The New York Times published a story yesterday about a study (done at Harvard and elsewhere involving income data from millions of people) that found In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters. If you’re born in the bottom 20 percent in New York City, for instance, you’ll wind up on average around the 40th percentile. People in places like Chicago, Atlanta and Charlotte are not so lucky. Brian Lehrer of WNYC invited listeners today to phone in to tell their upward mobility stories. He asked his listeners to tell him what personal factors and what outside factors made their rise in socio-economic class possible. If you grew up poor but made it to the middle class, how did you do it?
AUDIO:
Callers cited the usual—family, education, mass transit, (public) housing, “hard work”—in their rise to the middle class. Dorothy, 94, from Croton-on-Hudson, was the last caller:
Dorothy: I was going to mention something that nobody has talked about and that is the role
that unions played in raising people from poverty to less poverty. That’s what
happened with my father. He came to this country . . . he and my mother both were
immigrants. I’m a first generation American. My father was lucky to get a job in a
factory . . . in a mill . . . a shop, I should say.
Brian: Where did he come from?
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Yesterday, the leading Democratic candidate for President, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, came to New York City to deliver a major speech on the economy right at the time when the economy appears to be teetering on the edge of a deep recession.