The American Dream

We Indian have always come believing that The land of opportunities, as America is known to generations of Americans and others, was the place where anyone can become anything with hard work and ambition. The possibility of upward social mobility, defined as the ability to move up social stratas defying circumstances that a person is born in, was the light for millions of people who immigrated to the United States of America during the 20th century.Not only Indians, but any one with the dream of good living standards, quality life and earning loads of money wants to go there. People from India to mexico, Brazil, China, Europe etc go there. It is truly a multinational country.

In the 20th century, Indians who had been struggling against barriers created by caste, religion, income, occupation etc. were also seduced by the American dream and the desire for a better quality of life. Interestingly, an economist who has been at the forefront of the discussion on whether America is indeed the land of opportunities, is an immigrant himself. 

Professor Raj Chetty, one of the youngest fully tenured faculty members in Harvard University used anonymised field level or administrative data to identify wealth and income changes in the lives of American families across generations (also known as intergenerational social mobility) and concluded that the American dream, to a certain extent, was being viewed through rose-tinted glasses.