entrepreneurship
Passive Income Is the New American Dream. The Psychology Behind It Should Worry Leaders
A Wall Street Journal investigation this month put a striking name to a sweeping cultural shift: passive income has replaced hard work as the new American Dream.
EXPERT OPINION BY SOREN KAPLAN, WSJ BESTSELLING AUTHOR, KEYNOTE SPEAKER, AND LEADERSHIP STRATEGY ADVISOR
Jul 5, 2026
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For generations, Americans built wealth through accumulated skill and earned experience, the kind of success that didn’t rely on shortcuts. Now 72 percent of Americans either have a side hustle or are considering one, with many chasing returns from crypto, prediction markets, or AI content.
Why?
Consumer prices climbed more than 20 percent from 2020 to 2024, outpacing wage growth for most Americans and widening the distance between effort and reward. Pew Research found that just 39 percent of Americans under 30 believe the Dream is still achievable through their own ambition. The rise of zero-fee platforms like Robinhood and prediction markets like Polymarket has made the potential for big paydays possible—if bets pay off
There’s a mechanism driving this shift that rarely gets named directly: survivorship bias. That’s the psychological mechanism where we draw conclusions about something using only a few successful examples (the survivors) while ignoring the failures (which usually outnumber the survivors).
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Today, the get-rich-quick stories that circulate on social media are the survivors. And they’re rewriting how millions of people think about effort, risk, and wealth.
That distortion matters to every leader and entrepreneur, because it shapes who’s entering the workforce, what they expect from careers, and how they evaluate building something versus betting on something.
The Dream That Changed
The American Dream has always carried a clear logic: effort connects to reward. Its roots run through the Declaration of Independence and the Protestant work ethic that defined early American culture. And for much of the last two centuries, the contract felt real enough to head west to the gold rush, take loans out to go to college, or drop out of school to launch a startup.
