Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, and President Barack Obama; what do all of these people have in common? Well, despite the time period they grew up in they all found a way to take themselves from the bottom of the social ladder up to the top. Since its origin with the Puritans in the seventeenth century, the American Dream has been a sign of motivation for individuals born into a low social status. However, society has recently eradicated the possibility of the American dream yet still promotes it as a possibility. The American Dream has been reduced to a euphemism to put hope into the individuals who do not have the resources to succeed. The American Dream on an individual level is the capability of a person to enhance their style of living so that it would, in turn, better their quality of life. In order to increase one’s style of living, it is almost imperative to have an opportunity that leads to an influx of income. In an article done on The Great Gatsby and the American Dream, one critic writes that “America was to be a place where men were …show more content…
In an article done by Forbes, it is said that “Opportunity is the true mother of success and for too many years, access to it has been made too easy and thus abused by greed and distrust. The new American Dream requires you to earn opportunity. This doesn’t even mean that you will be able to seize it” (Llopis). Today’s economy is based off of a system that no longer admires ambition. America is now posed with a system that relies on an uncontrollable opportunity to become successful, and it seems as though without such an opportunity that an individual is limited in their capacity to succeed. The American capitalistic economy was based on the premise that ambition and hard work would result in success, but that is no longer the case as it now takes more than just raw determination to obtain the capital necessary for the American