What factors determine whether a person can lift themselves out of poverty? Apparently, social contacts with people with higher incomes play an important role in this. This is the result of a current study based on an evaluation of around 21 billion Facebook friendships in the USA. Accordingly, social mixing increases so-called economic mobility, i.e. the chance of achieving a higher socio-economic status than the parents. However, the data also shows that in many regions of the USA friendships between people from different social milieus are less likely, for example due to separate colleges and high schools.
In the USA, but also in many other countries, there are large social differences between people with high and low socioeconomic status. For most people born into poverty, the American dream of rags to riches does not come true. But which factors contribute to increasing the chances of advancement? It has long been assumed that a person’s social relationships, the so-called “social capital”, have a major influence. So far, however, it has been difficult to make social capital measurable.
21 billion Facebook friendships analyzed
A team led by Raj Chetty from Harvard University in Cambridge has tackled this problem. To do this, the researchers used the world’s largest dataset on social relationships: friendships on Facebook. In cooperation with Meta, the provider of Facebook, Chetty and his colleagues analyzed the data of over 72 million American Facebook users between the ages of 25 and 44. From the profiles, they extracted which college and which high school the respective users attended, in which zip code area they live and who they are friends with. A total of around 21 billion Facebook friendships were included in the analysis.
Based on various information in the user profiles, the researchers were also able to draw conclusions about the socio-economic status of the respective person and their parents – for example based on their place of residence in a poor or a rich neighborhood. They also ranked all of a person’s friends according to their socio-economic status and created an index that indicates what proportion of friends have an above-average socio-economic status. They called this measure “economic connectedness”. Next, they related this “economic connectedness” to the likelihood that a person would be better off socially and economically in adulthood than would have been expected based on their parental background.
Friendships between different social classes
The result: “The proportion of friends with a high social status is one of the strongest predictors for economic advancement opportunities,” according to the authors. In an accompanying commentary, also published in the journal Nature, Noam Angrist of the University of Oxford and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth College, who were not involved in the study, write: “These data show the importance of social capital in journeying out who is poverty. The links between people of low and high social status can affect their aspirations, access to information and employment opportunities.”
However, in order to form such friendships, people with high and low social status must first come into contact. According to Chetty and his colleagues, this is not a given in many parts of the United States. The children of rich parents often attend different educational institutions than children from poorer families. And even if they go to the same college, children from the same social class are more likely to become friends. According to the authors, how strong this effect, the so-called “friending bias” is, depends on the structure of the group in which people interact with each other: “The friending bias is greater in larger and more diverse groups,” they write. “It’s lower in religious organizations than in schools and workplaces.”
Data for targeted interventions
From the point of view of the researchers, it is a task of politics to promote a social mix and thus give more people the chance to escape from poverty. To help policymakers and other research groups, they have compiled and made publicly available data for all US zip code areas and for all colleges and high schools. From this it can be seen for each location whether the problem lies more in a lack of contact or in the fact that the young people only make friends within their own social milieu, for example because the classes are too large. Political interventions could thus target the respective problematic situation and thus effectively increase social capital.
Source: Raj Chetty (Harvard University, Cambridge, USA) et al., Nature, doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-04996-4 and doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-04997-3