Joe: In 1940, if you were born in America, you had a 92% chance of earning more than your parents. A near certainty. Lewis: Wow. Ninety-two percent. That's almost everyone. Joe: Exactly. Now, fast forward to kids born in the 1980s—our generation, more or less. What do you think that number is? Lewis: I mean, it’s got to be lower, but maybe… 70%? 65%? Joe: It plummeted to a 50-50 coin flip. Lewis: A coin flip? That’s staggering. You’re saying the defining promise of America—that your kids will have a better life—became a statistical toss-up. What on earth happened? Joe: That is the central question in David Leonhardt's widely acclaimed book, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream. And Leonhardt is the perfect person to tackle this; he's a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist at The New York Times who founded their data-driven news section, The Upshot. He brings a mathematician's mind to a deeply human story. Lewis: A 92% chance... that feels like a different country. How on earth was that even possible? Was it just some post-war boom that we can never get back? Joe: That's the common myth, right? That it was just this magical, automatic thing. But Leonhardt argues it wasn't magic at all. It was built. And the story starts not in Washington D.C. with some grand policy, but in a freezing, miserable wooden shack in a Minneapolis coal yard.

Lewis: A coal yard? That’s not where I expected the American Dream to be forged. Joe: Well, in the 1930s, that shack was called the 'doghouse.' It's where truck drivers would wait, unpaid, for hours, sometimes all day, just for a single delivery order. They were paid by the delivery, had to cover their own truck and gas, and lived on the edge of poverty. Lewis: That sounds less like a dream and more like a nightmare. It’s the gig economy before the app. Joe: A perfect analogy. And in Minneapolis at the time, this was the norm. The city was dominated by a group of powerful business executives called the Citizens Alliance. Their entire purpose was to keep unions out and wages low. They even boasted that every strike in the city since World War I had "failed utterly" because of their help. They called it an "employer's paradise." Lewis: A union against unions. That’s bold. So how does anything change in a town that's completely locked down by business interests? Joe: It changes because of a guy named Carl Skoglund. He was a Swedish immigrant, a socialist, and a truck driver who had seen union efforts fail before. But he started holding secret meetings in his home, explaining a concept that economists call the 'range of indeterminacy.' Lewis: Okay, that sounds like academic jargon. Break that down for me. Joe: It's actually a really simple and powerful idea. Think about negotiating a salary. The company has a range they're willing to pay, say between $50,000 and $70,000. But you, as an individual worker, don't know that range. You only know what you need to survive. The employer has all the information and all the power. So where does the wage usually end up? Lewis: At the bottom of that range. Or even below it if they can get away with it. Joe: Exactly. The 'range of indeterminacy' is that gap. Skoglund's argument was that a union, by getting all the workers to bargain as one, could find out where the top of that range was and demand it. It’s about shifting the balance of information and power. Lewis: So it’s not about fighting for some impossible wage, it's about fighting for a fair wage that the company could already afford to pay. Joe: Precisely. And this idea caught fire. The coal drivers organized, and in 1934, they went on strike. The Citizens Alliance fought back hard. There was violence, police cracked down, and it got ugly. But the strikers were incredibly organized. They had 'flying squads' to stop replacement workers, they published their own daily newspaper to counter the pro-business press, and they even had a women's auxiliary to provide food and support. Lewis: They built a whole community around the strike. Joe: They did. And it worked. They won. That victory in Minneapolis, and others like it across the country, created a seismic shift. It forced politicians, including FDR, to pass laws like the Wagner Act, which protected workers' right to organize. This is the core of what Leonhardt calls 'democratic capitalism.' It wasn't just free markets; it was markets guided by democratic pressure and government guardrails. Lewis: It’s fascinating because we see this exact playbook with corporate union-busting today. The tactics haven't changed much. But you're saying for a few decades, the workers actually had the upper hand, or at least an even playing field? Joe: They had a seat at the table. And the results were stunning. From the 1940s to the 1970s, the economy grew, and crucially, the gains were shared. CEO pay was modest. Productivity gains were passed on to workers as higher wages. This was the era of the 92% chance. It wasn't an accident; it was the direct result of this hard-won balance of power.

