Economix Blog: Fatalism and the American Dream

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

Two of my colleagues have alluded to a recent Pew Research Center report on American exceptionalism, paying particular attention to the fact that Americans are more likely to say their culture is superior to others than are people in Germany, Spain, Britain or France.

One finding of the report that received little attention, however, was about cultural attitudes toward success. Of the five nationalities polled, Americans were least likely to believe that success in life was determined by forces outside our control.

Just 36 percent of Americans believe in this fatalistic statement, while the vast majority of their compatriots are greater believers in self-determination. Put another way, Americans are (not surprisingly) more likely to believe in the American dream.

Americans with less education are more fatalistic, however. The study found that 22 percent of college graduates believe they have little control over their fate, compared to 41 percent of Americans without a college degree.

Even so, American nongraduates still seem to think they have more control over their destinies than the average German, Frenchman or Spaniard does. Almost three-quarters of Germans, for example, believe that success is determined by factors outside our control.

These findings are particularly interesting when juxtaposed with a separate report from the Pew Economic Mobility project. That report, which examined economic and social mobility in 10 Western countries, found that Americans actually appear to have less control over their success in life than their counterparts do.

In particular, the educational attainment of a person’s parents — a factor usually determined before that person’s birth — seems to matter more for mobility in the United States.

“There is a stronger link between parental education and children’s economic, educational and socio-emotional outcomes than in any other country investigated,” the report says.

As Richard Wilkinson suggested in a recent TED Talk, if you want to live the American dream — and have greater control over your own likelihood of success — you should probably move to Denmark, where the poor have a better chance of moving up in the world.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=1a4c4840c69345f04695ebdf1fbdf323