Is the American Dream DEAD? The Real Reason You Can’t Get Ahead
Andrew Yang Podcast
Andrew Yang & Audacy
4.8 • 3.2K Ratings
🗓️ 3 March 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For most of American history, if you didn’t like your circumstances, you could move somewhere new and reinvent yourself — but that freedom has been slowly stripped away. In this episode, historian and journalist Yoni Appelbaum uncovers how zoning laws, segregation, and discriminatory policies have made mobility a privilege of the wealthy, trapping generations in poverty. Cutting through a century of myth, he reveals how we got here — and how we can get moving again.
Get your copy of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity
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Follow Andrew Yang: https://andrewyang.com | https://x.com/andrewyang
Follow Yoni Appelbaum: https://x.com/YAppelbaum | https://www.theatlantic.com/author/yoni-appelbaum/
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Transcript
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| 0:30.4 | This week on the Andrew Yang podcast. |
| 0:34.3 | America, for 200 years, the gap between the richest and the poorest places in America was narrowing, |
| 0:40.3 | because people would move from poor places to rich places. |
| 0:42.3 | If you were a janitor in Alabama 50 years ago, and you moved to San Francisco, you'd pay more in rent. |
| 0:48.3 | Your cost of living would go up, but you'd make a heck of a lot more as a janitor. |
| 0:52.3 | You'd end up way ahead, like 40% ahead. And today, if that same janitor in Alabama tries moving to San Francisco, he'll still make more. |
| 0:59.0 | In fact, he'll make a lot more. |
| 1:00.7 | But his housing costs won't just cancel it out. |
| 1:03.3 | It'll leave him net behind. |
| 1:05.5 | The rational choice is to stay making a lot less. |
| 1:08.6 | So you talk to people and they're kind of stuck. |
| 1:19.1 | It is my pleasure to welcome to the podcast, historian, journalist, deputy executive editor |
| 1:25.8 | at the Atlantic, and now author of the brand new book stuck |
| 1:30.1 | how the privileged and the property broke the engine of American opportunity. We're going to dig |
| 1:36.5 | into all of that. Yoni Applebound. Welcome Yoni. Oh, I'm so glad to be here. Wow. So I was pumped |
| 1:43.8 | to read the Atlantic piece that is an excerpt of your book because I have been freaked out about how little Americans have been moving for quite some time. When I ran for president, I even had a policy platform trying to get America moving |
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