Lewis: Okay, so if this system of 'democratic capitalism' was working so well, why did we stop doing it? Why did the engine start to sputter? Joe: Exactly. That balance of power was the engine of the dream. But starting in the 60s and 70s, that engine began to sputter and break down. And Leonhardt argues the breakdown started not just with economics, but with ideas. It was a two-front war against the established order. Lewis: Two fronts? What do you mean? Joe: On one side, you had the New Left. These were the 'young intelligentsia' that sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote about. They were college students, activists, and intellectuals who were rightly furious about the Vietnam War and racial injustice. The Port Huron Statement, their manifesto, opens with the line: "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." Lewis: That line says so much. They were privileged, and they knew it. Their fight wasn't necessarily about getting a bigger piece of the economic pie. Joe: Right. Their focus was on social justice, personal freedom, and authenticity. These were incredibly important fights. But Leonhardt points out that this often created a cultural and political disconnect from the traditional labor movement, the 'old left,' which was focused on wages, hours, and job security. The left began to fracture. Lewis: And while the left was fracturing, what was happening on the other side? Joe: A very focused, very well-funded counter-revolution was brewing. It started in academia, at places like the University of Chicago, with economists who argued that the New Deal consensus—the whole idea of government guiding the economy—was wrong. They believed in pure, unregulated markets. Lewis: The rise of neoliberalism. Joe: Yes, and it found a powerful champion in the legal world with a man named Robert Bork. Bork was a brilliant legal scholar who, influenced by his mentors in Chicago, began to argue that most government regulation, especially antitrust law, did more harm than good. He argued the only goal of antitrust should be 'consumer welfare,' which in practice usually meant lower prices, even if it led to giant monopolies. Lewis: That’s a huge shift. So he’s basically providing the intellectual ammunition for corporations to get bigger and more powerful. Joe: He is. And that ammunition gets loaded into the cannon with something called the Powell Memo in 1971. Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer who would soon be a Supreme Court Justice, wrote a confidential memo to the Chamber of Commerce. It was a call to arms. He argued that the American free enterprise system was under attack from campuses, from the media, from politicians, and that business needed to get organized and fight back. Aggressively. Lewis: So you have a fractured left, and a newly energized, unified, and well-funded corporate right. That sounds like a recipe for a major power shift. Joe: It was. But ideas and memos alone don't change the world. You need a crisis. And the 1970s delivered. You had the oil crisis, soaring inflation, and economic stagnation—'stagflation.' People's paychecks weren't going as far. At the same time, you had a massive crime wave. Society felt like it was coming apart at the seams. Lewis: Okay, but the book can't just be blaming a bunch of academics in Chicago. What about real-world events? Joe: Absolutely. Leonhardt is clear that this created the political opening. People were scared and frustrated. And politicians like Ronald Reagan were able to step into that void and offer a simple, powerful story: Government is the problem, not the solution. Let's cut taxes, slash regulations, and unleash the power of the market. The ideas that had been percolating in Chicago and in corporate boardrooms were now ready for primetime. Lewis: And this is where some of the criticism of the book comes in, right? I’ve seen reviews that say Leonhardt's framing of 'two capitalisms'—the good democratic one versus the bad individualistic one—is a bit too neat, a bit too binary. The real world is messier. Joe: It's a fair critique. The book is a grand narrative, and any grand narrative has to simplify to make its point. But the evidence he marshals for this fundamental shift is overwhelming. The attack on unions, the deregulation of finance, the tax cuts that overwhelmingly favored the wealthy—these weren't isolated events. They were part of a coherent project to dismantle the old system.

Lewis: So if the system was built and then dismantled, does Leonhardt give us a realistic blueprint to rebuild it? Or is this just a depressing history lesson? Joe: It’s definitely not a depressing book. In fact, it’s surprisingly hopeful. The core message is that since the American Dream was a human creation, it can be recreated. He argues we need to focus on the same three levers that built it in the first place: Power, Culture, and Investment. Lewis: Okay, let's take those one by one. What does he mean by Power? Joe: It's about rebalancing the scales, just like Carl Skoglund and the Minneapolis strikers did. Today, that means policies that make it easier for workers to form unions, raising the minimum wage, and strengthening the social safety net. It's about ensuring that working people have a voice in the economy again, not just capital. Lewis: That makes sense. What about Culture? That one seems a bit fuzzier. Joe: This is maybe the most fascinating part of the book. He argues that the culture of corporate America has to change. And he uses this incredible story to illustrate it. In the late 1950s, George Romney—yes, Mitt Romney's father—was the CEO of American Motors. The company was doing incredibly well. Romney became so uncomfortable with his own soaring pay that he went to his board and insisted they cap his salary at $225,000. He even forfeited bonuses he had earned. Lewis: Hold on. A CEO voluntarily asked for a pay cut because he was making too much money? That’s… I can’t even imagine that happening today. Joe: Right? It sounds like it's from another planet. Romney believed that obscene executive pay was bad for the company's culture and for society. He saw himself as a 'trustee of the common welfare.' That was the prevailing culture. Today, the culture is that a CEO's job is to maximize shareholder value at all costs, and take home as much as humanly possible. Leonhardt argues that this cultural shift is just as important as any policy change. Lewis: The George Romney story is mind-blowing. It really shows that what we consider 'normal' for a CEO is just a recent invention. It’s not some law of nature. Joe: Exactly. And the final lever is Investment. For decades, America invested heavily in the future—in infrastructure, in scientific research, in education. Leonhardt tells the story of a young Dwight Eisenhower participating in a military convoy across the country in 1919. The roads were so terrible it took them two months to get from D.C. to San Francisco. That experience stuck with him, and it's a major reason why, as president, he championed the Interstate Highway System. He understood that investing in public goods creates the foundation for private prosperity. Lewis: And we’ve been coasting on those investments for a long time. Our infrastructure, our public schools… they're crumbling. Joe: We have. The book argues that a return to long-term public investment is essential. So it's not one magic bullet. It's about rebalancing power, shifting culture, and reinvesting in the future, all at the same time.

Joe: Ultimately, the book's most powerful message is that the economy isn't like the weather; it's like a garden. It doesn't just 'happen.' It has to be designed, tended, and sometimes weeded. The American Dream of the mid-20th century wasn't a given, it was a project. Lewis: A project that a lot of people fought and sacrificed for. The book makes you realize that shared prosperity isn't the default setting for capitalism. It's an achievement. And it's a fragile one. Joe: Very fragile. And the data from the beginning of our conversation shows just how much we've lost. That 92% chance of a better life wasn't a fluke of history. It was the outcome of a particular set of choices. We've since made a different set of choices, and we're living with the consequences—a 50-50 coin flip. Lewis: And it leaves you with a really challenging question: Are we willing to do the hard work of gardening again? Or are we content to just live with the weeds? Joe: It’s a huge question. The book doesn't offer easy answers, but it restores a sense of agency. It reminds us that the future isn't written yet. We'd love to know what you think. What part of this story resonates most with your family's experience of the American Dream? Let us know on our social channels. Lewis: This is Aibrary, signing off.