I suspect that when Marc Andressen said the American middle class is a myth in a Business Insider interview he was unaware that he was summarily dismissing the American Dream, too. It is practically impossible to separate the idea of American middle class from the aspirations of the American Dream. If we look at history we can see that the bourgeoisie of the Industrial Revolution were instrumental in transforming a large group of subsistence farmers into what we call the middle class. The bourgeoisie in Europe and the United States were the innovators who were disrupting the farming and manufacturing markets. It is hard to imagine an industrial revolution without improved farming efficiencies. If we go back even farther in history we can argue that  this bourgeoisie class was probably responsible for most of the innovation in the Europe for the last 1000 years and a pretty good reason why Islam is not the state religion of Europe. Europe’s advancements in ocean going ships did more to halt the spread of Islam than anything else. The idea that this innovative class would not exist in America is preposterous! The American middle class is the modern version of Europe’s bourgeoisie with a few American twists. As a country of immigrants America’s bourgeoisie was especially well suited to embrace the risk of Schumpeter’s creative destruction. On multiple occasions America embraced disruptive technologies that destroyed whole industries only to replace them with more efficient ones. By the end of World War I the willingness of the United States to successfully embrace new industries and subsequently dominate them, allowed the United States to surpass Great Britain as the preeminent world economic power. It was this combination of smart risk taking with the productivity gains that explains most of the wealth of the middle class and the growth of a consumer driven economy. Now the middle class could afford homes, cars, health care, and leisure activities. For over a hundred years this success is was what made America and the American Dream great. Industry giants such as John D. Rockefeller started from modest backgrounds and created great businesses. His story gets repeated over and over again but in America it gets repeated with people with different ethnic backgrounds, religious backgrounds, and color of skin. America made it work and it is impossible to separate the American middle class from the American Dream and America’s success.