Why Life Choices are key to Upward Mobility
And why we need to start talking about them
In my book series and this Substack column, I argue in favor of a Progress-based reform agenda focused on the following principles:
Promote long-term economic growth (this is what I call “promoting progress”, the topic of my second book)
Create a prosperous working class.
Promote a clear pathway that enables youths from low-income families to enter the prosperous working class.
The last two principles are promoting Upward Mobility, the topic of my forthcoming book: Upward Mobility: A Radical New Agenda to Uplift the Poor and Working Class. In this post, I will focus on the third principle: Promote a clear pathway that enables youths from low-income families to enter the prosperous working class.
What factors enable youths from low-income families to experience Upward Mobility?
In a previous article, I made the case that the American class system can be best understood using the following four criteria:
Age
Education (particularly those with a four-year college degree and those that do not)
Work status (whether a full-time worker is in the household)
Marital status
When I break down American households based on these critical characteristics, I get something that looks like this:
In the previous article, I explained the characteristics of each group. In this article, I want to explain how youths enter one of the three classes that are available to them. To do so, I want to introduce two key concepts:
Life Choices
Life Trajectory
Life Choices
The first concept that I would like to introduce is “Life Choices”. A Life Choice is:
“a decision made by an individual that has a profound effect on their future material standard of living.”
See more articles on Upward Mobility:
Why Progress and Upward Mobility should be the goal, not Equality
Why Life Choices are key to Upward Mobility (this article)
I also will be writing a significant number of excerpts from my forthcoming book: Upward Mobility: A Radical New Agenda to Uplift the Poor and Working Class. Most of these excerpts will only be available to paid subscribers.
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