As a result, our politics is rancorous and volatile. Political division and economic division go hand in hand.

The young and middle class are not wrong to be dispirited and angry. The culture and economy that have developed over the last 40 years are not working well for them. Top-line numbers for employment can look pretty good. But when you look more closely at long-term trends, the numbers tell a tale of dashed hopes and a fading American Dream.

Economist Raj Chetty’s research shows that a child born in 1940 was overwhelmingly more likely to earn more than his or her parents at around the age of 30 (9 out of 10 did so). Not so for a child born in 1985. Only half of those who reached age 30 in 2005 earned more than their parents did at the same stage of their lives. We don’t yet know whether children born in 2000 will do better at age 30 than their parents did. But it seems very likely that their chances will fall well below 50 percent.

Wages have not been rising for male workers. According to economists at the Congressional Research Service, wages have been stagnating for 40 years. For the median male worker, real (inflation-adjusted) wages were actually slightly lower in 2019 than they were in 1979. For Black and Hispanic men at the median, they were lower by 8 percent and 9 percent, respectively.

What is going on? Hasn’t GDP grown pretty much year-in and year-out? Wasn’t employment robust before the coronavirus pandemic? Yes, but the problem is that job growth doesn’t do much for upward mobility anymore.

The real issue is not employment but ownership.

Most policymakers refuse to confront the hard truth that millions of Americans are being transformed into serfs. Like the serfs of the Middle Ages, they own almost nothing. For a large and increasing percentage of Americans, it isn’t possible to buy assets like a house or a college education—both bearing 2022 price tags—with wages that haven’t changed since 1982.

Economist Edward N. Wolff has developed the notion of “wealth poverty” or “asset poverty.” To be “asset poor” means that one does not have sufficient financial assets to eat, keep a roof over one’s head and remain clothed for three months without wage income. In other words, the asset poor have no margin for error for a stroke of bad luck. The asset poor do not own enough assets to stand on their own two feet.

The rate of asset poverty is high and rising. Research shows that it rose from around 35 percent of Americans in 1983 to around 47 percent in 2013. We have no reason to believe that this trend has not continued into the 2020s, making our situation worse.

Let’s state the obvious. If half of the country (and almost certainly more in 2022) is asset poor, the median American is no longer middle class. Asset ownership, especially through home ownership, has long been considered the foundation of middle-class life in America. In less than a lifetime, our country has been transformed from a middle-class nation with widespread asset ownership into a regressive society in which a majority of Americans appear well fed and well clothed, but in reality are serfs.

Declines in middle-class prosperity and wealth can be reversed. To accomplish that, we need policies designed to foster widely distributed ownership of productive assets. The idea is not to put what Marx called “the means of production” into the hands of the government. Instead of socialism, we need more widespread private ownership. Instead of a neo-feudal society, we need a wide ownership society.

Here are nine proposals to get policymakers started.

These policy proposals are traditional, not radical; they reflect an older and very American way of thinking about how the economy should work. We welcome debate over them.

Reasonable people can disagree about how to renew the American Dream. But of this we are convinced: we must face up to the failures of recent decades and take the plight of the middle class and the young much more seriously. If we don’t, we’ll only see continued political division.

R.R. Reno is editor of First Things. Tim Reichert is a candidate for Congress in Colorado’s Seventh District.

The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.