Social Mobility - Upward and Downward Mobility

Upward and Downward Mobility

Upward social mobility is a change in a person's social status resulting in that person rising to a higher position in their status system. However, downward mobility implies a person's social status falls to a lower position in their status system. A prime example of an opportunity for upward mobility nowadays is in athletics. There is an increasing number of minorities holding top executive positions in the NBA. Transformative assets would also allow one to achieve a higher status in society, as they increase wealth and provide for more opportunity. A transformative asset could be a trust fund set up by family that allows one to own a nice house in a nice neighborhood, instead of renting an apartment in a run-down community. This type of move would allow the person to develop a new circle of friends of the same economic status.

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Famous quotes containing the words upward and downward, upward and, upward, downward and/or mobility:

    There is a Restlessness springing from the consciousness of power not fully utilized, which must be present wherever there is unused power of whatever kind. This is the restlessness of the germ within the seed, struggling upward and downward towards its proper life. ... it is a striving full of pain, the cutting of tender flesh by the fetters of the captive as he struggles against their pitilessness.
    Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)

    ... here, where the gaze is stopped everywhere, the whole earth is designed so that the face turns upward and the gaze implores. Oh! I hate this world where we are reduced to God.
    Albert Camus (1913–1960)

    And yet for all this help of head and brain
    How happily instinctive we remain,
    Our best guide upward further to the light,
    Passionate preference such as love at sight.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    A woman drew her long black hair out tight
    And fiddled whisper music on those strings
    And bats with baby faces in the violet light
    Whistled, and beat their wings
    And crawled head downward down a blackened wall....
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)

    One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
    Susan Sontag (b. 1933)