People Really Did Get Ahead, and You Can, Too

Perhaps you’ve heard that nobody can get ahead anymore.

That capitalism is broken. That only the rich get richer. We name our sports teams after workers and what they make—Steelers, Brewers, Packers, Pistons—but no one would watch the Manhattan Middle Managers play the Silicon Valley Unicorns. Success is out there, on the coasts, for the elites. We are left behind in the flyover states, but at least we get football.

Anything bad you’ve believed about capitalism, I’ve believed it more. Finding myself as a happy warrior for Go Ahead America was not just a strange personal trip, it was also family heresy and professional suicide.

Most people don’t know this about the South, but we once had a budding communist party. When I was a kid, my dad periodically voted for communists for president.¹ The only mainstream candidate he ever genuinely liked was Bernie Sanders. If that sounds strange, then you’ve never heard of the Loray Mill Strike of 1929² in Gastonia, North Carolina. Gastonia is wedged into the Carolinas’ state border region, where thousands of poor, sharecropping southerners flocked in from both sides, desperate for work in the factories. My great grandmother was born there in one of the mill village shacks. Dozens of great aunts, uncles, and cousins worked the spindles. When the initial boom subsided, management tried getting more work from fewer workers for less pay. The communist National Textile Workers Union noticed, dispatched organizers to teach poor rednecks The Communist Manifesto and labor strike strategies and, on April Fools’ Day, 1929, thousands of poor lintheads—and a dozen of my relatives—walked off the job.

It was a disaster. A deputy died. A striking pregnant mother of five kids was shot. Workers were evicted from mill housing. The event is so famous it spawned an entire genre of Marxist fiction, Gastonia novels. That was the high-tide of southern labor unions, and helps explain why socialism never succeeded down South. There remain, however, working families embedded throughout the Carolinas with long memories.

When it came time to try real estate, I chose Gastonia. I bought homes along the same streets once owned by the evil mill barons. I would be the change I wanted to see in the world. This was all an experiment anyway, so I charged breakeven prices. No profit, no problem. The mortgages would pay down, which would build my wealth. I would do what they said couldn’t be done: good for myself and affordable housing for all!

I forgave late rents. I fixed every small thing. I only charged what I had to. Solidarity, not charity!

But I’d made a critical error. Every real estate guide tells you to set aside small amounts of rent for monthly repairs. Only repairs don’t arrive in monthly installments. They come in trees that fall on the neighbor’s car. By being kind, under charging, and forgiving, I trapped myself and the tenants into a cycle where each problem made the next problem worse. I eventually just ran out of money to fix things. If I couldn’t keep up payments, the lenders would take the houses and sell them to some slumlord who would jack up the rents. All of this, ironically, because I hadn’t charged enough.

Things came to a head when I was texted pictures of a house I’d recently renovated that was literally destroyed. Every windowpane was shattered. There were holes in the walls. The front door was ripped off the hinges. Why? Apparently, she was sleeping around, and he’d had enough and let his rage loose on my rental property. An elderly woman in an apartment was waiting for us to swing by and fix her bathroom. Now I couldn’t even afford the parts.

C. S. Lewis, the author famous for The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, converted to Christianity later in life. It wasn’t like conversions you see on The Righteous Gemstones revivals. He was driving to the zoo. “When we set out, I did not believe . . . and when we reached the zoo, I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion.” Lewis was as surprised as anyone else.

That is what happened to me. When I climbed into my Volvo after surveying the damage, I was a humanities professor assigning Karl Marx each and every semester. When I got home, I was a capitalist. My way wasn’t working. The great irony is that I never actually cared about money that much. I thought people were getting scammed by financial gurus, and I wanted to study the lie to expose it. I arrived in exactly the opposite place I’d meant to go.

* * *

Let me tell you what I believed before I tell you why I no longer believe it. There is a Despair Industrial Complex of academics, activists, and journalists convinced that capitalism is a system of exploitation keeping people down rather than offering a path up. I call them Big Woe, because every hot take is either “Woe to Them!” or “Woe is Me!” Inside Big Woe, the fight is against “War Capitalism”: governments and businesses just helping each other win the game of power and coercion like two brother lions who’ve always had each other’s back. Want higher wages? The government will send the militia (as they did in Gastonia). Want more rights? Businesses will buy off politicians to keep that from happening. Let’s not worry that there was also war feudalism or war Alexander-the-Great-ism or that the Assyrian Empire didn’t exactly advance emancipatory visions of labor. What matters is that the system we have today is built for the few on the backs of the many.

