<
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/01/upshot/rich-poor-friendships.html>
"Over the last four decades, the financial circumstances into which children
have been born have increasingly determined where they have ended up as adults.
But an expansive new study, based on billions of social media connections, has
uncovered a powerful exception to that pattern that helps explain why certain
places offer a path out of poverty.
For poor children, living in an area where people have more friendships that
cut across class lines significantly increases how much they earn in adulthood,
the new research found.
The study, published Monday in
Nature, analyzed the Facebook friendships of
72 million people, amounting to 84 percent of U.S. adults aged 25 to 44.
Previously, it was clear that some neighborhoods were much better than others
at removing barriers to climbing the income ladder, but it wasn’t clear why.
The new analysis — the biggest of its kind — found the degree to which the rich
and poor were connected explained why a neighborhood’s children did better
later in life, more than any other factor.
The effect was profound. The study found that if poor children grew up in
neighborhoods where 70 percent of their friends were wealthy — the typical rate
of friendship for higher-income children — it would increase their future
incomes by 20 percent, on average.
These cross-class friendships — what the researchers called economic
connectedness — had a stronger impact than school quality, family structure,
job availability or a community’s racial composition. The people you know, the
study suggests, open up opportunities, and the growing class divide in the
United States closes them off."
Via
The Fixer August 10, 2022:
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/maya-bay-thailand-the-beach-closed/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
