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The rhetoric is as classic as it is cliché: The American Dream is achievable with enough hard work and more than enough determination. Famously known as the "Land of Opportunity," America has made a reputation as that soil from which a single seed can spring a garden.

But the reality, according to researchers from the University of Michigan, is that the inequality gap between socioeconomic statuses is so pervasive that upward social mobility is very improbable.

"In the United States, people underestimate the extent to which your destiny is linked to your background," says Fabian Pfeffer, a sociologist at the U-M institute for Social Research (ISR). "Research shows that it's really a myth that the U.S. is a land of exceptional social mobility."

Pfeffer's illustrates this point based on data gathered from two generations of families in the U.S. and a comparison to similar data from Germany and Sweden. The U.S. data came from the ISR Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a survey of a nationally representative sample that started with 5,000 U.S. families in 1968.

According to a report released by the University, in the U.S. parental wealth plays an important role in whether children move up or down the socioeconomic ladder in adulthood. And that parental wealth has an influence above and beyond the three factors that sociologists and economists have traditionally considered in research on social mobility - parental education, income and occupation."

"Wealth not only fulfills a purchasing function, allowing families to buy homes in good neighborhoods and send their children to costly schools and colleges, for example, but it also has an insurance function, offering a sort of private safety net that gives children a very different set of choices as they enter the adult world," Pfeffer says.

More than this, financial wealth can offer psychological securities, letting children from substantial socioeconomic backgrounds to make choices based on desires, thereby allowing them to take more risks. On the other hand, those less fortunate make life choices based on survival and/or self-preservation.

"Despite the widespread belief that the U.S. provides exceptional opportunities for upward mobility, these data show that parental wealth has an important role in shielding offspring from downward mobility and sustaining their upward mobility in the U.S. no less than in countries like Germany and Sweden, where parental wealth also serves as a private safety net that not even the more generous European public programs and social services seem to provide."

This study is just a small part of an expansive global analyses of the "opportunity scale" in each country. He also intends to examine the wealth of grandparents and how this may affect second generation wealth. I am sure we would all be interested to know who wins first place in widest door to success.