![]() ![]() Economic connectedness is the only form of social capital that boosts mobilityĬhetty and his colleagues examine three types of social capital: For example, the northeast generally has high exposure but also high friending bias (that is, people with low and high SES in the northeast are relatively well integrated in schools and neighborhoods, but tend to befriend each other at lower rates).”Ĥ. “Friending bias is lower on average in areas with more high-SES exposure, with a correlation of about −0.2 across counties, but there are many exceptions to this pattern. The team assessed the degree of friending bias across the nation, and found some geographical patterns: “friending bias,” which means that even when there are people of different backgrounds around, friendships remain strongly class-based.lack of exposure to people of a different background (and particularly of lower-SES people to higher-SES people). ![]() ![]() There are two factors that can influence the formation of friendships across class lines: The Midwest really is friendlier than the northeast… “Individuals with the lowest SES make about four times greater a share of their friends in their neighborhoods (residential ZIP codes) compared with individuals with the highest SES…Neighborhoods therefore play a larger role in defining the social communities of low-SES individuals, perhaps explaining why where one lives matters more for the economic and health outcomes of lower-income individuals than higher-income individuals.”ģ. Sources: Social capital II: determinants of economic connectednessįor those from working class or middle-class backgrounds, neighborhood networks are much more important, followed by religious communities. For high-SES people, college plays a much bigger role in the creation of friendship networks – mostly for the obvious reason that they are more likely to have gone to college in the first place: There are also marked class differences in how and where people make friends. Rich people make friends of college classmates, poorer people make friends of neighbors The slope rises to 0.98 between the 90th and 100th percentiles, which shows that the highest-SES individuals tend to have particularly high-SES friends.”Ģ. The relationship is almost linear between the 10th and 90th percentiles of the SES distribution, with a slope of 0.41 in that range. “A one percentile point increase in one’s own SES rank is associated with a 0.44 percentile point increase in the SES rank of one’s friends on average. As the figure below shows, one in three of the friends of those in the top SES decile are from the same decile, compared to just 24% from the whole bottom half of the income distribution:Īs the team notes, there is an almost linear relationship between the SES of an individual and the average SES of their friends: People are most likely to be friends with people of a similar socioeconomic status (SES), especially at the top of the ladder. Friendship networks are strongly class based, especially at the top.Watch a discussion this Wednesday with Chetty and Stroebel, as well as Harvard’s Robert Putnam, AEI’s Scott Winship, and our colleague Camille Busette. Here we summarize seven key findings from the research, as well as some implications for policy. The headline finding is that at the community level, cross-class connections boost social mobility more than anything else, including racial segregation, economic inequality, educational outcomes, and family structure.Ĭreating more connections across class lines – either through greater economic integration of our institutions and neighborhoods or more opportunities for cross-class social engagement – looks to be the most promising route to improving rates of upward economic mobility in the U.S. The findings are striking and certain to have a profound impact on discussions of economic mobility. As usual they have also created an interactive and public use version of the data. Their two papers Social Capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility and Social Capital II: determinants of economic connectedness have just been published in Nature along with supplementary data here and here. The richness of their data permits analysis at a very granular level, down not only to zip codes, but individual colleges and high schools. Center Coordinator - Center on Children and Families, Economic Studiesĭrawing on a massive dataset, comprising the social networks of 72.2 million users of Facebook aged between 25 and 44 years, Chetty and his team are able to assess how far social networks influence economic mobility. ![]()
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