What was once the land of opportunity is shrinking for three reasons: the economy, evolving norms, and dysfunctional politics. At the heart of our current divisions is not just our failure to address these wrongs but our tendency to blame our ills on the “other.” We need fewer scapegoats, more respect for one another, and more understanding of the power of individual agency and of acting together as one nation.

Blending serious policy debates with personal stories spanning decades in Washington and various administrations, celebrated economist Isabel Sawhill documents the importance of both opportunity and personal responsibility to outline a new social compact that would help bring a divided nation together around new policies to expand opportunity.


At the heart of Revising the American Dream are questions Sawhill has grappled for decades: how much are people responsible for their lives and how much are they victims of their individual circumstances? How much should government do to compensate for peoples' different circumstances in order to equalize opportunity? She argues we have spent too much time analyzing the effects of various individual policies, and exaggerating what government by itself can accomplish, and too little time thinking about how to create a politically sustainable policy framework built on a foundation of broadly-shared public values.