What Is Wrong with Americans?

We are among the wealthiest people in history, but full of anxiety about the future. A recent Wall Street Journal poll (June 20-21, 2026) reveals that among Americans who place themselves among the upper or upper-middle class, 86 percent now doubt their children will live better than they do. The American promise has long been that hardworking families could attain a better life for their children. The latest poll suggests that our belief in the American dream may now be receding. 

From the outside looking in, this American anxiety is hard to square with the arithmetic. Median household income in the United States now exceeds that of nearly every country on earth. Most families across the world live on a small fraction of the average American household’s income. 

Despite our affluence, American optimism has eroded since the 1970s, and our pessimism has measurably deepened since the 2008 financial crisis. What is different about this current poll is that it shows the encroachment of this pessimism among the most financially secure Americans, who reside at the world’s summits of prosperity.

How can we understand this expanding vertigo among Americans, the gap between where they objectively stand socioeconomically and where they feel they stand? Some have attributed it to affluenza, a socially transmitted disease caused by American consumerism. But perhaps Alexis de Tocqueville can help us better understand how great wealth and anxiety can go hand in hand. 

In his Memoirs on Pauperism, two essays written in the 1830s, Tocqueville sought to understand why industrial expansion in England had seemed to create more pauperism and, in turn, had expanded the provision of public welfare. While other contemporary observers of the early industrial age introduced class-based critiques of capitalist exploitation of labor, Tocqueville puzzled through “the social question” of his age in a different manner. 

Tocqueville incisively observed that while industrialized production more easily supplied a population’s basic needs, it also elevated our horizon of perceived needs. The benefits of industrialization, he explained, thus presented new forms of anxiety. At once, the birth of plenty raised people’s expectations but left increasing numbers “more open to the hazard of fortune.” The agrarian farmer with his twenty acres had the security of being able to feed his family from the land, even in the most trying conditions. Industrial workers, however, now depended on the invisible hand of the marketplace to provide wages to buy their bread and to ensure its availability for purchase. In other words, the anxiety of industrial workers originated less from the excessive pursuit of consumer goods and more from the uncertainty that came with the growing distance of work from the sources of subsistence. In Tocqueville’s own words: 

The more prosperous a society is, the more diversified and more durable become the enjoyments of the greatest number, the more they simulate true necessity through habit and imitation. Civilised man is therefore infinitely more exposed to the vicissitudes of destiny than savage man. What happens to the second only from time to time and in particular circumstances, occurs regularly to the first. Along with the range of his pleasures he has expanded the range of his needs and leaves himself more open to the hazard of fortune. 

We thus confront the paradox of prosperity: market economies help us attain tremendous prosperity, but they also require us to depend on mechanisms of social and economic coordination that are hard to see and not directly within our control. Times of uncertainty or economic shock can elevate the undercurrents of anxiety that course beneath the surface of a world in constant motion.   

Tocqueville’s insights shed light on today’s white-collar dread about the effects of persistent inflation and the displacement of meaningful work by artificial intelligence. They also underscore the suffering borne by those who endure the downsides of the regular creative destruction of an innovative economy, as seen most notably in the hollowing out of the industrial Midwest in the late twentieth century. As we now ponder what changes AI will bring to our economic livelihoods, Tocqueville reminds us that such revolutions can create real anxiety and real damage.  

I feel these vulnerabilities myself these days. As I approach retirement, I face genuine anxiety about the rising cost of health care and the sufficiency of my hard-earned retirement cushion. I also watch with concern as my son and his fiancée begin to form a household that will start below the middle-class line that even their grandparents had cleared. Despite knowing that my family dwells among history’s highest economic peaks, the WSJ poll’s headline about economic angst resonated with the facts of my own family’s economic outlook.  

So my question is not whether our present anxieties are false or unwarranted but rather what we do with them. Reading Tocqueville more deeply may help us here, too. Tocqueville observed that the expansion of public welfare in England in the early industrial age was only exacerbating the social problems it sought to address, creating a moral hazard for the most vulnerable at high public expense. Likewise, too many of today’s public voices prescribe treatments that could deepen the very discomfort they promise to relieve. 

Take the de-growth pessimism that has been given a platform at the European Parliament’s "Beyond Growth" conferences in recent years. The de-growth diagnosis is that modern nations have reached the limits of growth and should deliberately contract. Even in his time, Tocqueville saw this option to exit from the modern condition and refused it. Observing that “civilised man is...infinitely more exposed to the vicissitudes of destiny than savage man,” he nevertheless understood that to force down our horizon of needs would deny an irrepressible part of human nature. Lowering the horizon does not cure the anxiety; it may simply dampen human aspiration and creativity at a time when we need more. 

A similar pessimism seems to influence many other proposals that would expand the industrial policy and welfare functions of the modern state. The new “postliberal” movement, epitomized by American Compass and its founder Oren Cass, takes aim at a litany of maladies, including “the lottery economy” and “naked consumerism.” American Compass proposes to restore security through expanded social programs, stronger industrial policy, constrained immigration, and a thicker citizenship defined by populist nostrums against “the elite.” Alternatively, a cohort of Silicon Valley technologists, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have entertained the idea that it will be necessary for the government to guarantee basic incomes to mitigate AI-driven job displacement.  

While these prescriptions differ in method, their proposals share a structural flaw: they would purchase security in the face of uncertainty by concentrating decision-making in the hands of the state and further concentrating risks for everyone. As US public debt continues to climb, we must temper rather than expand our dependence on the public purse.  