I once attended an academic conference panel where the main topic was how to use class assignments to mobilize students to rally against our oppressors. Academic conferences on capitalism, the joke goes, feels like someone convinced all the WTO protestors to get their PhDs together. Historians especially love myth busting. It is so gratifying to destroy the illusions of 100 freshmen per seminar. Since young people are particularly anxious to know what their parents got wrong and to get good grades, the audience is receptive. The American Dream, we inform them, was a fantasy sold to the masses to keep their eyes off their shackles.

Big Woe’s message is working. Anti-capitalism is culturally everywhere, especially on campus. Want to impress your Netflix & chill partner? Next time you’re watching a crime drama, proclaim, “It’s the CEO!” It is important to do this early. You will get less credit if you wait. Businessmen (and women) are evil in American culture. A study of nearly 1,000 shows³ found that businesspeople commit more television crime than any other characters, even than career criminals. You will know this intuitively if you’ve ever binged Law & Order.

Before I started working on this book, I gave earnest lectures teaching students all this Go Ahead stuff was mostly made up. One of the favorite professor targets is the Horatio Alger myth. Rags-to-riches heroes, we assure students, were not real. Notes are dutifully typed into iPads.

Alger is an odd windmill to tilt at. I’ve not met a single college freshman who’s read his stories. Most people nodding that these tales aren’t realistic just now learned who Horatio Alger was. Hey, this guy you never heard of wrote some stories you’ve never read but don’t worry because they’re all bunk.

Alger was a writer who neither started poor nor ended up rich. He was, however, wildly popular 150 years ago. His stories sold so well in the Gilded Age that he ranks, to this day, among the top 100 American authors by sales. Every story followed the same formula. A poor boy’s character gets tested. He makes the hard but moral choice (saving a baby, returning lost valuables), which brings him to the attention of some wealthy mentor. From there, he is given a chance. Just a chance, mind you. Maybe it’s a clerk job where he learns the business. Through slow, steady accumulation, he winds up wealthy. Moral character and hard work lead to success in America for young boys.

Not so fast, says literally every academic in every discipline. Everyday people rising by their hard work is a fantasy to keep the poor loving their chains. Mark Twain was especially scathing of Alger’s books. He wrote a counter-story of an equally moral lad for whom every good deed got punished: he warned friends not to sail on Sundays and nearly drowned, he helped a blind man get out of the mud only to be accused of pushing him over. Finally, he tries to rescue tortured dogs from street urchins but gets both himself and the mutts blown to bits.

Award-winning works assure us Twain was right.⁴ People in the Revolutionary Era didn’t have a Hamilton-like shot to throw away. Similar studies exist for the Civil War era, Gilded Age, Progressive Era, Great Depression (obviously), and post 1970s. To cap it off, seemingly the only thing that MSNBC and Fox News agree on is that someone screwed the working class.

We arrive at this lunacy: nobody can get ahead anymore, which is funny because no one used to get ahead, either. A robust body of prestigious people say Americans were locked in place for the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and they’re still stuck in neutral today. Here we sit, and all that crossing of oceans and fruited plains got us nowhere. Our ancestors should have kept their butts in Guangdong, Ireland, Norway, Panama, Punjab, and Poland. What a waste of three centuries!

Skepticism is extremely seductive. Not buying the bullshit sounds smart. But they’re wrong. “Horatio Alger is a Myth” is, itself, a myth made up by cynics to impress other cynics. Look around you.

If something can’t be true, it probably isn’t. Everyday Americans long believed people got ahead because they saw people getting ahead. Today, despite a chorus of voices saying you can’t, you can. You probably know someone who has. The truth is messier. It was hard. It still is hard, just not as hard as before. Challenging and doable are not mutually exclusive.

* * *

Where did all the poor people go? In 1800, nearly 85 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today it’s less than 10 percent. Right now around the globe, the number of people surviving on above $10 per day,⁶ a threshold for basic health, grows by nearly 250,000 every single DAY. Every 161 days, a population the size of California exits extreme poverty.

The same is true of American history.⁵ In 1974, President Ford’s America,⁷ an incredible 30 percent of Americans lived on just $37 a day (inflation adjusted). Today, just 16 percent fall below that line. True, that is much higher than tiny Norway (6 percent), but is still lower than France (16.2 percent), Japan (25 percent), Britain (25 percent) and Italy (32 percent). The United States has the third least amount of poverty among large nations (Germany and Canada are the top two).

