#Stratification

Social mobility is a slide that surreptitiously sweeps people up and down the stratified structure of society. Talent and effort serve only as rallying cries, while real movement is driven by opaque power plays and fierce scramble for promotion. Those who boast of climbing look down upon the wreckage of those who have slid back to the bottom. The rhetoric of equal opportunity is nothing more than a signboard, masking a cage of ruthless competition. Social mobility is a high-wire circus fueled by the hopes of the contestants.