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China Daily, November 3 (Dang Chaofeng) Recently, Laji Chety, a famous economist at Harvard University, pointed out in a speech that the decline of the "American Dream" reflects the fundamental changes in the US economy.
He said that a cornerstone of the concept of the "American Dream" is that through hard work, any child has the opportunity to stand out and have a higher standard of living than his parents. But Chetty and his colleagues found that while children born in the 1940s and 1950s “almost certainly” will develop upward, the “American Dream” faded drastically over time, so the likelihood that children born in the 1980s would live better than their parents is about 50%.
He said: "This trend has caused Americans to express a lot of frustration, and as the 2020 election results reflect, it is no longer a country that can easily succeed even if you work hard." The Chetti research team found that black and white Americans had such a huge difference in economic opportunities that the two comparison maps showing the distribution of opportunities used two different color proportions. "In essence, this is two different countries, or in more precise statistical terms, basically a non-overlapping distribution." The Chetti team also looked at the downward movement, tracking blacks and whites from high-income families who came from the top five of the income distribution. The study found that blacks present an unsettling pattern of layers of decline, while whites tend to continue to rise to the top. "For white Americans, realizing the American dream is like climbing a ladder," Chetty said. "You basically start from the starting point where the previous generation left and then keep going up." For black Americans, it's more like on a treadmill. Your status in a generation has risen, but the huge structural force seems to pull you back to the low end of your income distribution and you have to climb again from the starting point. ”
(Editor: Hu Xiaoshan)
Source: China Daily Network
