Abstract
Status hierarchies exist in human societies. People who comprise a society can be grouped based on the economic resources available to them, and a person’s location in a particular group dictates the status they are accorded in that society. Various exclusionary mechanisms keep a society’s economic and social status groupings intact (Banerjee and Mehta 2017); such mechanisms operate to keep people in the status groups where they are born. Nevertheless, our interest here is social and economic mobility. “Mobility” indicates the capacity for motion. While a society’s economic and status groupings tend to remain fixed, the term social and economic mobilitydescribes the phenomenon whereby individuals do not necessarily remain located within one particular group for their entire lifetimes. A person’s socioeconomic standing can decrease; so too can it increase. People tend to have considerable interests and exert considerable...