The Horatio Alger Myth

http://www.fightbacknews.org/2004/01winter/algermyth.htm

This article discusses the Horatio Alger Jr. myth and how after the world war 11 it was seen that this could be the case that hard work enabled you to a better lifestyle.

"Many poor and working class Americans did achieve a better way of life, buying a house and sending their children to college."

Therefore, this demonstrates as the myth says by working hard and saving money you can enable yourself to do better things in life. However, this article does go on to say that it wasn't necessarily the myth that helped make hard workers gain as its states it was the force of the people coming together to make a change and get higher wages to pay for these.

Furthermore, the Alger myth also suggests that the poor can become better of whereas this article would say otherwise:

"The gap between the rich and the poor are growing" and "Working people would be better off with universal health insurance, access to college education and a living wage."

So this demonstrates that the Alger myth can't completely be applied in today's society because the poor stay poor no matter how hard they work and the rich get richer even if they are not wokring as hard as poor working class Americans.