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.
Read more about this topic: Social Mobility
Famous quotes containing the words upward and downward, 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)
“Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.”
—Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)
“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)