Advances in Applied Sociology, 2019, 9, 478-490 https://www.scirp.org/journal/aasoci ISSN Online: 2165-4336 ISSN Print: 2165-4328 DOI: 10.4236/aasoci.2019.910035 Oct. 29, 2019 478 Advances in Applied Sociology Status Crystallization and Mobility Lock: The Poverty Production Process * John Tropman, Emily Nicklett School of Social Work, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Abstract While America is nominally the “land of opportunity”, it is more so for some than others. Those in the lowest and next-to-lowest class quintiles are espe- cially disadvantaged. Numerous efforts to be helpful seem to have not worked well probably due to a lack of opportunities and misaligned interventions. For the most part, residents in these classes seem to be stuck in their positions. This paper hypothesizes that “status crystallization” in the bottom quintiles (low on income, low on wealth, low educational attainment, and ma- nual/episodic low status work/job) creates a “quadruple helix” of intertwined deficits that can “lock” individuals and families in a poverty position. This “mobility lock” contributes to the persistence of poverty status in spite of numerous social programs and health services. These five variables—income, wealth, educational attainment, occupation type and health—are all forms of personal capital that contribute to the opportunities for social mobility in the United States. High values on these variables act as “compound interest”, ac- celerating mobility; low values function as the opposite—sort of the “payday loan”: effectively trapping those individuals in lower and ever decreasing sta- tus. However, as discussed in this article (and by others), personal capital alone does not sufficiently predict opportunities for social mobility in the United States. Social capital—or the networks of relationships that contribute to living and working in a given society—provide and enhance opportunities for social and economic mobility. As pointed out by Raj Chetty and others, the conditional probability of upward mobility is also enhanced by geograph- ic location, or “opportunity areas”. Higher opportunity places shared qualities associated with upward mobility: good schools, greater levels of social cohe- sion, many two-parent families, low levels of income inequality and little res- idential segregation either by class or race (Gareth Cook, 2019, The Atlantic). Low values on these factors may tend to co-exist in some areas and become “impediment areas” as opposed to mobility enhancement ones. *We want to express our deep appreciation to Dan Madaj for his wonderful help in preparing this paper. How to cite this paper: Tropman, J., & Nicklett, E. (2019). Status Crystallization and Mobility Lock: The Poverty Production Process. Advances in Applied Sociology, 9, 478-490. https://doi.org/10.4236/aasoci.2019.910035 Received: August 26, 2019 Accepted: October 26, 2019 Published: October 29, 2019 Copyright © 2019 by author(s) and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access