The American Dream Can Be a Dead End, Especially If You Grow Up in the 'Wrong Place'

http://www.alternet.org/economy/american-dream-can-be-dead-end-especially-if-you-grow-wrong-place



A flurry of recent headlines proclaims that climbing the income ladder has not grown harder in America in recent decades. Referring to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, many pundits have concluded that the widespread belief that a widening gap between rich and poor has made it harder to get ahead is wrong.

Not so fast. It is true that the study found that the rate of mobility has pretty much remained constant over the last couple of decades. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a problem. If you’re born to poor parents, you still have a terrible time bettering yourself economically in America, especially if you happen to be born in the wrong place.

The researchers, an impressive group including Harvard's Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Emmanuel Saez, Patrick Kline of UC Berkeley, and Nicholas Turner of the Treasury Department, looked at people born from the '70s to the '90s to determine how they are doing relative to their parents. Last summer, the same researchers from Harvard and Berkeley released a study on income mobility at the local level. You have to put these two studies together to get an understanding of what’s going on.

The researchers have found that it’s still harder to move from poverty to affluence in the United States than in most other wealthy countries, like Denmark. "In some sense, how could it have gotten worse?" Hendren asked the Huffington Post. "It's not like we're losing the American Dream. We never really had it."