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When I was in 6th grade, our final class project was to map out our life and where we would be in 20 years. Appropriately titled, “This is your life,” the project was supposed to be a fun way to map out our future. Each student basically designed his/her own ‘American Dream,’ complete with the notion of the white picket fence.

Naïve is an understatement. I think I may have been delusional at the time, with my desires of becoming a forensic scientist (remember the days of CSI?). Alas, I can't be too harsh on my 6th grade self, mainly because, at the time, Qatar was not in my vocabulary, much less on my radar of places I wanted to go.

My visions have definitely changed, but the conceptual ‘American Dream’ still lives on. As a through-line in American historiography, everyone, at some point, has had his/her own interpretation of the American dream. Hollywood may have been the first one to exploit the dream for financial gains, but its trajectory through American history is older than the nation itself.

As early as the 1700’s, Benjamin Franklin’s aphorisms in Poor Richard’s Almanac depicted sage advice for Americans. Pithy phrases like “He that has a trade has an estate” and “Industry, perseverance, and frugality make fortune yield.” This brings us back to Weber’s protestant work ethic in defining capitalist nations and their work/spending habits.
Franklin’s key to life is summed up in hard work and education. Can Franklin safely promise these outcomes? Not really, but he isn’t the only one who has tried. American writer Horatio Alger wrote wildly popular ‘rags-to-riches’ stories in the 19th century. In modern times, Hollywood isn’t the only one to portray the gleaming American dream. Nas’ 2003 song, “I can” has the same message. “I know I can…Be what I wanna be…If I work hard at it…I'll be where I wanna be,” sung by a chorus of children.



Part of me wants to believe that the American dream is a possibility for everyone. But at the same time, how high is the deck stacked against those who try to achieve upward social mobility? Talk to any Occupy Wall Street protester and they will give you one set of answers. Talk to a Wharton Business school graduate and you will get a completely different answer.