The Road Not Taken is Guaranteed Minimum Income

The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans.

The Road Not Taken is Guaranteed Minimum Income

The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans.

Jeff Atwood

20 Mar 2025
— 14 min read
— Comments

The following is drawn from a speech I delivered today at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York City, where I joined Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman to discuss the future of the American Dream:

What is the American Dream?

In 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, James Truslow Adams first defined the American Dream as

“[...] a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. [...] not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which [everyone] shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position”

I wanted to know what these words meant to us today. I needed to know what parts of the American Dream we all still had in common. I had to make some sense of what was happening to our country. I’ve been writing on my blog since 2004, and on November 7th, I started writing the most difficult piece I have ever written.

I asked so many Americans to tell me what the American Dream personally meant to them, and I wrote it all down.

Later in November, I attended a theater performance of The Outsiders at my son’s public high school – an adaptation of the 1967 novel by S.E. Hinton&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1742507328643679&usg=AOvVaw2GgwTbUV3qWhPvsHuYFgy7). All I really knew was the famous “stay gold” line from the 1983 movie. But as I sat there in the audience among my neighbors, watching the complete story acted out in front of me by these teenagers, I slowly realized what “stay gold” meant: sharing the American Dream.

We cannot merely attain the Dream. The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans. That act of sharing is the final realization of everything the dream stands for.

Thanks to S.E. Hinton, I finally had a name for my essay, “Stay Gold, America.” I published it on January 7th, with a Pledge to Share the American Dream.

In the first part of the Pledge, the short term, our family made eight 1 million dollar donations to the following nonprofit groups: Team Rubicon, Children’s Hunger Fund, PEN America, The Trevor Project, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, First Generation Investors, Global Refuge, and Planned Parenthood.

Beyond that, we made many additional one million dollar donations to reinforce our technical infrastructure in America – Wikipedia, The Internet Archive, The Common Crawl Foundation, Let’s Encrypt, pioneering independent internet journalism, and several other crucial open source software infrastructure projects that power much of the world today.

I encourage every American to contribute soon, however you can, to organizations you feel are effectively helping those most currently in need.

But short term fixes are not enough.

The Pledge To Share The American Dream requires a much more ambitious second act – deeper, long term changes that will take decades. Over the next five years, my family pledges half our remaining wealth to plant a seed toward foundational long term efforts ensuring that all Americans continue to have the same fair access to the American Dream.

Let me tell you about my own path to the American Dream. It was rocky. My parents were born into deep poverty in Mercer County, West Virginia, and Beaufort County, North Carolina. Our family eventually clawed our way to the bottom of the middle class in Virginia.

I won’t dwell on it, but every family has their own problems. We did not remain middle class for long. But through all this, my parents got the most important thing right: they loved me openly and unconditionally. That is everything. It’s the only reason I am standing here in front of you today.

With my family’s support, I managed to achieve a solid public education in Chesterfield County, Virginia, and had the incredible privilege of an affordable state education at the University of Virginia. This is a college uniquely rooted in the beliefs of one of the most prominent Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson. He was a living paradox. A man of profound ideals and yet flawed – trapped in the values of his time and place.

Still, he wrote “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” at the top of the Declaration of Independence. These words were, and still are, revolutionary. They define our fundamental shared American values, although we have not always lived up to them. The American Dream isn’t about us succeeding, alone, by ourselves, but about connecting with each other and succeeding together as Americans.

I’ve been concerned about wealth concentration in America ever since I watched a 2012 video by politizane illustrating just how extreme wealth concentration already was.

I had no idea how close we were to the American Gilded Age from the late 1800s. This period was given a name in the 1920s by historians referencing Mark Twain’s 1873 novel, The Gilded Age, A Tale of Today.

During this time, labor strikes often turned violent, with the Homestead Strike of 1892 resulting in deadly confrontations between workers and Pinkerton guards hired by factory owners. Rapid industrialization created hazardous working conditions in factories, mines, and railroads, where thousands died due to insufficient safety regulations and employers who prioritized profit over worker welfare.

In January 2025, while I was still writing “Stay Gold, America”, we entered the period of greatest wealth concentration in the entirety of American history. As of 2021, the top 1% of households controlled 32% of all wealth, while the bottom 50% only have 2.6%. It’s difficult to find more recent data, but wealth concentration has only intensified in the last four years.

We can no longer say “Gilded Age.”

We must now say “The First Gilded Age.”

Today, in our second Gilded Age, more and more people find their path to the American Dream blocked. When Americans face unaffordable education, lack of accessible healthcare, or lack affordable housing, they aren’t just disadvantaged – they’re trapped, often burdened by massive debt. They have no stable foundation to build their lives. They watch desperately, working as hard as they can, while life simply passes them by, without even the freedom to choose their own lives.

[...]

Original source