Question

labor economic.

how do communities increase or decrease social mobility? include the role of mentors, extracurricular activities, and society " air- bags" for young people?

Answer 1

Social mobility is the movement of an individual/group/community from one position to another position in the hierarchy of the society, where the position possess some value.

There can be individual and structural factors of social mobility. structural mobility cab be defined as agricultural economy to industrial economy.Such a change provides new opportunities for employment, which the people avail and thereby the whole process becomes instrumental to social mobility.

The individuals may have differences in their “mobility oriented behaviors”. There is much which persons can do to increase their prospects for upward mobility by improving their educational qualifications.

A variety of factors affect the level of social mobility in a country. The most important factor is perhaps the education system which determines the degree of equality of opportunity for young people. A free, high quality public education system would provide relatively equal education opportunities and thus supposedly high social mobility.

The education supply in itself is not enough to increase social mobility, however, as there are many other barriers to mobility. The first arises from differences in education demand between poor and rich families. Even if the direct costs of education were completely free, there will still be indirect costs (clothing, school supplies, transport, etc.) and opportunity costs (children cannot help as much with domestic and farm work) which tend to be relatively more important for poor families. Studying may also be more difficult and require more effort for poor children as their study environments are less ideal (lack of parental support, no computers and books at home, etc). Educational quality is another factor - incentives to place the best teachers in remote rural areas are expensive and often inadequate. Bolivia has yet to become as urbanized as many neighboring countries, and the geography and difficult access to rural areas is another factor which challenges the provision of quality educational access to all regions of the country.

A second type of barrier to social mobility are found in the labor market in the form of discrimination. Discrimination essentially reduces the returns to education for the groups of people who are discriminated against, making it less likely that these groups will make the necessary education investments. If jobs are allocated more on the basis of family, political, ethnic or social ties than on the basis of merit, this would have the same negative effect on social mobility and growth.

A third barrier is found in the credit market. If people do not have access to credit at reasonable terms, they cannot make the investments necessary to improve their lives in the future. Bolivia is considered a pioneer in the microcredit market along with Bangladesh, and this financial sector appears to have weathered the ongoing economic crisis better than the traditional banking sector. In a relevant study of the poverty alleviation effects of microcredit in Bolivia (Navajas, 2000), the authors find that microcredit in Bolivia appears to serve not the very poorest but rather those on the upper edge of the poverty line. In addition, microcredit apparently serves more to smooth consumption rather than to increase incomes. It is to be expected, given the resistance of this financial service sector to the economic downturn in the country, that microcredit will continue to expand throughout the country and consolidate market share in the near future. As consumption smoothing is important to ameliorate the opportunity costs of children attending school and thus reducing schooling gaps, access to microcredit may have important and measurable effects on social mobility in future generations.

A fourth barrier is related to the marriage market. If people marry almost exclusively within their own social class, such marriage customs would tend to reduce social mobility. On the other hand, if people marry across social and economic classes, this would have a positive effect on social mobility and at the same time reduce inequality.

It has also been shown that the degree of urbanization has an impact on social mobility, with highly urbanized countries enjoying more social mobility, and urban people typically being more socially mobile than rural people. This can be partly explained by the easier access to education in urban areas, but probably also by the wider range of work opportunities found in urban areas. Finally, high fertility rates, with the associated high dependency burdens, may also be an obstacle to social mobility.