I’m out of here. Have fun making assumptions.

My father met my mother while he was in the army, stationed in S. Korea. When they were married and moved to the states, she didn’t speak any english. After he got out of the army he worked in a factory while my mom raised my brother (middle), sister (youngest) and myself (oldest). When he got laid off, we were dirt poor. Food stamps poor. Since he dropped out of school in the 6th grade, he didn’t have much in the way of an education. But he isn’t dumb by any means. Well, we survived on food stamps pretty much until I graduated high school. During this time my mom went to college during the day, cooked dinner, helped the kids with homework in the evening and studied at night. She graduated with an engineering degree suma cum laude. My dad also got an assocates degree. They did this while on food stamps, working the occasional odd job and raising 3 kids. Sure we never went on vacation, had cable or huge Christmas holidays. But they made it out. It can be done. I’ve seen it.

Due to their hard work and determination, we had a pretty good childhood and grew up happy and healthy. I’m now doing ok myself after only a bit of college. My sister graduated college and works in NYC. My brother lives in Hawaii after being stationed there while in the marines.

I know that no matter what sort of adversity I’ll face, it won’t be as great as what they went through. And I think this experience has made me a much stronger person and helps to drive me to succeed in everything I do.

So anyway, you don’t have to stay lower class forever, but it takes great amounts of will power and determination to make it out.

i wonder if this blog will try to offer solutions – even though people will knock them down because of course, they won’t apply to everyone. but ideas are better than a complaining blog. like, could a stay-at-home mom in your area look after your kids for cheaper than daycare? can you sell anything at all? can you share cars with anyone else in your area or take on another roommate? can you eat less? can you start a garden? use modestneeds.org? ask relatives/church for help? can you use any or your skills to land a simple 2nd/3rd/4th/5th job? and a biggie – could you find free job/interview classes and try to get a more lucrative job? (not a guarantee that you’ll get one but clearly, you can only cut so much. eventually you’ll just have to earn more)

my parents emigrated to america as singles with little money, no relatives and broken english. they survived a failed business, 3 kids, 1 war, 1 disability, being people of color and the high COL of NYC. the american dream – it doesn’t happen to everyone but it does happen.

Gee, T, thanks for explaining your strategy.

Seriously, do you not see yourself in that? You, it seems, need to believe that your aunt’s experience is normal. You said it yourself–your whole reason for disbelieving or not understanding was that these accounts didn’t dovetail with your aunt’s. There are several people telling you it isn’t normal–telling you that maybe even if there isn’t a systematic reason why she has succeeded (and several have been given), it is entirely possible to get LUCKY. Lucky is not the same as hardworking or deserving (not to belittle your aunt–I’m just saying these things aren’t necessarily under people’s control).

As for urban sprawl and lack of public transportation being the result of individualist mythology–there’s truth in that, but it has more to do with marketing than anything else. Urban sprawl is the product of the housing boom and marketing by a million construction companies, domestic product companies, and banks specializing in mortgages and home equity loans. Lack of public transportation has to do with the speed and poor planning of the sprawl, but more to do with a lack of interest in Washington for creating such a thing–class privilege, check–and lobbying/marketing by car companies and by oil companies, who got Washington to keep gas prices feasibly low until we were far enough wedded to it.

I think your general point about the harm that individualist mythology can do is very true and not understood enough in the US (I’ve thought a lot about how it plays into our foreign policy and views of the presidency as well). But

My point is that these things are not the creations of consumers. They were fed to consumers, and deliberately so, by companies and lobbyists, and politicians who refuse to hear or believe what people tell them.

And for some strange reason, their economy isn’t collapsing from horrendous “socialism”.

There are alot of us living like this, I don’t understand how everyone talks about the hypothetical poor, when really, it seems like everyone I know is poor. (except employers of course).

yazikus, it’s because to a lot of people they are “hypothetical”, in more ways than one. A lot of so-called middle class people are actually poor, but as there is a taboo about being poor (obviously you must be lazy if you’re poor, right?), they won’t admit it. This results in many people not knowing anyone who are openly poor.

As the US economy is going downhill, this is certainly changing, but until there is a frank and open debate about these things, there won’t be any change. In Europe, this debate was raised by the unions – who is going to raise it in the US?

T, throughout your questions, you seem to implicitly buy into the concept of the American dream. Unfortunately it’s a myth, and it’s becoming more even more so. I wrote a post about social mobility in the US that links to some articles and studies on the subject.

When most American cities were being built, in the early days of the mass-produced automobile, urban planners had bought into Henry Ford’s vision of a car for every family, and into the ideal of the City Beautiful, where nobody would walk, and people would have beautiful, clean-lined enclaves in which to live, separated from their noisome, unpleasant workplaces. They would escape to these enclaves in their personal cars, of course.

In the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s many cities and towns tore up tram lines. Others expanded their suburbs across the landscape, creating vast, sprawling suburban landscapes linked by freeways. These suburban enclaves lacked any amenities within walking distance—people were expected to either have things delivered by a man with a truck or drive to what they needed.

Spawl is an enemy of public transit—the greater the area you need to cover, the more people you need to serve in order to make transit useful.

The cities in the U.S. where it’s remotely possible to live without a car tend to be the older cities—those for which some significant part of the urban planning took place prior to 1930. These cities also tend to be costlier areas in which to live. And even in many of those cities, public transit is much better in the denser, core areas (New York is probably an exception to this generalization, as it is to so many things). Even the greater Boston area can be difficult to manage without a car.

Most European cities, by contrast, were built on the scale of the human foot, making intra-city public transit more feasible than it is in many US cities. They’re built closer to each other, making inter-city public transit more viable and easier to manage, too.

I’m a die-hard public transit advocate, who doesn’t have a car, and rides a bike much of the year. I live in Canada, which has many of same problems with its urban planning as the States. I think that if my life or career had taken me to Los Angeles, or Miami, or Orlando, or Kansis City, I’d have a much more difficult time managing than I currently do.

You say you don’t understand how educated people can work so hard, yet be struggling so much in the US, despite explicit explanations such as low, sometimes deliberately low, salaries; work disruptions, health conditions, high health care costs, regional differences, or simple high cost of living? Why not?