A3 Political radicalization due to sustained economic frustration

Topic

The collapse of social mobility describes a drop in the rate of intergenerational mobility below what would be expected given the level of economic development; political radicalization driven by sustained economic frustration describes what happens when this realized mobility—already depressed—is compared against what people expected to achieve, and that comparison persists over time. It is not realized mobility in itself that triggers this anomaly, but rather the gap between expectations and actual outcomes.

The variable triggering this anomaly is the gap between mobility expectations and realized mobility crossing a critical threshold in a sustained manner: as long as the gap remains limited or transitory, the resulting frustration stays contained within people's everyday economic behavior; when the gap crosses the critical threshold and persists over time, that frustration ceases to be expressed solely in the economic realm and shifts toward political activity—the other dimension of the stratum that the "Socioeconomic Behavior" component already models alongside socioeconomic status and education.

This anomaly thus marks the point where "Socioeconomic Behavior" ceases to be purely economic and begins to generate a political outlet for frustration rooted in the mobility gap. At its core, this type of radicalization resembles the unchanneled grievance described in another module of the Kyon Model as part of the compound trigger for armed violence—though here, the specific source of frustration is the gap between expectations and realized mobility, rather than a generic source of grievance. For the time being, this link to the other module is noted informally, without a formal structural connection to support it. Sustained political radicalization ultimately feeds back into the very collapse of social mobility that sparked it: a population that channels its economic frustration into political activity—rather than into the economic activity that could reverse the mobility gap—risks deepening, rather than correcting, the very decline in intergenerational mobility that gave rise to it.

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