A2 Collapse of social mobility

Topic

Socioeconomic behavior shapes individuals according to their stratum—socioeconomic status, education, political activity—and a central aspect of this shaping is the ease or difficulty with which a person can change strata relative to their parents. The collapse of social mobility is the anomaly describing what happens when this intergenerational stratum shift ceases to occur at the pace one would expect given the level of economic development.

The variable triggering this anomaly is the intergenerational mobility rate falling below the level expected for the economy's stage of development; this is not a matter of an absolute mobility threshold, but rather a comparison relative to the economic development already achieved. In principle, a more developed economy should offer more opportunities for stratum mobility than a less developed one, not fewer. When the intergenerational mobility rate falls below that expectation, one's stratum of origin begins to weigh more heavily than general economic development in determining one's destination stratum.

Unlike an exogenous shock to the population—which originates outside the economy and propagates to other channels through already exposed interfaces—the collapse of social mobility describes an internal dynamic of socioeconomic behavior. It is not a discrete event but a sustained pattern in how strata are inherited across generations. This same dynamic of intergenerational concentration—where the stratum of origin increasingly influences the destination stratum—is, at its core, the same dynamic described elsewhere in the Kyon Model regarding the risks of concentration and social mobility. Here, it is noted as a manifestation within the socioeconomic behavior component—a linkage currently indicated informally, without a formal interface between modules to underpin it.

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