Examples Of Class Mobility

“It’s really hard to explain, and I honestly have no idea”, said my guardian, Don. It was a rainy December, and we were sitting in the living room and I asked him why, despite our economic growth, financial disparities exist. Why are there so much homeless? Did the generations before us experience the same thing? Here we are now, months later and I am interviewing about almost the exact same thing. I believe that social classes have changed throughout generations, but they are not heading the right way. In this essay, I am going to explain class mobility in general, but also in an intergenerational context, using Don’s story. I will use the concepts of meritocracy, structural and individual explanation, the concentration of wealth, socioeconomic status to analyze Don”s class mobility. …show more content…
In my country, Senegal, there is a strong belief in meritocracy: your class mobility depends on how hard you work for it. Don’s dad was a small business owner who worked his way up and became a millionaire, which is quite unusual. Senegal is a very low-income country, and his case was one of very few. His small business became a big one in my country and what’s interesting is, his education stopped in middle school. A structural explanation to that would be the fact that education was not too important in Senegal at that time and people believed that a workplace is a right location for a man. Also, a good education is expensive. So instead of spending money on an education for him, why not let him drop out and work so that he can be a source of income ? On the other hand, an individual explanation would be that he was surrounded by people who were always working, and that influenced him to drop out. Or, he just didn’t like school at