Quotes: The Fiction Of Social Mobility

American social mobility is now more fiction than fact...Top or bottom. Market winners or market losers. Once you’re sorted into one or the other, your position is probably permanent. -- Conor P. Williams (What Social Immobility Does)

Comments

[Mary]

You were invited to the New Clothes Venture Fund summit today, weren't you, Alexander?
"Fifteen Million Children in Poverty: Education Entrepreneurship and America’s Most Urgent Challenge"
http://www.newschools.org/event/summit-2012

So, the entrepreneurs are looking back on their decade of victories, in which the free market has finally transformed teaching and learning, for the benefit of those 15 million kids.

Here's John H Jackson's take on the problem of children's downward mobility,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-h-jackson/a-new-take-on-no-excuses_b_1459233.html

Was Jackson invited? If you see him around, you could ask him what he thinks of the progress entrepreneurs have made.

[Sarah]

I’m not sure, to be fair, that there ever was social mobility. The American sentiment, in this regard, is completely wrong. We’re all lead to believe that we can be among the top 1% of American citizens, a mathematical impossibility! There isn’t anything wrong with an unbalanced system, such is the way of humanity... but what is wrong is that America’s top 1% can exist solely on the accomplishments of their forebearers, while the hard-working poor barely manage to find enough food to keep going.