downwardly mobile

downwardly mobile

Descending or likely to descend in social rank, esteem, or class. The opposite, "upwardly mobile," is much more common. If we lose all our savings, we'll become downwardly mobile.
See also: mobile
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

downwardly (or upwardly) mobile

moving to a lower (or higher) social position; losing (or gaining) wealth and status.
See also: mobile
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • mobile
  • upwardly mobile
  • ranking
  • rank above
  • rank above (someone or something)
  • rank below (someone or something)
  • rank higher than (one)
  • lower (oneself)
  • lower yourself
  • pull rank, to
References in periodicals archive
Whether these emerging forces can coalesce at national and multination levels, reach out to employed urban-industrial workers and downwardly mobile middle-class people and create a permanent power bloc to transform society are the questions that remain.
Given the compelling likelihood that many Black children will go through 12 years of schooling and rarely encounter a Black teacher (most will never have a Black male teacher), I find it frightening that so many African-American college graduates see teaching as downwardly mobile.
Both shared a brutalized and peripatetic childhood in the midst of an increasingly desperate clan of downwardly mobile former serfs and sharecroppers; they both led vagabond existences up and down the major river of their nation's heartland, deprived of fathers, disappointed in mothers, shuttling in and out of insecure households dominated by sporadic violence and a suffocating piety.
Reduced to bootlegging during the Great Depression, they have become "downwardly mobile." To Paul Whitehurst, they are a walk on the wild side that he savors, a counterbalance to his proper Presbyterian background that had "deprived him of a certain depravity." Striated with half-breeds at this point, the Dabneys are a parody of their former selves, with dark-skinned, voluptuous daughters; they are dysfunctional to the point of delirious amoral opportunity.
To be sure, the American middle class is long extinct, and the superrich decorate their fortified pleasure-domes with "Nightmare Folk Art--Southern Gothic" or "Aggressive Retro Seventies," while the likes of Berry and Chevette, downwardly mobile members of the service proletariat, can only dream of a weekend in a cheap motel or a visit to a VR theme-park.
Human-resources types coin some memorable not-quite-ready-for-Webster words: the noun re-career is the new job you take after you retire from running with the big rats; job-lock explains your staying in a lousy job because it offers health insurance; and if you're a domo (from downwardly mobile professional), you're an under-40 who shucks a promising career to concentrate on more meaningful or spiritual activities.
For their part, Republicans who had faithfully served the interests of big business while stoking the ire of their white working-class constituents against minorities and immigrants discovered that those downwardly mobile working-class whites had had it with the catering to big business.
Instead, it provocatively features a fictive, downwardly mobile citizen trying to get hard answers from real-life candidates regarding what they'll do in office to help needy supporters like herself.
But by the age of 50, downwardly mobile men are over three and a half times as likely to be depressed as women in the same position.
They "may look at vowed or ordained life as something that is not upwardly mobile, but rather downwardly mobile."
There's only been one flop - a cheesy ITV sitcom about yuppies called Downwardly Mobile, which limped through just one series.
Taking advantage of the interest in getting downwardly mobile is The Futon Company which has a wealth of experience and should be able to give good advice about what kind of futon will best suit your requirements.
Are the uncertain future of the small business remnant and the painful circumstances of the predominantly downwardly mobile not the long-term fate of many more outside the factory walls?
Below them, a segment of downwardly mobile working people found that their reduced job prospects and declining wages had placed them in the ranks of the working poor.
She actually planned to become "downwardly mobile," saying "For my generation of creative people, status is rejecting the status symbols."