Horatio? Horatio Alger? Where are you now? You and Ragged Dick?

[Rider Haggard]

I haven't sold apples yet. Republicans have been steeling them off my trees. I haven't sold pencils either. They're all made in China.

I wanna work hard for an honest day's wage, and I do, but sometimes the chill keeps me from doing it and makes my fingers work slower on the keyboard because of the shivers.

I wanna be rich like everyone else, and if I could, I would. It's not or lack of trying. I try like a sonofabitch.

I'm jus' asking what am I doing wrong as to not get your American dream that so many take as gospel Shouldn't EVEYONE be able to become rich here?

Please respond so I can correct my actions to become rich as well. I've done the apple selling part. I've been honest and trustworthy.


Thanks in advance Mr. Alger.

[Warpy]

1. Didn't you hear? Horatio Alger is dead.

http://socialjusticeblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/horatio-alger-is-dead.html

Horatio Alger is dead. In fact, Horatio Alger died 1898, but his fame and popularity stems from a simple concept most Americans regard with patriotic pride: the belief that we live in the land of opportunity. Our British cousins have their royalty, lords and dukes. India has its caste system. But in America, anyone can become President, CEO, or at least a millionaire. In fact, this idea of American social mobility is a fallacy of remarkable proportions. American society is already far less mobile than it has been from the country’s inception. The most pessimistic evidence lists the United States among the less mobile first world societies (behind Canada and many European countries). But even conservative estimates indicate that a person has less than a 1 in 3 chance of moving up a class. At the lower end of the spectrum (bottom quarter), a person’s odds of moving up to the top quarter are roughly 1 in 10. Indeed, it is difficult even for a lower class individual to rise to the ranks of the lower middle class.

But is this a one-sided viewpoint? While someone can easily find studies showing that the sky may not be falling like I’ve stated, it is important to note that even those studies (indicating that social mobility remains relatively unchanged) paint a far less mobile America then most Americans imagine. Take a commonly cited study, for example, of 6,273 families across racial lines. When looking at these families over two generations, the economists found that only 6% of the poorest fifth ever made it to the top fifth. I’m not an economist, but those seem like pretty bad odds. In another study over two generations (again, a study that showed only a subtle decline in social mobility), economists found that a son or daughter in the 1990s was about 40% likely to remain in the same income bracket as his or her parents.

Such a conclusion might be shocking and difficult to swallow for most people. For if this is true, then the rich are rich not due to “winning” in a system of meritocracy, and the poor are not poor simply because they never bothered to make something of themselves. The Ivy Leagues are filled with legacies. The University of Michigan gives admissions preference to applicants with college-educated parents. How many non-first generation Americans do you know who became the first person in their family to go to college? How many college educated Americans do you know whose kids never graduated college?

[Rider Haggard]

2. I had not read that before but it is sooo much like my own opinion.

Thank you so much for taking the time to post this.

[enlightenment]

3. Two of the most dangerous national mythologies we have -

Horatio Alger and the belief that the United States does not have a class system.

Using a fictional story to create a national ethos is just plain stupid - why pick Alger? Why not Dorothy and the Wizard? Or Natty Bumppo?

Believing that the United States doesn't have a class system is self-blinding. We've had a clear-cut class system from the beginning; denying it is like denying the sunrise. You can refuse to look at it, but the sun still comes around every single day.

Both mythologies have led to a collective hubris that prevents us from dealing honestly with the reality of what we are as a nation.

[Rider Haggard]

4. Very well said.

I have a feeling that many here have no idea who Horatio was and what he did. He was the first Rush.

[HughBeaumont]

5. Here's an old Krugman article that's pretty good on the subject:

http://www.alternet.org/story/17452

Now they're back. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez -- confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office -- between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they're not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality.

Never mind, say the apologists, who churn out papers with titles like that of a 2001 Heritage Foundation piece, "Income Mobility and the Fallacy of Class-Warfare Arguments." America, they say, isn't a caste society -- people with high incomes this year may have low incomes next year and vice versa, and the route to wealth is open to all. That's where those commies at Business Week come in: As they point out (and as economists and sociologists have been pointing out for some time), America actually is more of a caste society than we like to think. And the caste lines have lately become a lot more rigid.

(snip)

Very few children of the lower class are making their way to even moderate affluence. This goes along with other studies indicating that rags-to-riches stories have become vanishingly rare, and that the correlation between fathers' and sons' incomes has risen in recent decades. In modern America, it seems, you're quite likely to stay in the social and economic class into which you were born.

Business Week attributes this to the "Wal-Martization" of the economy, the proliferation of dead-end, low-wage jobs and the disappearance of jobs that provide entry to the middle class. That's surely part of the explanation. But public policy plays a role--and will, if present trends continue, play an even bigger role in the future.