Mortgaging the American Dream

The COVID-19 Pandemic has demonstrated the awesome power of exponential growth and how it can overwhelm our systems and a society conditioned to think and react in linear terms with linear solutions. In Mortgaging the American Dream, award-winning author, R. Michael Conley reveals a toxic mix of escalating threats that will ultimately trigger a perfect storm of unparalleled dimensions.

The book shows how this gathering storm has intensified over decades of intergenerational malpractice into the toxic mix of existential threats now growing by the day. The growth trajectories of climate change, ecological destruction, unfunded entitlement liabilities, crushing debt, and other pernicious byproducts of our “play now – pay later” culture are of an exponential nature, and they are being turbo-charged by aggressive feedback loops, denial, and our wasteful anthropogenic practices. Our tendency to apply liner thinking to exponential threats and address complex systemic challenges with quick fixes – a sure prescription for disaster – is examined with no attempts to sugarcoat the results. 

Feeling the storm’s early tremors, we are borrowing heavily on our future to sustain an unsustainable paradigm of living, and mortgaging, in effect, the American Dream for future generations while jeopardizing our own. The escalating tensions within this gathering storm and its claim on the resources that have made the American Dream possible are graphically explored; culminating in a frightful picture of what life will be like after the perfect storm erupts. A plan, Reenergizing the American Dream, is then provided to show how this threat could also be a catalyst for mitigating the storm’s sharper edges while getting positioned for a more sustainable future.

Personal stories from the author’s high school class of 1961 are provided throughout the book to show how the American Dream played out at a boots-on-ground level; living history, if you will.