Title: Why did people believe in the American Dream? - Quora
Headings: Why did people believe in the American Dream?
Why did people believe in the American Dream?
Quora User
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Yanna Smith
Lu Leng
Sridhar Sharma

Content: But the 200 million middle class Americans have no right to bitch about the tough market or how horrible things are. There ARE jobs, just not the jobs Americans want to go to college and study for ("But I wanna be a teacher!") It's not that they make less or that we have potentially less disposable income . . . it's that we own more shit now and have used debt ineffectively to give ourselves more shit that we do not need but believe we need (and have a right to) because we're Americans and buying shit is what we do. Quora User
, American by choice
Updated 8 months ago · Author has 629 answers and 3.2M answer views
Originally Answered: Why do people believe in the American Dream? Your question betrays a misunderstanding of what the "American dream" meant for most people before the present generation, especially people who weren't born in America. My grandparents sent their kids ranging from nine to 19, alone, across the Atlantic in pursuit of that dream. When they were allowed to join them several years later, they were happy to get menial work in New York's garment district. They had little hope of rising much above the condition they left in Europe.