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Explain Why The American Dream Is Still Alive

1143 Words5 Pages

Nhat Anh Nguyen
Prof. Standford
WRI102
10/03/15
American Dream, Are You Still Alive? I came to the United States for the first time in 2011, and I was grateful to be a part of the country's culture that promotes diversity and hard work. Hard work is really important, because it is what American Dream bases on, and American Dream has been the principle of Americans since the creation of this country. Although the Dream and its ideas are great, I wonder if it is still alive after we discussed Krugman, Piketty, Friedman and a lot other brilliant economists' articles. I have constructed myself a way to look at American Dream after this half of the semester: It is still alive, but it is dying really quickly. Why? For this matter, I would love to discuss …show more content…

This is the United States' economy based on, and as Americans people move towards it, the inevitable wealth gap between the top one percent and the rest makes sense. The main goal of capitalism, or of many big corporations today is to reduce the costs of productions and make the most profits out of it. As the more successful they are to become at this goal, the routine workers - the main populations of the United States - started to find out that their income is nowhere near that of the executives of those big corporations. Robert Reich discussed this problem in his brilliant article "Why the Rich Are Getting Richer and the Poor, Poorer". He categorized the people in three boats, of which two are sinking, and one is rising. Routine production workers are on one boat, and unfortunately that boat happens to be sinking quickly. The author stated, "Twelve thousand people are added to the world's population every hour, most of whom, eventually, will happily work for small fraction of the wages of routine producers in America." (Reich 405) This is the statement about

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