Ideas worth spreading

America's forgotten working class

2,973,168 views | J.D. Vance • TEDNYC

J.D. Vance grew up in a small, poor city in the Rust Belt of southern Ohio, where he had a front-row seat to many of the social ills plaguing America: a heroin epidemic, failing schools, families torn apart by divorce and sometimes violence. In a searching talk that will echo throughout the country's working-class towns, the author details what the loss of the American Dream feels like and raises an important question that everyone from community leaders to policy makers needs to ask: How can we help kids from America's forgotten places break free from hopelessness and live better lives?

J.D. Vance grew up in a small, poor city in the Rust Belt of southern Ohio, where he had a front-row seat to many of the social ills plaguing America: a heroin epidemic, failing schools, families torn apart by divorce and sometimes violence. In a searching talk that will echo throughout the country's working-class towns, the author details what the loss of the American Dream feels like and raises an important question that everyone from community leaders to policy makers needs to ask: How can we help kids from America's forgotten places break free from hopelessness and live better lives?

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Check out Questbridge, a national nonprofit based in Palo Alto, California that connects the nation’s most exceptional, low-income youth with leading colleges and opportunities.

About the speaker

J.D. Vance

See speaker profile

Former Marine and Yale Law School graduate J.D. Vance writes about how upward mobility really feels.

Yuval Levin | Basic Books, 2016 | Book

The Fractured Republic

An important book about the ways that both liberals and conservatives (falsely) idolize the past. Levin argues that because of this attachment to the past, our politics tries in vain to recapture a history that's gone forever.

William Julius Wilson | University of Chicago Press, 1990 | Book

The Truly Disadvantaged

Wilson, a brilliant sociologist, chronicles the ways that difficult job markets affect struggling communities in the inner-city. While the subject of the book is black Americans living in urban centers of poverty, the arguments of the book apply to many groups in the contemporary United States.

Stanford University | Explore

Equality of Opportunity Project, led by Raj Chetty

Through a number of studies, Chetty and his coauthors have done admirable work in understanding the contributors to economic mobility in the country, the geographic distribution of opportunity, and how the country might give poor children more chances.

Learn more

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Check out Questbridge, a national nonprofit based in Palo Alto, California that connects the nation’s most exceptional, low-income youth with leading colleges and opportunities.