It Takes a Lot of Money to Look This Cheap

From Horatio Alger novels to Business Insider slideshows, rags-to-riches stories emphasize hard work: the only thing standing between the poor farm kid and the jet-setting CEO is sufficient pluck and elbow grease. Dolly Parton and J.D. Vance—who are both hard-working, smart, and supported by older family members as they work their way up—bear this story out in their lives, and add to it in their memoirs. In addition to hard work, these new bootstrap stories emphasize a more ethereal prerequisite for upward mobility: the big dream. The problem with the focus on the bigdream story is that—like so many bootstrap narratives before it—it places the blame for poverty squarely on the dispossessed.