{"id":226278,"date":"2026-03-29T23:54:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-29T23:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/226278\/"},"modified":"2026-03-29T23:54:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-29T23:54:11","slug":"a-modern-day-horatio-alger-reveals-an-uncomfortable-truth-about-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/226278\/","title":{"rendered":"A modern-day Horatio Alger reveals an uncomfortable truth about class"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cTook a whole lotta tryin\u2019<\/p>\n

Just to get up that hill.<\/p>\n

Now we\u2019re up in the big leagues<\/p>\n

Gettin\u2019 our turn at bat.\u201d<\/p>\n

-The Jeffersons, 1975<\/p>\n

Quoting the theme song<\/a> from an iconic, beloved and groundbreaking television show from a bygone era might seem like an unorthodox way to contextualize a business story. But after reading this week\u2019s centerpiece profile, George and Louise Jefferson moving on up to the East Side immediately sprang to mind. <\/p>\n

Walk with me \u2026<\/p>\n

Courtesy of Nick Wooten, this week\u2019s Business Sunday introduces our readers to the backstory of Fehmi Karahan, one of Dallas\u2019 wealthy developers. Billionaire real estate magnates may be a dime a dozen in the D-FW, yet Karahan is arguably more fascinating given his origins as an immigrant from a family from modest means in Turkey. In fact, his first gig in the area was as a bartender, and he lucked into his first real estate job. <\/p>\n

Karahan\u2019s Horatio Alger tale comes with something of a caveat, in that his father\u2019s employer granted him a scholarship to pursue an MBA in America \u2014 a considerable stepping stone that most people never see. Nevertheless, in an environment where it\u2019s become reflexive to openly resent wealth and success \u2014 much to our society\u2019s detriment \u2014 Karahan is a fascinating case study in a concept that appears to have fallen by the wayside: upward mobility.<\/p>\n

Our worsening crisis of affordability has dulled our ability to appreciate stories like the one Karahan embodies and focuses attention on something economists of all stripes have come to agree upon: The ability of one generation to escape their parents\u2019 socioeconomic orbit has become an increasingly tough proposition. <\/p>\n

D-FW Real Estate News<\/p>\n

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The linkages between concentrated wealth in one generation and how it influences those in the next to bootstrap themselves is a serious policy discussion that economists have mooted for years. They\u2019ve even come up with a catchy phrase for it: \u201cThe Great Gatsby Curve<\/a>\u201d (an allusion to the book of F. Scott Fitzgerald fame).<\/p>\n

According to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth<\/a>, intergenerational economic mobility has plummeted to the point where \u201cit is now more difficult for U.S. individuals to move up the income distribution over the course of their lifetimes than it was in the 1980s, even for college graduates.\u201d<\/p>\n

It gets worse. According to a 2022 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago<\/a>, the steepening Gatsby Curve problem is a more acute global problem than some might want to acknowledge \u2014 even here in \u201cthe land of the free and home of the brave.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Chicago Fed found that \u201cin addition to better evidence from the U.S. suggesting that intergenerational persistence is much higher than we thought several decades ago, accumulating evidence from other countries also suggests that the U.S. economy is relatively immobile, particularly when compared with other advanced economies.\u201d<\/p>\n

The struggle to escape the economic fate of our parents is increasingly real. Harvard economist Rajiv Chetty, a scholar on the subject, has noted that while more than 90% of children born before 1940 went on to earn more than their progenitors, kids born in the 1980s have little better than a coin toss to outperform their parents. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt is this very trend that underlies a lot of the frustration that people around the U.S. are expressing, that this is no longer a country where it\u2019s easy to get ahead, even through hard work,\u201d Chetty said at a Yale University lecture last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Karahan\u2019s inspiring story is one that once typified the vaunted, and increasingly jeopardized, American Dream. But it also points to the uncomfortable fact that upwardly mobile narratives are getting further and farther between.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cTook a whole lotta tryin\u2019 Just to get up that hill. Now we\u2019re up in the big leagues…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":226279,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[160,162,161,111,58287],"class_list":["post-226278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-plano","tag-plano","tag-plano-headlines","tag-plano-news","tag-real-estate","tag-wealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}