You Can Be Anything You Want. Can You?

The Things We Were Told About Life — Part 5

Career day at school. A kid asks what they should be when they grow up. The answer, same as always: "You can be anything you want."

The numbers on that promise have been quietly changing for decades.

The Claim

With enough hard work and self-belief, anyone can become anything, regardless of where they started.

The Investigation

Economist Raj Chetty and a team of researchers tracked "absolute income mobility", the share of children who grow up to out-earn their parents, adjusted for inflation, across decades of Census and tax data. The decline was stark: 92% for children born in 1940, down to 50% for children born in 1984. For sons specifically, the drop was even sharper: from 95% down to 41%.

The researchers' conclusion wasn't that people stopped working hard. It was that economic growth, once shared more broadly across the income scale, has become far more concentrated at the top, leaving less room for each new generation to simply out-earn the one before it, no matter the effort involved.

The Contradiction

"You can be anything you want" gets delivered to every child equally, as if the odds are the same for all of them, regardless of when and where they were born. The data says the odds themselves shifted, generation to generation, for reasons that have nothing to do with individual belief or effort.

The Human Question

Someone works exactly as hard as their parents did, same discipline, same hours, same sacrifices, and still can't match the life their parents built. It's easy to make that feel like a personal failing. The data says something structural shifted underneath an entire generation, not just underneath them.

The Uncomfortable Question

If the odds changed structurally, not individually, why does it still feel like a personal failure when the numbers don't work out?

The Other Side

This isn't fatalism. Individual effort still meaningfully shifts outcomes within whatever structural odds exist, mobility isn't zero, and Chetty's broader research shows specific factors like neighborhood, education access, and field genuinely move the needle for individuals. The corrected message isn't "nothing you do matters." It's "you're not competing on the same board your parents did."

The Verdict

Mostly misleading, as a universal promise.

Effort and choices still matter within your circumstances. But "you can be anything you want," delivered as an equal, unconditional promise to every generation, ignores a documented, dramatic shift in the actual odds.

The Reality Check

What does it promise? That outcome is mostly a function of individual effort and belief, regardless of when you were born.

What does the evidence show? That the odds of simply out-earning your parents have fallen from roughly 9 in 10 to a coin flip over two generations.

What should you do with the gap? Judge your progress against your actual starting line, not against a promise built for a different economy.

Your Turn

If you found out your odds were structurally different from your parents', would that change how you judge your own progress, starting today?