The key to increasing future income for children in poverty is friendships with wealthy people, research from Harvard and other universities reveals

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The paper ``Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility,'' published in Nature in 2022 by researchers affiliated with Harvard University and Stanford University in the US, is a research report that analyzes what kinds of connections with people affect future income increases.

The research team analyzed anonymized data on 21 billion friendships from 72.2 million Facebook users in the United States between the ages of 25 and 44. We analyze connections between people by dividing them into three main types.

The first is an index that shows how many friendships people have with people of low and high income or social status. The second is an index that shows the strength of the bonds within a friend group and the cohesiveness of the inner circle. The third indicator measures the degree of participation in volunteer activities. These figures were calculated for each region of the United States and compared with data on how much children raised in low-income families earn as adults.

As a result, it was an indicator (within the first indicator) that shows how many friends in low-income brackets had that had an impact on future income growth. The research team estimates that even children from poor families who grow up in an environment where they interact with wealthy people can increase their income by about 20% as adults, on average.

Even if local community ties were strong or local volunteer activity was strong, these factors themselves did not have a strong link to future economic success. It has been suggested that one of the factors needed to escape from poverty is whether or not one can form friendships with people from a different and more affluent class.

Source and Image Credits: Chetty, R., Jackson, M.O., Kuchler, T. et al. Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility. Nature 608, 108?121 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04996-4

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