The American Dream is being snatched away by regressive economic policies and predatory capitalist practices that prioritise the interests of the ultra-wealthy over the well-being of the median American, says Lewis Liu I am the quintessential product of the American Dream. My first memory is of meeting my father at
Lewis Z Liu
Tuesday 30 June 2026 5:20 am | Updated: Monday 29 June 2026 11:36 am
The American Dream is being snatched away by regressive economic policies and predatory capitalist practices that prioritise the interests of the ultra-wealthy over the well-being of the median American, says Lewis Liu
I am the quintessential product of the American Dream.
My first memory is of meeting my father at three and a half. I can still see it: the green sleeper train carrying me out of rural Hubei toward Beijing, my first flight aboard a Boeing 747, and then the man himself who had left for a master’s scholarship in Belgium shortly after I was conceived, and gone on to a PhD in New York. My mother had joined him when I was one, and for two years I was raised in the way many rural children of striving, emigrating Chinese were then: passed from relative to relative across our village.
While my father finished his PhD in financial economics, he washed dishes and delivered pizzas through Times Square; my mother folded clothes in a laundromat. Home was a basement studio in an unfashionable corner of Brooklyn (though in those days most of Brooklyn was unfashionable). I understood none of it at the time. Only later would I see that this was the American Dream itself, quietly under construction.
After his doctorate, my father went into finance and climbed his way up Citibank. His ascent gave my mother room for her own: a master’s degree, and then a career as one of the first data scientists, wrangling vast databases of numbers at AT&T Bell Labs. In time, like upwardly mobile families everywhere, they bought a house: a small one in Short Hills, a wealthy, leafy New Jersey enclave 30 minutes from Manhattan with one of the finest school districts in the country. And when both their sons made their way to Harvard, and then into lives of consequence, the arc was complete. They had built, brick by brick, patiently, the quintessential American Dream.
#mc_embed_signup { background: #fff; clear: left; font: 14px Helvetica, Arial,sans-serif; width: 100%; max-width: 600px; margin: 20px 0; } #mc-embedded-subscribe-form { margin: 20px 0 !important; } .newsletter-form-flex { display: flex; gap: 0; align-items: center; margin-top: -10px; } .newsletter-form-flex input[type=”email”] { flex: 1; padding: 2px 10px; border: 1px solid rgb(18, 22, 23) !important; border-radius: 12px 0 0 12px !important; } .newsletter-form-flex input[type=”submit”] { padding: 4px 10px !important; margin: 0 !important; background-color: rgb(18, 22, 23) !important; color: rgb(255, 255, 255) !important; border: 1px solid rgb(18, 22, 23) !important; border-radius: 0 12px 12px 0 !important; } .newsletter-banner-content { margin-bottom: 15px; } .newsletter-banner-content h2 { margin: 0 0 10px 0; font-size: 18px; font-weight: 600; } .newsletter-banner-content p { margin: 0 0 10px 0; line-height: 1.5; } .newsletter-banner-content ul, .newsletter-banner-content ol { margin: 0 0 10px 20px; } .newsletter-banner-content a { color: #0073aa; text-decoration: none; } .newsletter-banner-content a:hover { text-decoration: underline; } .newsletter-banner-content img { max-width: 100%; height: auto; margin: 10px 0; } #mc_embed_signup #mce-success-response { color: #0356a5; display: none; margin: 0 0 10px; width: 100%; } #mc_embed_signup div#mce-responses { float: left; top: -1.4em; padding: 0; overflow: hidden; width: 100%; margin: 0; clear: both; } The disappearing American Dream
As America nears its 250th birthday, the disappearance of the American Dream strikes me as a deeply alarming thing to watch. But how can it be disappearing amid the strongest GDP growth on record? Because, despite the headline numbers, report after report shows that ordinary Americans (everyone short of the Elon Musks) are struggling more than ever. In 2025, 67 per cent live paycheck to paycheck, up five points in a single year. Half cannot cover an unexpected $500 medical bill. And each generation now does worse than the last: the share of children out-earning their parents has collapsed from roughly 90 per cent for boomers to about 50 per cent for millennials. Living a worse life than your parents is the American Dream running in reverse.
