As delivered on Thursday, June 26, 2025, in Cleveland, Ohio.
Hello everyone. Good morning.
Thank you, Emily [Garr Pacetti], for that extremely kind introduction.
You know, we’re very proud of Emily. She’s an alumni of The Rockefeller Foundation and, I think, exemplifies the best of our talent: smart, committed, mission-oriented and able to get things done on behalf of others. And so we’re very, very proud of Emily.
And a special thank you to Beth [Hammack] for that great opening set of remarks. It was a wonderful and important reminder that the Federal Reserve system has a mandate that goes far beyond what most people understand and appreciate. I think it’s a message that just has to get out there more fundamentally.
I’d also like to take one moment and just introduce my colleague, Danielle Goonan. Danielle, where are you? There she is. I hope folks get a chance to meet Danielle. She’s part of our extraordinary program that focuses on expanding economic opportunity here in the United States, and just does amazing things. And we look forward to learning with and partnering with you over the course of time coming out of this important conference.
Now, and I’m excited to have a conversation with Lillian [Kuri] as well after some short remarks.
It is great and quite special to be in Cleveland and at the Cleveland Fed. Cleveland is, of course, where John D. Rockefeller spent his formative years and developed much of his own thinking about society, business, and philanthropy.
And on a personal note, it’s great for this Michigan kid to be in Ohio …and to get to say “Go Blue” to all of you.
I’ve had the privilege of leading The Rockefeller Foundation for eight years now. And for those of you who are not familiar with our work, we make big bets on innovative solutions, extraordinary leaders, and unlikely public-private partnerships that we think can help lift as many people as possible.
We have a long history of investing in bold, transformational change here in the United States and around the world.
Today, I want to focus closer to home.
Today, for a kid in America, achieving a life better than the one their parents led is now the exception rather than the expectation.
And that’s fundamentally why we’re here together.
For the past 50 years, policies from both sides of the aisle have not changed this downward trajectory of economic opportunity.
As a result, in so many places around this great nation, it’s harder to dream about the future and easier to aspire to return to the past.
So I want to talk to you today about how we got here and how you all can contribute to once again making the American dream affordable and accessible in the broad range of American communities.
Next [year], we’ll be celebrating the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. This country was revolutionary because it declared human dignity, defined by certain inalienable rights, to be both inherent and universal.
The idea of that universal human dignity is at the heart of the American dream.
It’s the idea that everyone deserves a shot at economic advancement. At making a dignified living. At giving their families a better future. Of having hope.
Over time, the definition of what Americans perceive as the American dream has changed. In 1986 the vast majority of Americans thought it meant getting a high school education. A decade later, the most popular answer to the survey question at 77% was “owning a home.” Today, the most common answer to what the American dream means to most Americans is simply “freedom of choice in how to live.”
Whatever the definition, the American dream inspires people all around the world.
Our foundation works on a global basis. And I’ve heard the same hope and the same yearning for dignity in my recent conversations with farmers in rural India, with small business owners in urban communities in Nigeria, with school kids in the Peruvian Amazon.
They may not have known the exact phrase “the American dream,” but they know what it is. There’s a universal aspiration to achieve economic success in order to live a better, more dignified life and to provide hope for kids and family.
But today, that American dream has become both inaccessible and unaffordable to families in the vast majority of our communities.
While 90% of children born in the 1940s earned more than their parents would have — ironically, the ones who didn’t often had parents who were named Rockefeller — today, only half do.
In 2010, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, 47% of Americans said the American dream doesn’t hold true anymore. Today, that number is now 70%.
Recent polling shows a record high share of Americans, 53%, believe their personal economic situation is worsening, and 42% of young Americans under 30 say they’re barely getting by, including many with college degrees.
How did this happen? There are many factors at play. You are the economists and the development experts that study these issues deeply.
But technology and innovation have always been the core drivers of massive economic and social change and disruption.
The agricultural revolution, the Industrial Revolution that so defined this city’s history, the information technology revolution of the last several decades, and now we are on the cusp of an AI revolution, which I believe will be the most profound technological revolution of them all.
These shifts always produce social adjustments to meet the scale of transformation required. In the case of the disruption we’re living through right now, one of the most striking byproducts has been the leaving behind of too many communities.
Research by economist Raj Chetty tells us that your ZIP code is one of the strongest predictors of your future economic mobility. There’s been a powerful positive trend around economic performance in a few key geographical areas in this country, but the vast majority of counties in America have been left behind.
In fact, the neighborhood a child grew up in has a measurable effect on their well-being. For every year a child spends in a better neighborhood, their future outcome — economic outcome — improves by about 4%.
In the aggregate, geographic income inequality has risen more than 40% between 1980 and 2021. Opportunity has become concentrated geographically.
But even in those communities and economies where opportunity thrives, in practice, those places have become unaffordable to most families. Affordability has made access to the American dream difficult even when opportunity is present.
The disappearance of access and affordability around the American dream is connected to all kinds of negative outcomes: health problems, distrust in institutions, polarization in our politics, “deaths of despair” related to drug overdoses and mental health struggles.
We know that left-behind communities are hungry for viable economic development strategies to help them rebuild pathways to the American dream.
As just one example, the U.S. Economic Development Administration found that the RECOMPETE Pilot Program, which sought to invest in economically distressed communities, was the most popular program in the history of the agency.
So how do we meet this need? How do we make the American dream affordable and accessible in an economy that is transforming at a breakneck pace?
How do we bring back living wages, affordability, good schools, and strong families during a technological shift even more seismic than the Industrial Revolution or the Internet age?
I’ll give you a spoiler up front. I don’t know the answer.
But here’s what I do know. It’s human nature in a crisis to want to go back to the past or to reflexively defend the present.
For instance, today, some nostalgically want to revive America as a manufacturing economy. But recreating that economy of the past is unlikely to be our path to the future.
Others hang on to the present at any cost, layering on onerous rules or engaging in massive government interventions to preserve a status quo that is not fit for purpose, either. Neither tariffs nor price controls are likely to make the American Dream affordable and accessible at scale.
The question isn’t, how do we get back to the past, or how do we tinker with the present on the margins.
The question is, how do we shape the future?
Here in Cleveland during the Industrial Revolution, John D. Rockefeller developed a theory of progress that was about bringing together public governance and private enterprise to harness the science and innovations of the future to lift up humanity at scale.
Since 1913, The Rockefeller Foundation has catalyzed partnerships that have helped create modern, science-based medicine, and global, international public health initiatives that have saved tens of millions of lives and changed the trajectory of entire continents. And one initiative yielded a green revolution that changed agricultural food production in many parts of the world and moved almost a billion people off the brink of hunger and starvation.
Today, we’re advancing that mission with our own big bet on pursuing the provision of universal energy abundance, particularly for the 1 billion people on this planet who still live in the dark without access to the energy to allow their communities to thrive.
We call this approach to making bold, long-term investments in public, private partnerships, inspired by technology and science and success being determined by measuring results for vulnerable families, and are they doing better — we call this approach making big bets.
John D. Rockefeller actually called this approach “scientific philanthropy.” But my book editor didn’t like that title.
Today, the challenge we face requires those unlikely partnerships and that bold, innovative thinking.
I hope you all will take this on as your agenda for this conference, as your agenda for the research you pursue, and as your tasks as you craft models of community development that are fundamentally designed to bring back an affordable and accessible American dream for most American communities, most American families and all American kids.
We need you to create and study the models of community-driven economic development that can meet the challenges of this era and shape a new future.
We need to invest in skilled trades as a durable path forward for a very large share of the American labor force.
We need to prevent the scourge of chronic diseases, including by investing in Food Is Medicine in a way that can prevent chronic disease from holding back so many American families and yielding consequences that are so horrific and absolutely unnecessary.
We need to reinvent our educational system to give our kids a secure future in the economy of the future, so they can access jobs in the future that maybe don’t exist today.
And we need to figure out how to use free, accessible and universal intelligence to unlock a true era of abundance and make the American dream far more affordable.
Today at The Rockefeller Foundation, we’re investing in partnerships and making big bets on each of these specific challenges.
We look forward to partnering with and learning from you and from communities across this country to help shape that future together.
Thank you, and I look forward to the conversation.