I didn’t say poverty and inequality don’t exist. But ending global poverty wasn’t even an ambition 100 years ago. We see more suffering because there is less of it, and what remains is therefore more offensive to our new normal. Historically, poverty was not weird. Everyday people getting to Go Ahead . . . that’s the weird part.

How did weird happen? To the dismay of my communist ancestors, the answer is capitalism. What makes it so spectacular for everyday people, and so spectacularly controversial, is not that it makes assets prices go up, but that capitalism brings the price of living down. That is why my ancestors were striking. Competition from other mills incentivized highly efficient processes that increased their workload but drove down their wages. They were mad as hell because, let’s face it, we all want higher wages.

But clothes got cheaper as more people competed for jobs making them. This helps explain why the town was so divided. Most Gastonians were anti-striker. In the depths of the Great Depression, pollsters asked citizens how they felt about ongoing worker revolts. Americans had never been more desperate for change, and capitalism had fallen completely on its face. Yet 67 percent thought the government should forcibly break up strikes,⁸ and the same number agreed with General Motors for not budging on workers’ pay demands. Why? Probably because more expensive cars are not in everyday people’s best interest.

“Aha!” says Big Woe. That’s why wages have stagnated and crushed the working class!

No, they haven’t.

Don’t take my word for it. Go to the Federal Reserve Bank’s freely available datacenter (just Google “FRED data”) and look up “Real Median Personal Income in the United States.” Since 1971, it’s up over 50 percent. Yes, I’ve seen the charts on Twitter saying the opposite. They’re wrong. We make more money than we used to and things got cheaper. That’s why you don’t own half a shirt.

Big Woe, not about to back down, wails that the prices of housing and healthcare are killing any chance at the American dream! There are now over 200 cities where starter homes cost over $1 million. Almost four in ten adults skip necessary medical care because it costs too much. Big Woe is right about that. These stink pretty badly (though, as we saw in earlier chapters, we’ve seen stinkier). We’ve had bad housing markets and high healthcare costs before, but none of them (including today’s) were caused by capitalism. Though it pains me greatly to say it . . . capitalism was, and is, the solution.

The problem with housing costs isn’t the houses. It’s the land. Building a square foot of house hasn’t increased in price since the early 1980s,⁹ adjusted for inflation. The actual inflation-adjusted cost to put nails in wood on top of concrete is cheaper than when my grandfather built his home with his brothers on nights and weekends using plans they ordered in a catalogue. Let’s put aside that starter homes today are twice the size of the average house in the 1950s and somehow Baby Boomers still managed to hide cigarettes from their parents there anyway.

Don’t blame capitalism, blame your city council. Zoning laws,¹⁰ rules that say you can’t build here or, if you do, only so much, create housing scarcity. The land you are allowed to build on costs more than ever before. Local politics (not red versus blue, but us versus ourselves) is pricing people out of home ownership, not capitalism. Some dilemmas are genuinely political, and that is one of them. No, it isn’t build-for-rent or corporate America owning homes. A house is a house is a house, and the more of them for sale or rent, the more prices come down. The answer to the housing shortage is build, baby, build, and tell local politicians to get out of the way. I’m a multimillionaire from real estate. I promise you the worst thing that could happen to my net worth is to let people build more houses. Please, for the good of the nation, tell your town council to make me poorer.

And healthcare? This is a particularly bad time to say, “I work in health insurance,” in public. Everyone hates the insurance companies because that’s who denies Grandma’s claim for chemo. But can you tell me the profit margin of health insurance companies? The answer over the past ten years is about 2–3 percent. In 2024 it was less than 2 percent. Here is a random sample of companies that are more profitable than health insurers and their profit margins: funeral services (10–15 percent), waste management (8–12 percent), self-storage facilities (10 percent). You can make more money burying people, dumping their trash, or storing their junk than managing medical billing. The company that makes TurboTax is nearly ten times more profitable than my health insurer. As a way to make bank, health insurance stinks.

You can do dang well as a doctor, though. The American Medical Association (AMA), a guild (like the medieval kind), refuses to increase the number of doctors and fought nurse practitioner laws like they were Viking invaders sent to burn the healthcare village. Norway has over 5 doctors for every 1,000 citizens. We have half that. Healthcare is so expensive in large part because the supply of healthcare providers is restricted to keep beachfront condos within reach of physicians. I’m not blaming the whole healthcare cost crisis on the AMA, and every doctor I know works insane hours trying their best to take care of an equally insane number of patients per day. That, though, is at least part of the problem: too few providers for too many patients.

