About the book
The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream: Volume 2 explores the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the American Dream in both theory and reality in the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together leading scholars from a range of fields to further develop the themes and issues explored in the first volume.
The concept of the American Dream, first expounded by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America in 1931, is at once both ubiquitous and difficult to define. The term perfectly captures the hopes of freedom, opportunity and upward social mobility invested in the nation. However, the American Dream appears increasingly illusory in the face of widening inequality and apparent lack of opportunity, particularly for the poor and ethnic, or otherwise marginalized, minorities in the United States. As such, an understanding of the American Dream through both theoretical analyses and empirical studies, whether qualitative or quantitative, is crucial to understanding contemporary America.
Like the first volume of The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream, this collection will be of great interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences.
Chapter abstract
This chapter examines whether the Nordic region has surpassed today's America on two of the most central tenets of the American Dream, defined as individualism and equal opportunity. An important reason is that there are certain identifiable Nordic values that are institutionalized within and across the five states that make up the Nordic region. These are referred to as the Nordic Model, a distinct Nordic approach to democracy, a social market economy, and gender equality. The chapter's starting assumption is that individualism and equal opportunity as core tenets of the American Dream resonate strongly with the values that underpin the Nordic Model, even if the Nordic Model is based on a different calibration of these. The chapter operationalizes individualism and equal opportunity and undertakes an extensive literature survey and examination of a wide range of statistics in order to assess the claim that the Nordic region may have surpassed today's America on key tenets of the American Dream.
Full info
Chapter 5: From American Dream to Nordic Realities
Ingrid Christensen, John Erik Fossum and Bent-Sofus Tranøy
In: The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream
Robert C. Hauhart and Mitja Sardoč (eds)
Routledge (2022)
ISBN: