The Future of the "American Dream" Robert Hormats | Big Think

The Future of the "American Dream"

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The idea of improving your living standards and passing on a better society to future generations is very powerful. Will Americans continue to be successful at doing that?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Robert D. Hormats:

Robert D. Hormats is the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs. He was formerly vice chairman of Goldman Sachs (International) and managing director of Goldman, Sachs & Co.

Hormats has also served as ambassador and deputy US Trade Representative, and senior deputy assistant secretary for Economic and Business Affairs at the US Department of State. He was a senior staff member on the National Security Council and senior economic advisor to National Security Advisors Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Hormats has received the French Legion of Honor and Arthur Fleming Award.

Mr. Hormats has been a visiting lecturer at Princeton University and is a member of the Board of Visitors of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Dean's Council of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Mr. Hormats' publications include Abraham Lincoln and the Global Economy; American Albatross: The Foreign Debt Dilemma; and Reforming the International Monetary System. Mr. Hormats earned a B.A. from Tufts University with a concentration in economics and political science; an M.A. and a Ph.D. in international economics from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What forces have shaped America most?

Robert Hormats: There are a number of forces in history that have brought us to where we are today. One is that people in this country talked about the American dream. And it is a very powerful dream.

The dream is to improve your society in large measure because you want to pass on to your children and your grandchildren a better world. You want to improve your living standards and make sure that you improve their living standards.

And we’ve been very successful at doing that as a country. Whether we’re going to continue to be successful is still in doubt.

It depends on the educational system. It depends on how well we fund medical institutions, medical research, insurance, health insurance. It depends on how well we look after the elderly in our society. It depends on how well we train minorities and immigrant communities. Do we give them the same chances that we had? Those, I think, are very important parts of continuing this process. They are the kinds of things I think are important as we look ahead.

The other changes, the Civil Rights Movement, I think, was extremely important. I think we now look back on it and say, “Well it was inevitable.” It wasn’t inevitable at the time. It was very controversial at the time.

I was fortunate because I had been in Africa the summer just before the rally Dr. Martin Luther King had in Washington at the Lincoln Memorial. And got off the plane coming back from Africa where I had spent the summer with a group called Operation Crossroads, and we got on the bus and went down to Washington. So I felt that first hand in a way.

And I think, also, the movement in many emerging economies has been remarkable, almost breathtaking when you think [about it].

For instance, the green revolution. And I’m not talking about the environment revolution. This is even before that. This was an attempt to develop better qualities of seeds that were drought resistant; better rice that was able to withstand disease. These changes in the 1950s and the 1960s avoided massive starvation in a number of emerging economies.

So science has come up with a number of very powerful driving forces to improve living standards. The polio vaccine, for instance. Remarkable. Polio was a scourge in the 1950s. Now it’s been almost eliminated in the United States and many other parts of the world. Cures for these horrible diseases have been, in some cases, produced by American medicine or medicine abroad.

Pasteurization, Louis Pasteur. People died regularly of drinking bad milk. He was able to pasteurize it and enable people, children to drink milk and thrive.

Read the full transcript at