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Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes Mark Robert Rank, Thomas A. Hirschl and Kirk A. Foster. Oxford, 2014.
Income and wealth inequality have been a central focus of American political discourse for the last forty years. Of particular concern has been how increasing inequality erodes working- and middle-class Americans' ability to attain "the American Dream" of providing a comfortable lifestyle for one's family through the rewards of labor. The last forty years' political and economic scholarship focuses on the increasing difficulty of attaining this dream; almost no work addresses what the American Dream actually means to workingand middle-class Americans. Mark Robert Rank, Thomas A. Hirschl, and Kirk A. Foster's Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes moves beyond this tradition, using a multidimensional approach to examine what Americans think the Dream is, as well as to explore the viability of attaining this Dream through traditional pathways. By utilizing individual interviews, focus groups, and a lifetable approach that employs data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Pew Center for Research, Rank et al. provide a "somewhat different lens for interpreting and assessing the current and future status of the American Dream" (7).
The authors break their study into three sections: identifying core components of, assessing pathways to, and exploring meanings of the American Dream. Each section utilizes the multidimensional approach, providing personal experiences and focus group discussions, as well as longitudinal quantitative data measuring...