in Hamilton.

Or maybe you prefer your nostalgia from the 1800s? In 1870, food, rent, and clothing took 91 cents of every dollar made (today it’s under 40 cents). The typical American owned just one and a half shirts. That is an actual historical statistic. To make money to buy this expensive food and the other half of that shirt, the typical man worked sixty hours per week. Women worked more. And the dollars in which people were paid could lose their value overnight, making them no more stable than cryptocurrency today.

If you could find work, that is. Newspapers regularly proclaimed the death of American opportunity in the 24 recessions that century. One in four years was bad, and some were really bad. Until late in the century, there was very little insurance to cover losses. If your bank collapsed, house burned, crops failed, or spouse died, you just lost everything.

Since the 1970s, the median income has risen by around 50% (yes, adjusted for inflation). Even left-leaning groups admit wages are up at minimum 29%. But working-class wages went down, right? No. The median weekly earnings of high-school graduates (no college degree) are up since the mid-1990s. In my birth state (North Carolina, which lost all those furniture and tobacco jobs), the bottom 10% of earners make 33% more than they did 20 years ago. It’s up in every other state, too.

By some estimates, about half of Americans were poor during the Roaring Twenties, which was before the Great Depression. By 1950 it was nearly a third. Today it’s barely over one in 10.

You can make more money, working fewer hours, spending less to survive, while buying more luxuries than any one of your ancestors. You can marry whomever you want. As we’ll see, that’s a big deal; marriage is one of the largest predictors of financial success. Side hustle platforms are everywhere. Your savings are safe. Mortgages don’t involve questions about your sex life (they used to), and you don’t have to pay them off in five years. Debtors’ prisons are abolished, bankruptcy laws give second chances, and Social Security offers a built-in retirement annuity. You’ve got it harder than “back then”? Puh-leeze!

Starting in the 1970s, a cottage industry of academics published research bemoaning the lack of real “get aheadism” in the so-called land of opportunity. The basic summation of those scholars is as follows: despite our national myths, most people stay in the same income class as their parents. Born poor, die poor. Born middle class, die middle class. Born wealthy, die in a Tahoe skiing accident. This line of reasoning has been absorbed into a media narrative feedback loop, especially on social media. Nearly 60% of young people today say the American Dream is no longer possible.

Our culture swallowed a pessimism pill, and it isn’t doing you any good. If you scream at people that their lives are terrible for five decades, they may start to believe you. There is real — and really persistent — wealth inequality in America. But remember this: the question is not what type of economy you would build, but what you will build in this economy.

For everyday people, the goalposts are set where they are, and it’s best to get the ball moving. The clock is twice as long as it used to be, but it is ticking.

PEOPLE REALLY DID GET AHEAD, AND YOU CAN, TOO

Perhaps you’ve heard that nobody can get ahead anymore. That capitalism is broken. That only the rich get richer.

Anything bad you’ve believed about capitalism, I’ve believed it more. Finding myself as a happy warrior for Go Ahead America was not just a strange personal trip; it was also family heresy and professional suicide.

Most people don’t know this about the South, but we once had a budding communist party. When I was a kid, my dad periodically voted for communists for president. The only mainstream candidate he ever genuinely liked was Bernie Sanders.

Let me tell you what I believed before I tell you why I no longer believe it. There is a Despair Industrial Complex of academics, activists, and journalists convinced that capitalism is a system of exploitation keeping people down rather than offering a path up. I call them Big Woe, because every hot take is either “Woe to Them!” or “Woe is Me!” Inside Big Woe, the fight is against “War Capitalism”: governments and businesses just helping each other win the game of power and coercion like two brother lions who’ve always had each other’s back.

