Social Mobility Quotes

“Poor kids, through no fault of their own, are less prepared by their families, their schools, and their communities to develop their God-given talents as fully as rich kids. For economic productivity and growth, our country needs as much talent as we can find, and we certainly can’t afford to waste it. The opportunity gap imposes on all of us both real costs and what economists term “opportunity costs.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“Upper-class parents enable their kids to form weak ties by exposing them more often to organized activities, professionals, and other adults. Working-class children, on the other hand, are more likely to interact regularly only with kin and neighborhood children, which limits their formation of valuable weak ties.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

“For kids who are exposed to books at home, the loss of a library is sad. But for kids who come from environments where people don't read, the loss of a library is a tragedy hat might keep them from ever discovering the joys of reading-or from gathering the kind of information that will decide their lot in life.”
― Michael Moore

“We are just peasants with money.”
― A.H. Septimius

“All rich things look the same, but poor things always look different.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, Can I Tell You Something?

“To achieve authentic, sustained happiness, above all else you need to be in charge of your life, to be in control of who you want to be, and be able to make the appropriate changes if you are not. This cannot merely be a perception, a slogan like the American Dream (the United States came way down on the LSE's social mobility scale, incidentally). In Scandinavia it is a reality. These are the real lands of opportunity. There is far greater social mobility in the Nordic countries than in the United States or Britain and, for all the collectivism and state interference in the lives of the people who live here, there is far greater freedom to be the person you want to be, and do the things you want to do, up here in the north. In a recent poll by Gallup, only 5 percent of Danes said they could not change their lives if they wanted to. In contrast, I can think of many American states in which it would probably be quite an uncomfortable experience to declare yourself an atheist, for example or gay, or to be married yet choose not to have children, or to be unmarried and have children, or to have an abortion, or to raise your children as Muslims. Less significantly, but still limiting, I don't imagine it would be easy being vegetarian in Texas, for instance, or a wine buff in Salt Lake City, come to that. And don't even think of coming out as a socialist anywhere! In Scandinavia you can be all of these things and no one will bat an eye (as long as you wait and cross on green).

Crucial to this social mobility are the schools. The autonomy enabled by a high-quality, free education system is just as important as the region's economic equality and extensive welfare safety nets, if not more so. In Scandinavia the standard of education is not only the best in the world, but the opportunities it presents are available to all, free of charge. This is the bedrock of Nordic exceptionalism.”
― Michael Booth, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

“When blue-collar, white workers in middle America look at Donald Trump in his fill-fitting suit and baseball cap, with a physical image that is perhaps more like their own, they see a possibility that they could be him. Aside from his skin colour, Barack Obama, with his lean physique, good looks and charisma, hanging out with rock stars and movie stars, his life and what he stands for seems at a far remove. Except the reality is that he was raised without his father, cared for by his grandparents and moved around a lot as a child, meaning he has potentially much more in common with the Appalachian voters than Donald Trump. He lived and achieved the American Dream in arguably a more fundamental way than Trump did.”
― Caitriona Perry, In America: Tales from Trump Country

“and, of course, the self-accursation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one who raises himself from private considerations and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar: Self-Reliance, Compensation

“Everyone who dealt with disadvantaged kids, from therapists to college admissions officers, treated us as if we could overcome any abuse or neglect with sheer force of will.”
― Emi Nietfeld, Acceptance: A Memoir

“Lors du recensement de 1931, il avait été estimé que les outcasts, tribes et
autresdepressed classes, comme on appelait alors les intouchables et autres
catégories discriminées dans la langue administrative britannique, et qui deviendront
par la suite les scheduled castes et les scheduled tribes, regroupaient quelque
50 millions de personnes, soit environ 21 % des 239 millions d’hindous. À la fin des
années 1920, des mouvements indépendantistes avaient lancé dans plusieurs
provinces des opérations de boycott du recensement, qui recommandaient de ne pas
indiquer de jati ni de varna aux agents recenseurs. Petit à petit, on passa d’un
système où les recensements visaient à identifier les élites et les hautes castes,
parfois pour leur garantir explicitement des droits et des privilèges, à la fin du
XIXe siècle et au début du XXe siècle, à une logique visant au contraire à identifier les
plus basses castes, dans le but de corriger les discriminations passées. En 1935,
alors que des systèmes d’accès préférentiel à certains emplois publics étaient
expérimentés par le gouvernement colonial pour les scheduled castes, on constata
que certaines jatis qui s’étaient mobilisées dans les années 1890 pour être reconnues
comme kshatriya et obtenir l’accès à certains temples et lieux publics, se mobilisaient à présent pour être considérées comme faisant partie des plus basses castes. Cela démontre de nouveau la plasticité des identités individuelles et leur adaptabilité aux incitations contradictoires créées par le pouvoir colonial.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology

“That’s the devil of things as they are now. As soon as any member of the working class shows ability as a leader, if he’s too rebellious to be collared as a foreman by the boss, the men make him an official and he steps right out of their class. Take Joan there. Now think what a power she would have been if she could have been kept in that shop where she used to work. Of course she would have got the sack and had to get another, but she’d have gone on fighting. What happens? She’s pretty (don’t blush, Joan), she’s clever, she is made an official. Then come along the Mary Mauds and the Anthony Dacres” (“and the Gerald Blains,” put in Dacre). “Quite. She is now a member of the middle class. Then she’ll get into Parliament and be quite a lady.”
― Ellen Wilkinson, Clash

“It seems that we are caught in a big, self-perpetuating celebrity-fueled cycle that goes something like this: declining social mobility and diminishing life options lead to increasing dreams of celebrity fame and fortune. This, in turn, enhances the power and allure of celebrity, which cause a focus (perhaps with an ever-increasing narcissistic resolve) on extrinsic aspirations that leads to less happiness and distracts us (and society more generally) from actions that may enhance social mobility, such as education and advocacy for social change.”
― Timothy Caulfield, Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash

“It may seem paradoxical that innovation should increase both the share of income of the richest 1 percent (top income inequality) and social mobility. Yet the comparison among different American states suggests that this is indeed the case. For example, if we compare California, currently among the most innovative states in the United States, with Alabama, which is among the least innovative, we find that the share of the state’s total income that goes to the top 1 percent is significantly higher in California than in Alabama. At the same time, social mobility is substantially higher in California than in Alabama.”
― Philippe Aghion, The Power of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations

“When the letters came, offering me places at university, that was when it all blew up - for ever.”
― Deborah Orr, Motherwell: A Girlhood

“The revolution opened doors for us and allowed an enormous social mobility. Many walls that blocked communication were demolished, and taboos were cast out.

(Interview in A Contemporary Cuba Reader, 2000)”
― Nancy Morejón

“Unlike most models of interpersonal networks, the one presented here is not meant primarily for application to small, face-to-face groups or to groups in confined institutional or organizational settings. Rather, it is meant for linkage of such small-scale levels with one another and with larger, more amorphous ones. This is why emphasis here has been placed more on weak ties than on strong. Weak ties are more likely to link members of different small groups than are strong ones, which tend to be concentrated within particular groups.
[...]
The major implication intended by this paper is that the personal experience of individuals is closely bound up with larger-scale aspects of social structure, well beyond the purview or control of particular individuals.
Linkage of micro and macro levels is thus no luxury but of central importance to the development of sociological theory. Such linkage generates paradoxes: weak ties, often denounced as generative of alienation, are here seen as indispensable to individuals' opportunities and to their integration into communities; strong ties, breeding local cohesion, lead to overall fragmentation. Paradoxes are a welcome antidote to theories which explain everything all too neatly.”
― Mark Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties