How did the wealthy destroy the American Dream? Yoni Appelbaum explains in his new book "Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity." Listen to his conversation with Michael to hear how Appelbaum thinks the U.S. is no longer the land of opportunity, and so much of it has to do with where you move and live. We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are only accessible to the wealthy. But in America, this wasn’t always the case. Though for most of world history, your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary idea: If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency, and, for two hundred years, that remarkable mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity. Original air date 11 February 2025. The book was released on 18 February 2025.
Yoni Appelbaum is a deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and a social and cultural historian of the United States. Before joining The Atlantic, he was a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University. He previously taught at Babson College and at Brandeis University, where he received his PhD in American history.