Effort Traps: Socially Structured Striving and the Reproduction of Disadvantage

It seems intuitive that the more effort one exerts to escape poverty, the likelier one should be to succeed. Findings from a two-year ethnographic study of low-income Black men transitioning to adulthood challenge this intuition. Participants in the study encountered two-tiered effort traps. First, schools and life circumstances regularly primed participants to overexert themselves in pursuit of escaping poverty and meeting long-term goals. Second, participants’ resulting efforts proved not merely futile but counterproductive, keeping them committed to untenable workloads past a point of no return and causing exhaustion and failure. Effort traps are a previously unrecognized mechanism of social reproduction: a structured way that ambitious young people from low-income families can be set up to fail, not despite their best efforts but precisely because of them.