The American Dream Is in Crisis

[Geee]

Heritage Foundation

Every year, The Heritage Foundation publishes a collection of data, charts, and thoughtful contextual pieces under the heading of the Index of Culture and Opportunity.
Its title is a nod to something often lost in our politics these days: that culture and opportunity are linked together, that the opportunities that exist in our society and our citizens’ perceptions of those opportunities shape our shared culture, and that our culture in turn shapes the opportunities available to individuals and communities.
So connected are these concepts that efforts to understand them will suffer from any artificial attempt to segregate them. This volume is admirable both for its willingness to house culture and opportunity under the same intellectual roof and for its effort to quantify and analyze both.
Opportunity is built explicitly into the American social contract. We declared independence by noting a God-given right to pursue happiness, and one of the few philosophical issues that unite both sides of our political spectrum is the idea that we should have some measure of “equality of opportunity” in our society.