Socio-Economic Effects Of The American Dream

The American Dream is one of the most subjective ideals of the American persona. It is generally defined as the house in the suburbs with the whitewashed picket fence. However, one of the key components of the American Dream is that it changes every generation. Millennials and the iGeneration no longer desire a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence. These most recent generations have an American Dream about living comfortably within the city while they continue to have access to constantly bettering technology. The American Dream has been increasingly achievable in the past century with a large majority of people in the 1950s having felt they had achieved their dream and that their children would also be able to achieve their dream.
The American Dream has never been achievable by everyone; nonetheless, the American Dream has the potential to be achieved by anyone, unfortunately for many Americans it is much harder to achieve the dream when you start lower on the socio-economic hierarchy. The American dream is not necessarily dependent upon your economic status or even your IQ rather it is your work ethic and some of your upbringing. Much like the American Dream, one’s upbringing can be heavily impacted by one’s socio-economic status through their childhood. Both influence your ability to achieve your American Dream, your socio-economic status affects this negatively as the you get close to the poverty line from above and even more so as you fall below it. Luckily for us just because our socio-economic statuses are low we are not immediately barred from achieving our own American Dreams. Our upbringing has a much greater impact on our ability to achieve our American Dream. In the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell he writes about how the outliers of our success in life is not necessarily based upon the sole fact that we are smarter than someone else and are therefore going to be more successful than that person. As evidence in his novel he explores the experiment conducted by
While it is true that there are many people who do have a higher intellect that end up being successful, it is not true that all or even most people with higher intellects will be more successful than their more average peers. Gladwell has an example of such a person, Christopher Langan has an IQ that is recorded at 190, one of the highest on record and 40 points higher than Einstein’s. His brothers praise him for being able to show up to a class and three minutes before the test skim the textbook and then ace the test. While Langan has the capacity to absorb and process information at that rate it has been found that someone with an IQ of 130 has about an equal opportunity to succeed and achieve highly as Langan would because the threshold of success rests at approximately that point. This is something that I have found myself within my own life. I have discovered that while some people