The Intersection of Constraint and Grief: Rethinking Opportunity, Work, and Wealth
For too long, our national conversations around poverty, workforce development, economic mobility, and even at times our work, has hinged on a singular question: How do we lift people out of poverty?
What if we’ve been asking the wrong question?
At the Wealth and Work Futures Lab, we’ve been rethinking this question entirely. Through our research and engagement with communities impacted by economic immobility, we’ve come to an insight that is shifting everything for us: the opposite of opportunity isn’t necessarily poverty—it’s severe constraint. It's the absence of choice.
This distinction matters. Poverty is an outcome, a result. But constraint—the lack of agency, of autonomy, of viable options—is a condition that permeates lives and communities, often long before poverty takes a developmental toll and long after wealth remains out of reach.
When we look at workforce development and economic policy through this lens, the landscape changes. It’s not enough to offer people jobs. It’s not enough to train them for “what the market demands.” If the structures they’re living in remain deeply coercive—dominated by unstable, precarious, low-wage work with little to no benefits beyond health, limited protections, and no path upward —then we haven’t created opportunity. We’ve simply shifted the shape of constraint.
We’re doing our best at the Lab to document and demonstrate the breadth and depth of this loss—and I use the word “loss” intentionally. It’s not just about the numbers. It’s about human impact. It’s about understanding that people are living at the intersection of grief, precarious work, and the absence of wealth. And grief is a crucial word here—it names the emotional toll of lost dreams, broken promises, and intergenerational disinvestment.
As Raj Chetty’s work points out, economic mobility—the ability to rise in income, wealth, and opportunity—is deeply tied to your zip code, the quality of your local schools, your racial background, and a host of other structural variables. But what Chetty calls “opportunity,” I’ve come to understand as the presence of real, viable choice coupled with intentional investments.
If opportunity is about options—about having a variety of paths you can choose from, about access to education, mentorship, capital, and stability—then its opposite isn’t just financial struggle. It’s coercion. It’s a system of heavy constraints—structural, cultural, economic—that limit a person’s ability to imagine, let alone pursue, a future that looks different from their present.
These constraints play out across levels of existence:
Personal: Where someone may be making daily decisions between paying rent or buying groceries, not because of irresponsibility, but because their wages fall short of meeting basic needs.
Institutional: Where schools in under-resourced communities continue to receive less funding, fewer supports, and less investment—perpetuating cycles of underachievement and stalled learning. .
Systemic: Where housing policies, tax laws, labor regulations, and generational wealth building tools ensure that some communities remain on the margins of growth.
So when we talk about economic development, we must also talk about healing. When we speak of workforce strategy, we must also speak of restoring agency. People need not just jobs, but power over their own development, the freedom to decide who they become.
At the Lab, we’re exploring what it means to center dignity, agency, and healing in the way we design workforce policy. That means:
Supporting worker ownership and cooperative business models that distribute power.
Exploring asset building strategies that enable families or individuals to stabilize their lives and pass something down.
Advocating for universal basic assets—access to housing, healthcare, childcare, and education as a right, not a privilege.
Rethinking metrics of success, from GDP growth only to frameworks that also include health, community wellbeing, and outcomes rooted in human flourishing.
Until we address the systems that restrict choice, that limit potential, and that force people into cycles of survival, we’ll never truly be a society of opportunity.
The opposite of opportunity isn’t poverty. It’s constraint.
And, liberation starts with recognizing that everyone deserves more than just survival—they deserve the freedom to thrive.
Reflection: What would it look like for our communities, institutions, and systems to prioritize expanding real choices for everyone—not just removing barriers, but actively creating conditions where people can live, grow, and thrive with dignity?