Friendship between rich and poor can reduce poverty, study says

Over the past four decades, the financial conditions into which children were born have increasingly determined where they have reached as adults. An extensive new study, however, based on billions of social media connections, has found a powerful exception to this pattern that helps explain why certain places offer a path out of poverty.

For poor children, living in a place where people have more friendships that cut across social class barriers significantly increases how much they earn in adulthood, the research found.

The study, published in the scientific journal Nature, looked at the Facebook friendships of 72 million people, representing 84% of Americans aged between 25 and 44.

Previously, it was clear that some neighborhoods were much better than others at breaking down barriers and moving up the income ladder, but it wasn’t clear why. The new analysis – the largest of its kind ever undertaken – found that the degree of linkage between rich and poor, more than any other factor, explains why children in a neighborhood did better in life as adults.

The effect is profound. The study found that when poor children grew up in neighborhoods where 70% of their friends were wealthy — the typical rate for higher-income children — it increased their future income by 20%, on average.

Friendships across social classes – which the researchers called economic connectivity – had a stronger impact than the quality of education, family structure, availability of employment or the racial composition of a community. The people you know, the study suggests, open up opportunities, and the growing class divide in the United States closes them.

“Growing up in a community with connected social classes improves children’s outcomes and gives them a better chance of lifting themselves out of poverty,” said Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard University and director of Opportunity Insights, which studies the roots of inequality and factors that contribute to economic mobility.

He was one of four lead authors on the study, along with Johannes Stroebel and Theresa Kuchler of New York University, and Matthew O. Jackson of Stanford University and the Santa Fe Institute.

The findings show the limitations of many attempts to increase diversity – such as school transport, multifamily zoning and affirmative action. Bringing people together is not enough on its own to increase opportunities, the study suggests. Whether they form relationships is important.

“People interested in generating economic connectivity should also focus on promoting interaction between people of different incomes,” Stroebel said.

Jimarielle Bowie was born into a lower middle class family. Her parents divorced, lost jobs and lost homes. So when she befriended girls in high school who lived on the rich side of town, their lifestyle intrigued her. Her houses were bigger; ate different foods; and her parents – doctors, lawyers and pastors – had different goals and plans for their children, including college.

“My mom really instilled in us hard work — knowing our family history, you have to be better, you have to do better,” said Bowie, 24, who goes by Mari. “But I didn’t know anything about the SAT [Teste de Aptidão Escolar], and my friends’ parents signed them up for this class, so I thought I should do the same. I asked the parents of friends to review my personal information.”

Bowie became the first person in his family to earn a graduate degree. Today she’s a criminal lawyer — a job she got with a friend of one of those high school friends.

“My experience of meeting richer people made me enter those circles, understand how these people think,” he said. “I absolutely think it made a significant difference.”

“Social capital,” the network of people’s relationships and how they are influenced by them, has long intrigued social scientists. The first known use of the expression was in 1916 by LJ Hanifan, a school administrator in West Virginia. Since then, researchers have found that connections with more educated or affluent people, starting in childhood, can shape aspirations, higher education and professional careers.

But the new study — which used a significantly larger dataset than others, spanning 21 billion Facebook friendships — is the first to show that living in a place that promotes those connections yields better economic outcomes.

The researchers found that the more connections between rich and poor there were in a neighborhood, the better at lifting children out of poverty. After accounting for these connections, other characteristics the researchers looked at — including neighborhood racial makeup, poverty level, and quality of education — mattered less, or not at all, for upward social mobility.

“It’s very important, because I think what’s missing in the United States today, and what’s been falling catastrophically over the last 50 years, is what I call ‘bridging social capital’ – informal ties that lead us to people who are different from us,” said Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist who wrote “Bowling Alone” (ed. Simon & Schuster, R$116.98) and “Our Kids” (ed. Simon & Schuster, R$84.47), about the decline of social capital in the United States.

“It provides a number of avenues or clues by which we can start moving this country in a better direction.”

Other types of social capital are also relevant, such as fees for volunteering in a community and friendships with people from similar backgrounds. However, the study shows that even in places where other types of social capital are lacking, an increase in class relationships is enough to benefit children’s economic prospects.

It is this kind of social capital that has diminished as the country has become more segregated by class. In recent decades, people have been more likely to live in neighborhoods and attend schools with people of similar economic standing — behavior that social scientists say is driven by anxiety about moving down the income ladder in an era of rising inequality.

The analysis did not directly measure the role of race, which was not provided in the Facebook data. While there are techniques that researchers use to guess race, the authors of the new study did not use them. But in places with greater racial diversity, the study found fewer relationships between classes.

‘Successful culture’

The researchers focused on high schools, one of the few environments where people from all walks of life make friends at similar rates, and a place where people form lifelong friendships, before they start making decisions that can determine their trajectories. economic.

Angelo Rodriguez High School in Fairfield, Calif., which Mari Bowie attended, had more class-to-class friendships than the average for large public high schools.

Midway between Sacramento and San Francisco, Fairfield is an unusually diverse area, racially and economically, and three-quarters of the Rodriguez School’s students, out of about 2,000, are non-white. The school, which opened in 2001, had an inverted C-shaped catchment area, drawing students from outlying neighborhoods of the city — and that’s how Bowie ended up studying in a more affluent area. It also allows some students from outside the region to participate.

In general, larger and more diverse schools – both economically and racially – have a smaller share of class connections. It can be more difficult to make friends in large groups, and you are more likely to get together with people from similar backgrounds. But the Rodriguez school fostered cross-class friendships in both planned and unforeseen ways.

“On ‘Rod’ you become friends with everyone,” Bowie said. “That’s literally what this school does.”

One thing that may have helped was the school’s campus design, with a boardwalk around a central library, outdoor stage and court. This was deliberate, said John Diffenderfer, president of Aedis Architects, who designed the campus: “Accidental unstructured interactions between students were a very high priority.”

Escola Rodriguez has a block timetable [aulas mais longas e concentradas] where classes meet for two hours on alternate days. This creates small, diverse groups that spend more time together. When large institutions do this, they help foster friendships across social classes, according to the research. Separating students on the basis of academic achievement, through international baccalaureate or gifted programs, has the opposite effect.

Extracurricular activities and interest clubs are also important for bringing together students from different backgrounds, said Catie Coniconde, a Rodriguez school counselor who graduated from the school in 2006. Half of the students are enrolled in them.

“Boys are identified by their extracurricular activities rather than by race or socioeconomic status,” he said. “There are the athletes, the boys in the band, the ones who are interested in anime…”

As they pursue common extracurricular interests, students begin to share aspirations, Coniconde said. Getting a good grade on the SAT and attending a four-year college are common goals at Rodriguez, she said. Students from the wealthiest part of town often arrive with these goals, while many students from low-income families didn’t consider them before.

“It exactly felt like a successful culture,” she said. “The four-year momentum was huge at Rodriguez, and it still is today.”

_{Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves}