Can Americans Still Get Ahead?

Religious affiliation doesn’t tell us much. Attendance does.

I’ve often thought that the one of the most caustic emotions that I can have is despair. For me, despair is that terrible, unwavering feeling that no matter what I do in my life, things just won’t get better. It’s what we are left with when we fully embrace the idea that there is no hope. I think a lot of people do everything that they can to avoid falling into despair. We all know stories of someone being in a terminally ill condition or suffering a catastrophic injury, but their family just cannot “pull the plug” and end the life of their loved one. They cling to hope - they reject despair.

Whenever I read a lot of chatter on the internet about people’s financial situations, the clear emotion that seems to come through is a creeping level of despair. People feel like they will never be able to get ahead. If their car breaks down, they won’t have the money to fix it. If their refrigerator stops working, they won’t have any way to replace it. They certainly can’t save for a down payment for a home nor can they really afford to have children. What a lot of them seem to believe is that their lives will be worse than their parents or grandparents.

I’ve always wanted to somehow measure despair, but I didn’t really know a good way to do that until Praveen Vissa, a bright student at John Burroughs high school in St. Louis reached out and wanted to propose that we work on a post together about a single question in the GSS aptly titled “goodlife.”

It simply states, “The way things are in America, people like me and my family have a good chance of improving our standard of living -- do you agree or disagree?” Before we dig into how religion may play a role in shaping economic optimism (or despair), let’s start by just tracking how answers to that question have varied in the last thirty years.

This is clearly a question where I had absolutely no idea how the answers were going to look over time. I tried to hypothesize some reasons why economic pessimism would be higher or lower, but I just couldn’t fully conceptualize how someone would have answered this question in 1994 (the first time it was asked) or in the 2024 General Social Survey. What I found was that economic optimism is still fairly popular but it has taken a noticeable dip in the last 15 years or so.

In the 1990s, about two-thirds of Americans agreed that they had a good chance of improving their standard of living. That actually rose in a significant way as we moved into the early 2000s, when about three quarters of Americans believed that their economic future was going to be better than their current situation. But that was the high water mark. From there, things began to slide. By 2010, the share who took a positive view was around 60% and then it just continued to drop. In the last three waves of GSS (2021-2024), the share who agreed that they had a good chance of improving their standard of living dropped below 50%.

I do need to point out, though, that the rise in the share who disagree with that statement hasn’t really skyrocketed. It went from 20% of the sample around the time Barack Obama won the White House to 30% in the 2024 GSS. So, the optimism still exceeds the pessimism by 15 percentage points even today.

You know what we have to do at this point, right? Poke around some demographic variables to see if there’s any evidence that things like age or education have an impact on how people view the possibility of moving up the economic ladder.

When I look at this question by generation of respondents, I don’t know if I’m blown away by the result. That’s especially the case when considering the confidence intervals. The only thing that really jumps off the screen to me is the clear difference between Baby Boomers and everyone else. Only 39% of Boomers are convinced that their financial situation can be improved. Among younger generations, it was about ten percentage points higher.

There are two things that are worth considering here. One is that there’s a good reason Baby Boomers don’t think their financial situation is going to get better: they have just retired or are going to retire in the near future. That’s not usually a period in life when money becomes more plentiful. I looked back at prior periods in the GSS and found this same pattern — the generation that was closest to retirement was less apt to agree with the idea that their standard of living was going to rise.

The other thing that jumps out is that Gen X still feels pretty good about their ability to improve their financial state — really the same as Gen Z. I don’t know why that is, really. Is it a function of Gen Z just not being that optimistic about things? Or is it that Gen X just feels much rosier about their salaries rising? I don’t have a good handle on that.

The other big factor that could impact this is, of course, education. I just restricted my sample to folks born in 1965 or later. This means that age really has no impact on these results based on the prior graph.

