Beyond Effort: Attractor Dynamics and Socioeconomic Trajectories — Why Hard Work Isn't Enough

This preprint proposes a dynamical-systems framework for analyzing socioeconomic mobility. It models poverty as a stable basin of attraction and characterizes wealth as a supercritical regime separated by a critical transition boundary. Within this framework, trajectories are shaped not only by effort magnitude but by structural constraints, path dependence, and discrete access thresholds that define regime geometry. The paper argues that conventional effort-based explanations are incomplete because effort applied within constrained regimes may dissipate against restoring forces rather than produce proportional displacement. It distinguishes between accumulation under constraint and post-transition positive-feedback dynamics, clarifying why equivalent sustained effort can yield radically different long-term outcomes depending on structural position. The framework generates falsifiable predictions that differentiate it from effort-only, credential-based, and purely stochastic accounts of mobility. Scope conditions and competing hypotheses are explicitly addressed to ensure empirical testability. This version establishes the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the framework while omitting formal modeling details.