A powerful blend of personal narrative and economic analysis that traces the long decline of the American Dream and offers a hopeful call for policies that restore security and prosperity.

Explores the decades-long erosion of the American Dream from the author’s perspective: a working-class kid who became a celebrated economist dedicated to advancing the interests of struggling workers, while also caught in the same currents of job insecurity and downward mobility as the people he aimed to defend.

Worker insecurity, increasing inequality, and downward mobility in our current era contrast sharply with expanding prosperity and opportunity in the first three decades after World War II. What happened? And what can we do to revitalize the American Dream, reduce worker precarity, and foster broadly shared prosperity?

In this historical account of a protracted and expanding national crisis, intertwined with a personal story about growing up in a work-obsessed family and pursuing a career devoted to addressing that crisis, Charles J. Whalen grapples with the social forces that sever the link between hard work and employment success. He exposes the obstacles that mar the path of many people seeking job opportunities and traces the fading of the American Dream, ultimately encouraging readers to take a fresh look at the current economic situation and championing a more constructive set of public policies to shape the future.

"From a blue-collar childhood to the halls of power, Charles Whalen delivers a gripping, eye-opening account of how the American Dream has slipped away for working families -- and what it will take to win it back. Blending lived experience with cogent economic insight, he challenges prevailing assumptions about markets, policy, and the role of government in shaping opportunity. At once urgent and deeply personal, hopeful yet provocative, his incisive and riveting account serves as both a warning and a call to action to rebuild an economy that truly works for all." - Michael W. Macy, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University

"In Fighting for the American Dream, Charles Whalen documents and interprets the changing nature of US employment, and its consequences for the American Dream, in a unique format bringing together US economic history and alternative economic theoretical frameworks through a participant-observer narrative. After a compelling account of the emergence of investor-driven predatory capitalism over the last half century, the concluding chapter’s call for the establishment of a new social contract to foster shared prosperity and to protect and restore a vibrant democracy could not be more timely." - Janice Peterson, Professor Emerita of Economics, California State University, Fresno

"Charles Whalen writes a compelling story about how the declining stability of jobs in the US over a working lifetime played out in the uncertainty of his own career studying that instability. A great story about what it often takes to put a career together now, which is persistence and hard work, a supportive family, and a good dose of luck." - Peter Cappelli, George W. Taylor Professor of Management, The Wharton School, and author of Our Least Important Asset: Why the Relentless Focus on Finance and Accounting is Bad for Business and Employees

"Fighting for the American Dream is an American memoir of a life of striving, but with a twist. For Charles Whalen, the American Dream was never about wealth, status or power. It was one man's dignified quest for a life in pursuit of truth, honesty, academic integrity and the means to advance the common good. Whalen gives us an unusual, but authentic, Everyman's struggle to live decently in the face of precarity and caprice -- the fate of millions, carried out here with tenacity, grit and honor." - James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations, The University of Texas at Austin

"Charles Whalen is a former Fulbright Scholar, Congressional Budget Office economist, and BusinessWeek editor. Yet his career exhibits the economic insecurity experienced increasingly by the well-educated as well as others in market economies. This fascinating life-story yields insights into how to reverse that fundamental injustice of the contemporary economy -- one that is likely to worsen with the advent of AI if we don't act as Whalen suggests." - Paula B. Voos, Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations, Rutgers University