As we celebrate the nation’s 250th, there’s been a lot of talk lately about the American dream, and I’ve gotten to be in some of these conversations. It has felt a little surreal, partly because for a long time the idea of America was a dream for someone like me.
Even in the years when immigration was an easier path, it took me about 14 years to become a U.S. citizen. I still distinctly remember the moment I was sworn in, partly because it was a room so full of joy, hope and possibility. There were people from 30 different nationalities, kids running around, old folks and young folks, and you could hear so many different languages in that room, and it was the realization of a lifelong dream.
I count myself lucky to be in the rooms where these conversations are happening, and I tend to lean in with the curiosity of someone still fairly new to the American experiment. In one of those conversations, I recently learned something that has stayed with me. The natural rights this nation was built on were first written, by John Locke, not as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but as life, liberty and property. In his Second Treatise, Locke held that government exists to protect men’s lives, liberties, and estates. It was Thomas Jefferson, drafting the Declaration in 1776, who recast that third right as “the pursuit of happiness,” following the wording George Mason had used a few weeks earlier in Virginia.
Historians don’t fully agree on why Jefferson made the change, and he never explained it, but one definitive reading is hard to ignore: enshrining property as an inalienable natural right would have written enslaved people, treated as property, permanently into the founding logic, an open moral questioning a slaveholding drafting committee had every reason to avoid. The economic engine of the country at that time was built on a shameful form of ownership, the ownership of human beings.
And somewhere along the way the older ideal of owning a piece of American prosperity was not only lost for the majority of Americans, it was systematically denied to many of them through deliberate policy, in ways whose effects have persisted to this day. Both the shame and the intention were real, and the loss served the people who already held the ownership and the gains that came with it.
Consider that as many as 46 million living American adults, roughly one in four of us, descend from families who received a land grant under the Homestead Act, a transfer of about 270 million acres, close to 10% of the nation’s land, much of it land that had been taken from Native peoples. Those families got a real leg up in the so-called American dream, and that leg up was overwhelmingly handed to white families. More than 1.5 million of them profited, while fewer than a few thousand Black families ever received land under the Act, and those who tried were routinely steered to the worst parcels.
Once industrialization began to concentrate capital, the owners of that capital needed a working class, and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” worked just fine for them as long as the working class believed in the dream and didn’t ask for a share of the upside. That was the quiet bargain offered to the people whose labor built the country, dressed up as part of the nation’s founding promise.
And yet we know today, especially those of us in the investing world, that wages don’t build wealth the way ownership does, that the economy pays owners and extracts from workers, and the return on capital stays higher and more durable, both because owners keep more of what is produced and because there’s a steady stream of workers with less and less agency, and no claim on the upside their labor creates.
Thomas Piketty made the structural version of this point: when the return on capital outruns the rate of growth, which has been the historical norm, owned wealth compounds faster than wages ever rise, and concentration follows, which is why the top 10% of U.S. households now hold roughly 60% of all wealth. In 2022, the median white household held about $284,000 in wealth, more than six times the roughly $44,000 held by the median Black household, a gap that decades of rising wages never touched. It was never really about what people earned. Spread the ownership wider and you change who the economy is built to reward, which is the whole point.
The impact investing world is finally waking up to this, and is building pathways toward broader ownership for every American through a range of tools, in the work we’ve done at Gary Community Ventures and in the work of many others, including the Aspen Institute’s Financial Security Program and the Unlock Ownership Fund. These run the full length of the ladder, from individual financial and capital accounts like baby bonds and children’s savings, to shared and mixed-equity real estate that lets renters share in appreciation, to broad-based employee ownership that gives workers an actual stake. This, to me, is the path toward realizing the real American dream.
I don’t think our problem is a shortage of ideas. It’s a shortage of imagination about who the dream is for. The biggest part of the American dream is the story we’ve been told about it, and that story may need to be questioned a good deal more.
In 2017, Pew asked Americans what was essential to their idea of the American dream. More than three-quarters named freedom in how they live their lives, 70% named a good family life, and well down the list came owning a home and a successful career, while only 11% named being wealthy, dead last on a list of seven. I think this keeps most Americans in a kind of trance, not quite believing they deserve an upside, not quite seeing that ownership is already woven into the dream they just described to a pollster, even though their own words and their own aspirations point straight at it. That gap, between what people aspire to and what they believe they’re allowed to ask for, is one of the lasting fallacies of how we’ve told our history.
The underlying beauty of this nation, I think, is the belief that everyone deserves a fair shot, and that belief has created prosperity unlike anywhere else in the world. It is why we immigrants come here, to dream and build a future for ourselves and our kids. So as we mark the 250th, heading into an age where AI is about to rearrange who captures the value that labor used to create, the thing worth remembering is that the American Dream was an ownership dream from the very first draft, before the language got softened and the stake got withheld. We have the tools to give that dream back to everyone now, and what it always meant was life, liberty, and an actual share of the upside.
Santhosh Ramdoss is CEO of Gary Community Ventures.
