If you had told me in the summer of 1963 that, within what anti-communist liberal economists like Kenneth Galbraith then called "the affluent society," I would, after 1969, be spending most of my life as poverty-stricken as my immigrant grandparents were and be downwardly mobile in my economic status compared to my white clerical working parents after obtaining a college degree, I would not have believed you.
Because in the early 1960's, the U.S. corporate media (and even some early New Left writers) were claiming that advanced capitalist societies like the United States would certainly eliminate poverty within their economic systems within the next few decades (and certainly by the end of the 20th-century); and that a liberal arts college degree automatically provided its recipient with a permanent passport into a high-salaried career within U.S. society, which would automatically provide the college grad more upward economic mobility and economic security than his or her parents had achieved or what students who did not got to college would obtain within U.S. society.
Of course, by the mid-1970's most U.S. liberal arts college graduates from working-class backgrounds of all races realized that the corporate media had lied to us about the economic rewards getting a liberal arts degree would bring to us after graduation, within an institutionally classist, racist, sexist and ageist country; and that the early New Left writers and antii-communist liberal economists who had claimed that advanced capitalist societies like the USA would eliminate poverty in a few decades had forecast the direction of U.S. economic history wrongly.