Wherever you find high prices, you should always ask which medieval guild is behind it, restricting the supply. Sometimes it’s people like me, the well-to-do “Already Homeowners Guild” members who vote up invisible barriers. No one ever sees the house my town never built that you never buy. Leaving the medieval period behind, one industry at a time, made everyday people’s lives and ability to pursue the American Dream real. Blame me and the guilds, but don’t blame capitalism.

* * *

So, what about all that “nobody really got ahead” stuff. Oh, it’s true. Studies of Revolutionary-era Philadelphia¹¹ found that only one in five poor people who stayed in Philly moved up to the middle class. Of those who saved funds and went out west, just 40 percent moved up and scarcely 10 percent did very well. A national study of records from 1820 to 1910 showed that, at best, 28 percent of any city’s inhabitants¹² were able to truly Go Ahead to financial independence. Barely 30 percent of workers’ children moved up to own their own shop, and even for hardworking immigrants’ children it was merely 50 percent.

Now go back and re-read that paragraph, but remove the following words: only, just, scarcely, at best, barely, and merely. Here we meet the central dilemma of understanding Go Ahead in American history. Compared to what?

These were historically dramatic numbers. In Europe, less than 10 percent of workers were likely to make it to some form of middle-class status within ten years of work,¹³ often must less. Compare that to nearly every American city: 10 percent was the lower bound of upward mobility for everyday people. Many cities saw 20 percent or more of their citizens go from unskilled workers to middle class or higher in any given decade. Americans lived longer, ate better, and possessed more wealth than those they left behind.¹⁴ By 1920, Americans were wealthier per-person than any place in the world by every measure: mean wealth, median wealth, workers’ wages, median landholding . . . everything.

Overall mobility has slowed¹⁵ compared to the post-World War II boom. The famous 2017 paper by Raj Chetty in Science found an incredible 90 percent of kids born around 1940 out-earned their parents. For kids born after 1980, though, it fell to half.

I ask again, compared to what? No Major League Baseball team has a winning percentage of 0.763 since the 1906 Chicago Cubs, but that tells you more about the weakness of baseball then than the strength of the game now. All American baseball players today, and probably most college teams, could manhandle the ’06 Cubs. Yes, 1940 was a particularly awesome year to be born compared to any moment in history before, but Americans in 1940 were not nearly as wealthy as we are today. Our median income is triple theirs.

In most cases, scholars compare old societies to a perfectly random distribution. In that magical world, someone born in the bottom 20 percent would have a perfectly random chance (one in five) of making it to the top 20 percent, no matter where they were born. Sounds great.

But that world does not exist now, and it never existed in the past—anywhere. Modern-day Denmark, a nation just larger than Phoenix, Arizona, comes the closest and even they don’t have perfect randomness. About one in six born at the bottom of Legoland in Billund climb to grasp the plastic flag at the top of Copenhagen’s economy. In the United States, where we sell off-brand blocks at the Dollar Store, it is merely half of that.

What happens at the top? If you can’t get to the front, surely it is because someone else is holding their spot in line. Not true. In the United States, 64 percent of those born at the top fall out in their lifetime, precisely the same percentage as in Denmark.¹⁶ Most Americans (and Danes) who make it to the top didn’t start there, and those born there don’t stay.

Working people in history weren’t comparing themselves to modern Nordic socialist perfection, anyway. They were comparing themselves to nineteenth-century, poverty stricken Europe¹⁷ and Asia. To be a farmer in Minnesota was to not be a peasant in Norway. To own a dry cleaning service in San Francisco was to not work in famine-plagued rural China. They improved their lives compared to what was on offer, which is what Go Ahead was always about.

Which brings us to today. Of those born in the bottom financial fifth of the United States, six in ten get out. That’s not perfect (eight in ten) but it’s a better-than-average shot. Four in ten become middle class, upper middle class, or rich. Nearly one in ten make it all the way to the top.

Go Ahead is there for the taking. If I told your ancestors, from India to Ireland, that you would live in a time where kids born at the bottom had a better than 50 percent shot at a good life and one of every ten born poor became rich, they would call me crazy or praise their gods. Probably both.

If only one in ten born at the bottom makes it all the way to the top, then damn it, be the one.