Diversity of ties helps to reduce poverty

A study recently published in the scientific journal Nature analyzed the Facebook connections of 72 million people in the United States, and the researchers concluded that when poor children grew up in places where their friends had more income, their future income also increased.

Although the survey is restricted to the United States, research in Brazil can give clues to the effects that a wide network of contacts can have on income in the future.

An example of this is a work done by Professor Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques, from the Department of Political Science at USP and a researcher at the Center for Metropolis Studies. The study investigated the relationship of sociability in the production of poverty, listening to more than 300 people in São Paulo and Salvador, cities with very different characteristics, from the point of view of urban segregation.

Residents of places with very different characteristics were interviewed, such as more isolated favelas, communities close to wealthy neighborhoods and housing projects, for example, and middle class people.

The idea was to show that, even if two people have the same income, one of them may have a worse life condition and reduced future prospects, if they are more isolated (and with less access to services and information) than the other.

The conclusion is that people with broader ties —linked to associations, entities or churches— had more opportunities than those with more local networks (neighborhood, family, etc.).

“We were able to show that part of the explanation for poverty, income, unemployment or better quality jobs is related to the type of sociability”, says the researcher.

Among the individuals in São Paulo with greater sociability, 58% had a formal job, compared to 33% of those with more local and primary sociability. Those with greater sociability had a higher income — R$390, per capita, compared to R$225 for those with local and primary sociability.

He highlights the role that the school environment and, above all, the university environment has in the construction of these networks of relationships. “When you are a child, the tendency is that family is your network. Then comes the neighborhood, friends of friends and school. from the same social class, but comes from different contexts.”

The professor adds that measures, such as the Quota Law (which is now ten years old) and Prouni, in addition to facilitating the increase in schooling, can produce longer-term effects than imagined, by increasing this web of connections.

The study was carried out between 2006 and 2009, when access to smartphones, which allow the use of social networks and applications, was not yet so widespread.

“But it is possible to intuit that virtual contacts are an amplification of physical contacts. Social networks on the internet do not represent a world that fell from the sky, they are organized through activities and shared interests”, he says.

Marques also explains that the richest tend to be able to maintain a greater number of ties over time, accumulating “network layers” — relationships built in different places and stages of life. “For the poorest, this has always been more difficult, but the virtual world reduces the cost of making and maintaining connections.”

For Ronaldo Lemos, director of the Institute of Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro and columnist for Sheetany initiative that allows people of different demographic characteristics to connect is beneficial.

“In this sense, the physical or digital infrastructure that allows meetings, including random ones, between different people always leads to an increase in opportunities. These infrastructures range from quality public transport used by everyone to social networks that allow meetings and contacts”, he says. .

In a 2018 study, researchers from FGV (Fundação Getulio Vargas) also mapped the relationship between childhood housing and income in adulthood. From the 2010 Census, they concluded that, depending on where the worker who migrated from other states to São Paulo spent his childhood, his income could vary from 2% to 13% for each additional year of study.

To arrive at these numbers, data on schooling and income were crossed, concluding that one more year of training for a Brazilian who grew up in Piauí and moved to São Paulo is reflected in a 2.3% increase in income — the level lowest among 19 states. Meanwhile, people from Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul had salary increases of 10.5% to 13.1%, respectively.

According to researcher at EPGE/FGV (Brazilian School of Economics and Finance) Cezar Santos, the networks and connections that this person brings with them are also important in defining income. People expanded their networks as they approached other migrants, who introduced them to local friends and employers.

For Lemos, the greater connectivity of the new generations can compensate for limitations and contribute to the formation of more diverse bonds from the early school years.

“Several countries, for example, have experimented with mentoring systems, in which retired citizens participate in programs where they can mentor young people. The exchange of experiences and information generates very powerful opportunities”, he says.