upwardly mobile

This happens when an upwardly mobile country can't offer ultra-low wages anymore, but at the same time doesn't have the innovative capacity to create the high-end goods and services of an advanced economy.

From the Mamluk slave-soldiers, recruited from Kipchak tribes in what is now southern Russia and Ukraine, to Hurrem, the powerful wife of the Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, who started her career as a lot in the Istanbul slave mart, the trope of the upwardly mobile slave has more than a grain of truth.

Mr. Leguizamo portrays the patriarch of an upwardly mobile Latin-American family who finds himself in choppy waters, both financially and emotionally.

Long after abortion ceased to be upwardly mobile women’s way out of a life-halting pregnancy—that is how feminists in the 1960s and ’70s framed it—millions of liberals continued to venerate legal feticide as a sacred inheritance, a thing beyond reason.

Hairy-backed grandpas are yielding to upwardly mobile startup founders and creative types.