Upward mobility is becoming a tougher hill to climb.
from an iconic, beloved and groundbreaking television show from a bygone era might seem like an unorthodox way to contextualize a business story. But after reading this week’s centerpiece profile, George and Louise Jefferson moving on up to the East Side immediately sprang to mind.
Courtesy of Nick Wooten, this week’s Business Sunday introduces our readers to the backstory of Fehmi Karahan, one of Dallas’ wealthy developers. Billionaire real estate magnates may be a dime a dozen in the D-FW, yet Karahan is arguably more fascinating given his origins as an immigrant from a family from modest means in Turkey. In fact, his first gig in the area was as a bartender, and he lucked into his first real estate job. Karahan’s Horatio Alger tale comes with something of a caveat, in that his father’s employer granted him a scholarship to pursue an MBA in America — a considerable stepping stone that most people never see. Nevertheless, in an environment where it’s become reflexive to openly resent wealth and success — much to our society’s detriment — Karahan is a fascinating case study in a concept that appears to have fallen by the wayside: upward mobility. Our worsening crisis of affordability has dulled our ability to appreciate stories like the one Karahan embodies and focuses attention on something economists of all stripes have come to agree upon: The ability of one generation to escape their parents’ socioeconomic orbit has become an increasingly tough proposition.The linkages between concentrated wealth in one generation and how it influences those in the next to bootstrap themselves is a serious policy discussion that economists have mooted for years. They’ve even come up with a catchy phrase for it: “, intergenerational economic mobility has plummeted to the point where “it is now more difficult for U.S. individuals to move up the income distribution over the course of their lifetimes than it was in the 1980s, even for college graduates.”, the steepening Gatsby Curve problem is a more acute global problem than some might want to acknowledge — even here in “the land of the free and home of the brave.” The Chicago Fed found that “in addition to better evidence from the U.S. suggesting that intergenerational persistence is much higher than we thought several decades ago, accumulating evidence from other countries also suggests that the U.S. economy is relatively immobile, particularly when compared with other advanced economies.” The struggle to escape the economic fate of our parents is increasingly real. Harvard economist Rajiv Chetty, a scholar on the subject, has noted that while more than 90% of children born before 1940 went on to earn more than their progenitors, kids born in the 1980s have little better than a coin toss to outperform their parents. “It is this very trend that underlies a lot of the frustration that people around the U.S. are expressing, that this is no longer a country where it’s easy to get ahead, even through hard work,” Chetty said at aKarahan’s inspiring story is one that once typified the vaunted, and increasingly jeopardized, American Dream. But it also points to the uncomfortable fact that upwardly mobile narratives are getting further and farther between.
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