What Does “Self-Made” Mean (Or Matter) Anyway?
Kylie Jenner was pronounced by Forbes as the “youngest self-made billionaire ever” and the internet started debating what exactly self-made means.
Hold aside that the Forbes lists are notoriously, well, estimates — I mean, this is the one that Trump was obsessed about ranking on, and would make up all sorts of numbers to successfully to do so. And hold aside that no matter what you think of Kylie’s success and what it says about America, she’s role modeling some notion of business-savvy and Get It feminism, albeit wrapped into a confusing package. What Forbes responded to quickly was backlash regarding the concept of self-made. And they did it in a surprisingly specific way — a scoring system!
The American mythology of meritocracy and mobility are being eyed with increasing amounts of skepticism by younger generations, and likely always by those less Caucasian and less male. Economic class mobility has statistically slowed as the inequality gap widens but many of us hew to the…
