LAUSR

Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes Mark Robert Rank, Thomas A. Hirschl and Kirk A. Foster. Oxford, 2014.Income and wealth inequality have been a central focus of American political discourse for the last forty years. Of particular concern has been how increasing inequality erodes working- and middle-class Americans' ability to attain "the American Dream" of providing a comfortable lifestyle for one's family through the rewards of labor. The last forty years' political and economic scholarship focuses on the increasing difficulty of attaining this dream; almost no work addresses what the American Dream actually means to workingand middle-class Americans. Mark Robert Rank, Thomas A. Hirschl, and Kirk A. Foster's Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes moves beyond this tradition, using a multidimensional approach to examine what Americans think the Dream is, as well as to explore the viability of attaining this Dream through traditional pathways. By utilizing individual interviews, focus groups, and a lifetable approach that employs data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Pew Center for Research, Rank et al. provide a "somewhat different lens for interpreting and assessing the current and future status of the American Dream" (7).The authors break their study into three sections: identifying core components of, assessing pathways to, and exploring meanings of the American Dream. Each section utilizes the multidimensional approach, providing personal experiences and focus group discussions, as well as longitudinal quantitative data measuring economic risks and rewards across generations. The first section points to what Americans most commonly identify as the crucial components of the Dream. Most crucial is the freedom to pursue one's passions or interests (28). Economic security is requisite for this pursuit and, indeed, ranks as the second-most crucial component-more important, for many Americans, even than mobility (39). For most Americans, security is not attaining riches but is having the resources and tools to live a comfortable and rewarding life: a decent paying job with benefits, accumulated savings and assets, the ability to provide for one's children, home ownership, and the possibility of retiring comfortably (49). Three quarters of Americans, however, think that attaining these two components have become more difficult, a reality Rank et al. attest to through data showing fewer decent-paying jobs, lower average wages, fewer benefits, and more part-time work relative to full-time opportunities. American workers have been living up to their end of the bargain, producing more despite working less; Corporate America, however, has not lived up to its end (39). Despite this, the third component is supreme optimism in the ability to attain the Dream in one's children's lifetimes, if not in one's own.The second section looks at the changing landscape of opportunities for attaining the Dream, with an eye specifically toward the market for jobs paying enough to support a family. This section provides a wealth of useful data and interpretations of labor markets. There is a mismatch between the number who need this type of job and the supply, which results in increased polarization of jobs, further fostering inequality (71). …