Big Woe’s message is working. Anti-capitalism is culturally everywhere, especially on campus. Want to impress your Netflix & chill partner? Next time you’re watching a crime drama, proclaim, “It’s the CEO!” It is important to do this early. You will get less credit if you wait. Businessmen (and women) are evil in American culture. A study of nearly 1,000 shows found that businesspeople commit more television crime than any other characters, even than career criminals. You will know this intuitively if you’ve ever binged Law & Order. To cap it off, seemingly the only thing that MSNBC and Fox News agree on is that someone screwed the working class.

We arrive at this lunacy: nobody can get ahead anymore, which is funny because no one used to get ahead, either. A robust body of prestigious people say Americans were locked in place for the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and they’re still stuck in neutral today.

If something can’t be true, it probably isn’t. Everyday Americans long believed people got ahead because they saw people getting ahead. Today, despite a chorus of voices saying you can’t, you can. You probably know someone who has. The truth is messier. It was hard. It still is hard, just not as hard as before. Challenging and doable are not mutually exclusive.

Don’t blame capitalism, blame your city council. Zoning laws, rules that say you can’t build here or, if you do, only so much, create housing scarcity. The land you are allowed to build on costs more than ever before. Local politics (not red versus blue, but us versus ourselves) is pricing people out of home ownership, not capitalism. Some dilemmas are genuinely political, and that is one of them.

So what happens at the top? If you can’t get to the front, surely it is because someone else is holding their spot in line. Not true. In the United States, 64% of those born at the top fall out in their lifetime, precisely the same percentage as in Denmark. Most Americans (and Danes) who make it to the top didn’t start there, and those born there don’t stay.

Of those born in the bottom financial fifth of the United States, six in 10 get out. That’s not perfect (eight in 10), but it’s a better-than-average shot. Four in 10 become middle class, upper middle class, or rich. Nearly one in 10 make it all the way to the top.

Go Ahead is there for the taking. If I told your ancestors, from India to Ireland, that you would live in a time where kids born at the bottom had a better than 50% shot at a good life, and one of every 10 born poor became rich, they would call me crazy or praise their gods. Probably both.

If only one in 10 born at the bottom makes it all the way to the top, then damn it, be the one.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU BELIEVE

At some point, someone thought it would be a great idea to destroy everyday people’s faith in the American Dream. Incentives matter, and for those doing the bashing, they’ve been well rewarded with tenure on the Left and political power on the Right.

I implore you to believe they might all be wrong. Believe that this system has worked for others and it will work for you, because it has and it will. Is it perfect? Of course not. Neither is our version of football, where you throw the ball with your hands, but we love it anyway.

It is easy to scoff at the idea that “outlook,” “mindset,” “optimism,” or whatever other self-help mantra people preach holds the secret to success. But outlook is crucial. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found, to everyone’s surprise, that income was slightly negatively correlated to financial well-being. The strongest indicator was “a positive attitude” and “the habit of saving.” In a follow-up study, behavior (again, greater than income) was the greatest predictor of well-being. If you say this in learned circles, you are “poor shaming” — blaming failure on the individuals when it is the system’s fault. But these results, in another study of nearly 150,000 people, are strongest for the poor. Hopeful views for the future significantly predicted long-term savings. Yes, systems matter. So does the faith in yourself the myth busters gleefully seek to destroy.

They’re not just wrong. They’re hurting people.

To see how far you’ve come, you must look back at where you started. If you want to gaze off at distant utopia, fine by me. Looking back, though, it feels like we’re awfully close to where previous generations strived to Go Ahead to. If we lose our sense of awe and wonder at how different our world is from the past, and if we lose our bearings on how hard it was to get this far, we will abandon the process of getting ahead. That is a mistake.

Don’t buy from Big Woe. You don’t have to give your DNA to a genealogy company to discover this; just call your grandmother and ask: How many generations removed are you from your family’s first indoor, flush toilet?

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Excerpted from “How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked (and Didn’t)” by Joseph S. Moore, Ph.D. Copyright © 2026 by Joseph S. Moore. Reprinted here with permission from Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Dr. Joseph S. Moore is a historian, investor, and author.