Told to Win SOC 3333 · Crime Lab · Midwestern State University
Robert Merton published a nine-page argument in 1938 that still organizes this part of criminology. American culture, he said, prescribes the same goal to everybody, and American social structure hands out the legitimate means of reaching it very unevenly. That mismatch is the strain, and it does not require anyone to be poorly socialized, badly parented, or short on self-control. It only requires a society that tells everyone to win and then rations who is allowed to. This page treats that as a claim you can check rather than a slogan, because unusually good data exists on exactly the thing Merton was describing.
The promise, and whether it was kept
The specific promise inside the American Dream is that you will do better than your parents did. That is a testable claim, and Raj Chetty and colleagues tested it by linking tax records to census data and asking, for each birth cohort, what share of children were earning more at age 30 than their parents had earned at the same age.
Start with the generation that came of age after the Second World War.
Chetty, R., Grusky, D., Hell, M., Hendren, N., Manduca, R., and Narang, J. (2017). The fading American dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940. Science 356(6336), 398 to 406. Rates are the share of children earning more than their parents at age 30, in inflation-adjusted terms. Retrieved August 2026.
Before you conclude the economy just stopped growing
The obvious explanation is slower growth. The authors tested it directly by running two counterfactuals: give the 1980s cohort the GDP growth rates of the 1940s cohort, or give them the way that growth was distributed in the 1940s. Only one of those fixes it.
Same source. The authors concluded that returning to the more equal distribution of growth experienced by the 1940 cohort would reverse more than 70 percent of the decline in mobility, while raising growth alone would have modest effects. Retrieved August 2026.
One honesty note before you use this in an argument. Everything on this page is about income mobility, not about crime. Chetty and colleagues were not testing strain theory and did not claim to. What this data establishes is that the PREMISE of Merton's theory describes the United States accurately. Whether the mismatch actually produces crime is a separate question, and it is the question the rest of the chapter is about. Treating a well-measured premise as if it were a demonstrated cause is exactly the mistake this course keeps asking you not to make.
The ladder is not the same height everywhere
Merton's claim is about structure, which means it should show up as variation across places rather than as a fact about individuals. So take the sharpest version of the question. If a child grows up in a family in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, what are the odds that child ends up in the top fifth as an adult?
If opportunity were perfectly equal, the answer would be 20 percent everywhere, because a fifth of adults are in the top fifth by definition. Guess the national figure.
Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Kline, P., and Saez, E. (2014). Where is the land of opportunity? The geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States. NBER Working Paper 19843. Figures are for children raised in families at the 20th percentile of the national income distribution, measured in adulthood. Retrieved August 2026.
What the geography does and does not tell you. These are the odds for children raised in a place, not a property of the place itself, and the causes are genuinely contested. Later work by the same team found that moving younger children to higher-mobility areas improved their adult outcomes, which is evidence that place is doing some causal work rather than simply sorting families. It is still not a finding about crime, and a low-mobility metro is not thereby a high-crime metro. Hold the two separately.
Five ways to live with the mismatch
Merton's most cited contribution is a table. Given a cultural goal and a set of approved means, a person can accept or reject each one, and the combinations produce five ways of adapting. Only one of them is what we usually call conformity, and only one of them is where most property crime lives.
Eight short cases below. Sort each into an adaptation. Two of them are arguable and the explanations say so.
Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review 3(5), 672 to 682.
Agnew: strain is bigger than money
Merton's strain is one specific thing: you want the thing everyone wants and cannot get it legitimately. Robert Agnew argued in 1992 that this is far too narrow, and that strain should cover the whole range of negative relationships people find themselves in. He proposed three types, and the mechanism running through all of them is emotional rather than economic. Strain produces negative emotion, anger above all, and crime is one way of coping with that emotion. Most people cope some other way.
Sort eight situations into the three types. Some genuinely belong to more than one and the explanations say which.
The critique, and Agnew's answer to it
Broadening a theory has a cost. If almost any bad experience counts as strain, and most strained people do not offend, then what exactly would refute the theory? That is a real falsifiability problem and Chapter 1 taught you to be suspicious of it.
Agnew answered it directly in 2001 by specifying which strains should matter. He argued that strains lead to crime when they are seen as unjust, high in magnitude, associated with low social control, and when they create some pressure or incentive to engage in criminal coping. That is a testable narrowing, and it produced a list. Before you look at it, predict one thing.
Two strains with numbers attached
Strain theory is easy to state and hard to measure, because most strains live inside people's lives rather than in administrative records. Here are two that leave a paper trail.
Legal financial obligations
A criminal case in the United States generates fines, court costs, supervision fees, and surcharges that follow a person for years after the sentence itself is finished. In Agnew's terms this stacks all three strain types at once: it removes resources, it presents a continuing negative condition, and it blocks goals that require a clean record or a driver's license. It is also, unusually, a strain the state creates on purpose.
Menendez, M., Eisen, L., Atchison, N., and Crowley, M. (2019). The Steep Costs of Criminal Justice Fees and Fines. Brennan Center for Justice. The report also found that roughly half of families with a convicted member cannot afford to pay the fees and fines imposed. Retrieved August 2026.
Keep the inference honest. These figures document the scale and inefficiency of the debt. They do not by themselves show that the debt causes offending. The strain argument is a prediction about what such conditions should produce, and it is a plausible one, but the numbers on this page are about the strain and not about the crime.
Discrimination as strain
Agnew's 2001 specification named experiences with prejudice and discrimination as a strain likely to lead to crime, on the reasoning that it scores high on every one of his four characteristics: it is unjust by definition, often severe, frequently outside the reach of any authority that would intervene, and it generates anger with no legitimate target. That is a prediction, and it has been tested.
Forum: look up a place you know
Post your initial response and then reply to two classmates. Length and deadlines are in that week's module in the LMS.
- Open the Opportunity Atlas from that week's module and look up a neighborhood you actually know. Where you grew up, where you live now, or somewhere you have spent real time. Report what it shows without editorializing yet.
- Explain what you found using ONE strain theory from this chapter. Name the theory, name the mechanism, and say specifically what that theory would predict about crime in that place.
- Then say what your chosen theory does NOT explain about the place you picked. Every one of these theories has a blind spot and yours will have one here.
- Finally, one methodological sentence. The Atlas measures adult income for children raised in an area. Say one thing that measure cannot tell you about the people who live there now.
A note on choosing a place. You are not required to write about where you grew up, and you should not feel obliged to share anything about your own circumstances. Any neighborhood you know well enough to describe is fine, including one you only worked in or visited often. The assignment is about applying a theory to a place, not about disclosing anything about yourself.
On step 3. This is the step that separates a good post from an average one. Merton says little about violence that earns no money. Agnew struggles to say why most strained people never offend. Institutional anomie works at the level of whole societies and gets awkward when applied to one block. Find yours and name it.