What really comes through for me is that there is a clear cut-point in this data between those with graduate degrees and everyone else. Whether one just stopped at a high school diploma or earned a bachelor’s degree, the share who thought that their economic situation would improve in the future was statistically the same: just about 45%. To me, that’s fascinating because the data is crystal clear on this point: folks with college degrees make hundreds of thousands of dollars more than those who stopped at high school.

Maybe it’s just lifestyle creep? Maybe having a white collar job means living in an area with a higher cost of living? Maybe it’s student loan debts that are dragging them down? It’s hard to know, honestly. But those with a graduate degree are incredibly optimistic about the future: almost two-thirds believe that they have a good chance of improving their standard of living.

Okay, we haven’t even touched on religion yet. But let me do that now. I’ve written before about how religious people tend to report higher levels of happiness compared to those who claim no religious affiliation, so maybe those people are also more optimistic about their ability to move up the economic ladder?

One possible reason lies in how religion can shape a sense of hope for the future. A study found that religiosity is linked to higher levels of optimism and expectations that life will improve, which may stem from how belief systems shape a person’s outlook on life. If that’s true, we should at least see some hint of it in how people answer this specific question about their economic potential.

But, I certainly don’t see a huge difference in responses here. Among people who claimed any religious affiliation, the share who agreed that their economic future could be better was just slightly above 50%. The lowest score was among Catholics at 49%. The highest percentage was among Black Protestants and those of other faith groups at 55%. However, the differences between any of these religious groups was not statistically significant. In other words, we can’t really say if evangelicals have a more positive outlook compared to Muslims. It’s all right about the same level.

Now, I do think that the data is suggestive of the idea that the non-religious are a bit less likely to see a better economic future. Only 46% of the nones agreed to the statement we’ve been focusing on in this post. That difference, though, is not statistically significant. Compared to any of the other individual groups, but when I just collapsed all Christians together that tightened up the confidence interval in a way that made the nones clearly lower than Christians.

But, again, I’m not really bowled over by this huge finding about how religious people have a more hopeful economic outlook compared to the non-religious. That led me to poke around a bunch of variables in a regression analysis. I controlled for things like education, age, political ideology, and religious affiliation.

You can quickly ascertain what I found when I plotted these coefficients and confidence intervals: not a whole lot of anything, really. I do find that having a graduate degree is predictive of having a more positive economic outlook. But that’s really all I could ascertain from this analysis. There’s really no difference between generations, the gap between political liberals and conservatives is non-existent. And, like I just discussed earlier, the question about religious affiliation doesn’t really do much, either.

In other words, a whole bunch of “null results.” But then I threw in a different religion variable into the regression model and I hit paydirt. Frequency of religious attendance does have a pretty clear impact on this question of one’s likelihood of raising their standard of living.

Again, I controlled for a whole bunch of factors that could matter here like age and education, but what I found was unmistakable — people who go to church more often are much more likely to believe that they will have a positive economic future. Among never attenders, just 44% agreed that they could raise their standard of living. Among those who attended church once a week, it was 58%. That difference is both statistically significant and substantively meaningful. A fourteen point increase on this question is the largest we’ve seen across any variable.

Why does attendance have such a clear impact? I don’t know if I can point to one single causal pathway. One thing that came to mind is that maybe people who are more social believe that they can always rely on their network of friends and associates to help them get a job or move up in their career? Maybe more socially active people are just more optimistic about everything else in life?

One possibility is that attendance captures what affiliation alone misses: being embedded in a community. Showing up week after week builds trust, connections, and support over time. One paper shows that frequent attenders report greater life satisfaction and purpose in life, and that attendance predicted these outcomes more strongly than other forms of community involvement, suggesting that benefits come from social integration.

If religious social networks function as a safety net when things go wrong, it makes sense that frequent churchgoers would feel more confident navigating setbacks and more optimistic about their future.

I don’t know for sure. But I really do think that this analysis is going to be the impetus for some future data exploration, as socialness and optimism seem to run on the same tracks.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.