Between house prices, the cost of living, and the threat AI poses to the labor market, Gen Z could be forgiven for giving up on the American Dream. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, understands why—but says they’re wrong anyway.
The American Dream—the idea that anyone from anywhere can achieve success as long as they work hard—remains “totally achievable” for the majority, the Wall Street veteran insisted. It is the bottom 20% that has been left behind, he adds, which is driving polarization between the American social classes.
“If you look at the American Dream, the middle class has gotten bigger, most have gotten wealthier. The country is clearly wealthier, and the rich have gotten richer,” Dimon told PBS. “But the real issue is the bottom 20%. Their incomes have not gone up for 20 years—maybe longer than that. They’re the ones who drive home to more crime-ridden neighborhoods. They’re the ones whose kids are going to schools [that] are not getting the best possible education to give them the opportunity.
“So yeah, I think it’s true, for them it’s slipping.”
Dimon’s own family is an example of the American Dream: The banker’s grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Greece without high school diplomas, but instilled in their children and grandchildren the need to find a purpose in life and pursue it diligently.
Dimon now leads the biggest bank in the U.S. and is leveraging its might to increase opportunities across the country: J.P. Morgan’s multi-year American Dream Initiative (ADI) focuses on six areas—including support for small businesses and access to skills-based training—to boost economic growth and help people live better lives.
The plan has some way to go if young Americans are to be convinced the historic ideal can be achieved. Only a fifth of adults aged 18 to 29 believe in the possibility of the American Dream, according to a report from AP-NORC, published in June.
While Dimon argues “I’m not a big fan of polls, and most of those people will be wrong,” he added he “completely understands” the anger felt by those at the low end of the wealth scale, and said policymakers from either side of the political divide should be working hard to fix policy that has allowed inequality. “Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, acknowledge the problem and then start to say, ‘How can you fix it?’ … That’s what we should be working on, solutions to that problem,” Dimon said. “I think it causes a lot of the polarization today, some of the anger today, that people see that some people are doing very well and they’re not.”
“And even the people who aren’t, by the way, good-hearted Americans, they’re not happy with that either. They don’t like to see their fellow citizens suffering at all. And they want to see that fixed, too.”
Dimon’s capitalist philosophy #
Other private market voices have suggested that skepticism about capitalism is also driving societal divides. In his 2026 letter to shareholders, for example, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink wrote that “this is where much of today’s economic anxiety comes from: a deeper feeling that capitalism is working—just not for enough people.”
The rise of democratic socialists such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani lends itself to this theory, and even Dimon (a self-described “full-throated, red-blooded, patriotic, unwoke, capitalist CEO”) says capitalism has its flaws.
However, the banker added that there should be a distinction between imperfect systems and their less desirable alternatives. He explained: “Every system has flaws. There’s never been a system that’s perfect …. The other thing is some of it’s just bad people. There are bad people in capitalist societies. There are bad people in communist societies … And when you listen to people talk about capitalism, they’re confusing all these things at once.
“But I totally agree. It has left behind certain people.”
breaks the traditional barrier between audience and newsroom. The show transforms
Fortune Daily* Fortune*’s trusted reporting into actionable, conversational, and entertaining insights for an emerging class of business leaders.
Watch here.