Here’s a telling comparison: if the UK were a US state, it would be poorer than Mississippi on GDP per capita; yet on life expectancy and educational outcomes, it would beat Massachusetts, our highest-ranked state by most quality-of-life measures. So what does the dream actually mean anymore, and how do we win it back?
In my view, two forces are dismantling it: regressive policy and predatory capitalism.
Regressive monetary and tax policy
After selling Eigen, my first company, my wife and I discovered just how many structures exist to legally avoid tax almost entirely, provided you have enough capital to afford the right advisors. The American system is profoundly regressive at the macro scale: a high earner in New York can pay a greater share than a European, while a billionaire pays a trivial one. I’m not here to relitigate tax policy. But I’ve always told fellow Americans I’d happily pay more, if billionaires paid their fair share, and if we simplified the system enough to strip out the loopholes that let corporations and the ultra-wealthy purchase political influence.
Read more Inside City’s latest Irish pub: London’s poshest Guinness served here
Monetary policy has been just as regressive. During the financial crisis and Covid, quantitative easing (the government buying up assets to keep markets afloat) amounted to a vast transfer of wealth from wage earners to asset owners; in America, that means from the 99 per cent to the one per cent. For some reason, we ascribe deep moral faith to the idea that capital handed to corporations will “trickle down” to everyone else. Encouragingly, in my recent conversations with central bankers, the concern that QE quietly moves wealth from poor to rich is finally getting some airtime. Next time there’s a crisis, let’s find a better mechanism to support actual people.
Predatory capitalism
Predatory capitalism comes at us from two angles.
The first is the over-financialisation of nearly everything in America, private equity above all. I’m not saying PE is inherently bad; I advise PE firms myself on genuinely value-additive deals. But the counterexamples have piled up, and too often they’re the rule. A friend’s elderly parents recently had their nursing home taken over by a PE firm; within days they were quietly “recategorised” into a higher pricing tier. With one parent suffering from Parkinson’s, they have almost no way to fight back. The same logic is seeping into youth sports, turning what should be community and childhood into another margin to be optimised.
The second is surveillance capitalism. Technology now lets companies collect data on every consumer, on everything, which means pricing precisely at what each person will pay, extracting every last cent of surplus. This is a genuine reason more Americans live paycheck to paycheck: airlines reportedly raising fares on someone desperate to reach a funeral, websites pricing dynamically based on how badly you appear to want something. When every cent is extracted, where is the room left to breathe?
I won’t offer detailed fixes yet, but thoughtful consumer protection and financial regulation can reverse this, if we’re brave enough not to surrender to special interests. It’s worth noting how differently Europe frames the problem: under Section 172 of the UK Companies Act, a director must have regard to “relationships with suppliers and customers”, and to the company’s “impact on the community and the environment”. The obligation to society is written into the law itself.
Finding the Balance
I’ve written before that America’s dynamism may stem from its extreme individualism and rule-breaking, risk-taking culture. But consider this: at a recent Harvard commencement, the Daily Show comedian Ronny Chieng chanted “Fuck AI — kill it,” and drew loud cheers from an audience of soon-to-be American elites who, more than almost anyone, stand to benefit from AI. When even they are cheering its destruction, we have to ask the question honestly: will the newest edifices of our capitalist system, AI above all, actually serve society? Or will they simply extend the same path of extreme rent extraction?
America is wealthy enough to have its cake and eat it. If our billionaires could be merely less greedy – still rich, just not insatiable (the prevailing view in China is that around $25bn is “enough”) – and if our politicians, red or blue, I genuinely don’t care, optimised policy for the median American rather than the marginal donor, and if we could each find some way to trust one another again, then America could remain the most innovative, dynamic place on earth. Only this time with good infrastructure, healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt people, safe children, and, of course, a living, breathing American Dream.
Similarly tagged content: Sections Categories People & Organisations
