Status Crystallization and Mobility Lock: The Poverty Production Process

Abstract

While America is nominally the “land of opportunity”, it is more so for some than others. Those in the lowest and next-to-lowest class quintiles are especially disadvantaged. Numerous efforts to be helpful seem to have not worked well probably due to a lack of opportunities and misaligned interventions. For the most part, residents in these classes seem to be stuck in their positions. This paper hypothesizes that “status crystallization” in the bottom quintiles (low on income, low on wealth, low educational attainment, and manual/episodic low status work/job) creates a “quadruple helix” of intertwined deficits that can “lock” individuals and families in a poverty position. This “mobility lock” contributes to the persistence of poverty status in spite of numerous social programs and health services. These five variables—income, wealth, educational attainment, occupation type and health—are all forms of personal capital that contribute to the opportunities for social mobility in the United States. High values on these variables act as “compound interest”, accelerating mobility; low values function as the opposite—sort of the “payday loan”: effectively trapping those individuals in lower and ever decreasing status. However, as discussed in this article (and by others), personal capital alone does not sufficiently predict opportunities for social mobility in the United States. Social capital—or the networks of relationships that contribute to living and working in a given society—provide and enhance opportunities for social and economic mobility. As pointed out by Raj Chetty and others, the conditional probability of upward mobility is also enhanced by geographic location, or “opportunity areas”. Higher opportunity places shared qualities associated with upward mobility: good schools, greater levels of social cohesion, many two-parent families, low levels of income inequality and little residential segregation either by class or race (Gareth Cook, 2019, The Atlantic). Low values on these factors may tend to co-exist in some areas and become “impediment areas” as opposed to mobility enhancement ones.