ORIGINAL: durnedwolf
I'm just trying to say that pursuit is important - it's what America was built on. A belief that I can be or do anything with the gifts of mind and body that my Higher Power granted to me. I'm white. Are there additional hurdles for the non-white in America? My experience and observation say "Yes" to that question. Is it better to be a male than a female when it comes to most careers in America? Again I would say yes. But I've met a lot of men and women of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Those that climbed up to a status of middle-class and higher here in America, for the most part, have had a dream that they pursued.
Working for something is important, but socioeconomic mobility in the US is much lower than is commonly mythologized - especially in modern times.
The wiki page on this actually has quite a bit of information with several citations. Synopsis: there is some bad news and some neutral news, with basically only 1 piece of news that could be called vaguely good (the part I underlined in the quote below).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioecon ... ted_States
In recent years, several studies have found that vertical intergenerational mobility is lower in the US than in some European countries.[3] US social mobility has either remained unchanged or decreased since the 1970s.[4][5][6][7] A study conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that the bottom quintile is 57% likely to experience upward mobility and only 7% to experience downward mobility.[8]
A study published in 2008 showed that economic mobility in the U.S. increased from 1950 to 1980, but has declined sharply since 1980.[9]
A 2013 Brookings Institution study found income inequality was increasing and becoming more permanent, sharply reducing social mobility.[10]
A large academic study released in 2014 found US mobility overall has not changed appreciably in the last 25 years (for children born between 1971 and 1996), but a variety of up and down mobility changes were found in several different parts of the country. On average, American children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s.[11][12]
However, because US income inequalities have increased substantially, the consequences of the "birth lottery"—the parents to whom a child is born—are larger today than in the past. US wealth is increasingly concentrated in the top 10% of American families, so children of the remaining 90% are more likely to be born at lower starting incomes today than the same children in the past. Even if they are equally mobile and climb the same distance up the US socioeconomic ladder as children born 25 years earlier, the bottom 90% of the ladder is worth less now, so they gain less income value from their climb, especially when compared to the top 10%.[11][12]
And that's just from the header... there's more, and I've could find plenty of other citations as well.
Again, that's not to say that it's impossible - just that it's harder than in the past, and also to point out that the mythologizing of "you can do anything if you only just work hard enough" as the common narrative sold to the American worker/workplace is nowhere close to the actual truth.
; Julia Child
