So when did the Dream start to fade?
The Dream started to decline some 50 years ago, beginning in the 1970s, with globalisation and wage stagnation, according to Mark Rank, co-author of Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes.
“It’s become much harder to attain the American Dream – this idea of an economic bargain that if you work hard and you play by the rules, you should have a decent, comfortable economic life,” he said. “That idea of each generation doing economically better than the past generation is a key component of the American Dream. And that had been the case up until about the 1970s,” he says.
And experts say that in the subsequent years, the Dream began to experience a prolonged decline as socioeconomic inequality increased.
Then, some experts say, there was another tipping point: the financial crisis of 2008 and the aftershocks that meant home ownership and job stability were increasingly out of reach.
And many Americans never recovered that economic optimism. Despite this, American wages remain much higher than ones in the UK, and across much of Europe.
Irrespective, wide partisan divides persist over whether the Dream is achievable. Surveys show more Republicans still appear to hold the faith, as do older Americans. Young adults seem particularly cynical. One poll found only a fifth of adults aged 18-29, people like Luke, think the Dream remains a possibility.
That being said, the Dream has never been entirely about financial success. For many, it’s a dream of freedom and individual rights that trace back to America’s founding documents, such as the Bill of Rights.
And in that vein, it’s worth noting that many black Americans have long thought the Dream was a myth built upon lofty rhetoric from the Founding Fathers that didn’t mesh with the reality of American slavery and segregation.