Tocqueville dissected this very temptation toward state-based administrative and technocratic solutions. He saw that using the state’s fiscal capacity to buffer uncertainty would fatally place “the entire fortune of a large kingdom’s poor classes... in a single place.” The result would be that a major shock could “in one stroke ruin their only and last resources.” Concentrating decision rights over wealth creation and distribution cannot adequately ensure against potential shocks, nor does it lead to a well-managed fund for social security. Expansive state expenditures lead to revenue demands that even aggressive tax rates and tariff schemes cannot supply. Nor is broadening public welfare the answer. A redistribution-funded income guarantee at a national scale would draw everyone into the risk that previously affected only a few, resulting in a systemic version of insecurity. Almost two hundred years ago, Tocqueville followed the institutional logic of such proposals to their conclusions and prophesied that such uses of the public purse would structurally fail, as would more extreme socialist proposals to collectivize property. 

Envisioning a world in which the uncertainties of globally interdependent economies must be balanced by personal property ownership, Tocqueville showed us the contours of an alternative path toward a more resilient population. He proposed that industrial workers, whether through increased savings or shares of ownership in industrial enterprise, needed the same “spirit and habits of property ownership” that gave the small farmer a stake to protect and lifted his imagination to the future. For Tocqueville, property’s value is not merely as a cushion of assets; rather, it is the responsibility it gives a person for his own future. “The entire question,” he wrote, “thus boils down to seeking means that would permit the poor man to build his savings and to render them productive.” He noted, however, that the best forms of ownership were not those handed out through public welfare. He commended tools that left decision-making in the hands of individuals and families: household savings, a diversified private industry providing accessible loans, and even the possibility of providing factory workers equity shares in industrial enterprises.  

Tocqueville had the analytical imagination to see the future evolution of capitalism toward systems we now live with every day but often ignore. In 2025, sixty-two percent of Americans reported owning equities, mostly through retirement accounts. While that ownership remains thin among households on the lowest income rungs, Tocqueville’s analysis suggests that the task ahead of us should be to strengthen and extend the bridges that connect people to property ownership, not to weaken their foundations. Tellingly, even some in the AI community who once championed cash transfers now propose distributing equity instead—encouraging people, by their own route, to reach for Tocqueville’s answer.  

Nevertheless, equity ownership is not the same as readily accessible savings, and an honest objection must be met head-on. Equity is an abstract form of property, and managing it well requires modern economic skills and education. If our goal is to widen the door to participation and to foster conditions in which learning and results are aligned and human agency increases, we must also engage people in “the economic way of thinking” and the practical skills and habits it can engender. Merely subsidizing families to live on higher hills than they have the ambition or skills to climb can simply drop them into landscapes they cannot read. This merely substitutes one form of anxiety for another.   

The paradox of prosperity requires us to understand both that human agency is a personal acquisition and that the mysterious coordination of human action that enables the creation of prosperity is fragile. Brendan McCord of the Cosmos Institute has recently observed that when transaction costs for coordinating exchanges were high, “societies reflexively engaged the planner to solve the problem from the top.” Modern technologies have vastly improved buyers’ and sellers’ ability to find one another, even over long distances and time intervals. We no longer need to delegate our interactions to a chieftain, and it is increasingly unsafe to do so. We can now see more clearly that political interventions too often disrupt the generativity of markets, resulting in stasis and stagnation rather than creativity and innovation.  

A dynamic, growing economy is a rich communication network that enables more effective social and economic coordination. As millions upon millions of exchanges happen, people acquire more agency through practice. And societies of increasingly capable people thus become more prosperous and more resilient.   

Even so, these patterns don’t happen miraculously or without costs. Market champions and interventionists alike must make honest appraisals: adjustments arising from a natural disaster, the closing of a local factory, or the rise of new technologies incur real costs that are paid by real people, but even in distress the specific help people need to overcome such challenges is best served through local knowledge that only personal charity, local collective problem-solving, and markets bring to bear.  

Much of what constricts opportunity, however, is not the free play of markets, but too much of the old sense that in times of danger, we need the solidarity of the masses behind a Leviathan-like leader.   

It is time to leave the age of Leviathans behind. While markets gradually disperse risk and expand ownership, planned interventions that centralize decision rights and risk do not offer safe shelter. We can find the most promising paths forward by understanding which institutional arrangements widen access to ownership and which create barriers to entry. The de-growth left, and the postliberal right converge on the same cure Tocqueville declined—promising nice-sounding arrangements that, when shocks come, are more likely to increase than cure our present insecurities.  

In the end, the paradox of prosperity requires us to balance the interdependencies we need to flourish with the independence we need to find our way. The way through our present anxieties is not to retreat into a smaller world where we imagine we have limited our interdependencies, but instead have merely traded them for potentially more fragile ones. Nor is it to allow our assets to be placed under the direction of central management. Managing our modern discontents requires each of us to keep moving forward, drawn by the opportunities we can see on the horizon.   

The paradox of prosperity is that the only way to attain it, and to keep it, is to keep our eyes focused on that horizon of an open future where we can improve our own lot, where we can celebrate when ownership expands, and where we can offer an outstretched hand to our friends and neighbors when disruptions come. 

The great philosopher of the democratic age observed the promise of Americans’ vast energy for economic and civic entrepreneurship. He also saw that prosperity could saddle us with anxiety. He thought the answer to our anxieties lay in expanding our agency. We are all in it together. But Tocqueville warned us against binding ourselves together under the allures of soft despotisms. There is still much we can learn from Tocqueville about both the meaning of democracy and the paradox of prosperity. 

Lenore T. Ealy is international vice president of Universidad Francisco Marroquín and founder of The Philanthropic Enterprise.