Friendship to end poverty | The Press

Over the past four decades, the financial circumstances into which children are born have increasingly determined their circumstances as adults. But a large new study, based on billions of social media connections, has highlighted a major exception to this pattern, which helps explain why some places offer a way out of poverty.

According to this new study, poor children who live in an area where people have more friendships that cross social class earn significantly more as adults.

The study, published Monday in Natureanalyzed the Facebook friendships of 72 million people, or 84% of American adults between the ages of 25 and 44.

Previously, it was clear that some neighborhoods were much better than others at removing barriers to upward social mobility, but it was unclear why. The new analysis — the largest of its kind — found that the extent of the ties between rich and poor explained why children in a neighborhood did better later in life, more than any other factor.

The implications are profound. The study found that if poor children grew up in neighborhoods where 70% of their friends were wealthy—the typical rate for higher-income children—it would increase their future earnings by 20%, on average.

These friendships between social classes — what the researchers have called economic connectedness — have had a stronger impact than the quality of the school, the family structure, the availability of jobs or the ethnic composition of a community. The study suggests that the people you know open up opportunities for you, while the growing social class divide in the United States robs you of them.

“Growing up in a community where ties cross class lines improves children’s outcomes and gives them a better chance of lifting themselves out of poverty,” said University economist Raj Chetty. Harvard and director of Opportunity Insights, which studies the roots of inequality and the factors contributing to economic mobility. He is 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 results show the limitations of many attempts to increase diversity, such as school transportation, multifamily zoning, and affirmative action. Bringing people together is not enough to increase opportunity, according to the study. The fact that they build relationships is just as important.

“People interested in building economic ties should also strive to bring people with different incomes together,” Stroebel said.

“Linking social capital”

Jimarielle Bowie grew up in a lower middle class family. His parents divorced, lost their jobs and their house. Also, when she befriended girls in high school who lived in the city’s affluent neighborhoods, their way of life intrigued her. Their homes were bigger, they ate different foods, and their parents—doctors, lawyers, and pastors—had different goals and plans for their children, especially when it came to college enrollment.

“My mom really pushed us to work hard, to know our family history, to be better, to do better,” said Jimarielle Bowie, 24, who goes by the name Mari. “But I didn’t know anything about the SAT test, and my friends’ parents signed them up for this class, so I figured I had to do it. I asked my friends’ parents to look at my personal documents. »

Jimarielle Bowie became the first person in her family to earn a post-secondary degree. She is now a criminal lawyer, a job she found through a friend of a high school friend of hers.

Social capital, that is, people’s network of relationships and how they are influenced by those relationships, has long puzzled social scientists. The first known use of this phrase dates back to 1916, by LJ Hanifan, a West Virginia school administrator. Since then, researchers have found that connections to more educated or affluent people, starting in childhood, can influence aspirations, higher education and careers.

But the new study, which uses a much larger dataset than other studies, covering 21 billion Facebook friendships, is the first to show that living somewhere that fosters those connections leads to better financial outcomes.

The researchers found that the more connections there were between rich and poor, the better the neighborhood was able to lift children out of poverty. After controlling for these links, other characteristics analyzed by the researchers—including neighborhood ethnic composition, poverty level, and school quality—were found to matter less, if at all, for mobility. ascending.

“It’s important because I think what we’re lacking today in America, and what’s been catastrophically diminished over the past 50 years, is what I call ‘bonding social capital’. — the informal ties that bring us to people unlike us,” said Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist who wrote Bowling Alone and Our Kidson the decline of social capital in the United States.

Other types of social capital are also important, such as volunteer rates in a community and friendships with people of the same origin. Yet the new study shows that even in places where there are no other types of social capital, an increase in social class relations is enough to improve children’s economic prospects. It is this type of social capital that has diminished as social segregation has deepened in the country. In recent decades, people have become more likely to live in neighborhoods and attend schools with people of similar economic status – behavior that social scientists say is driven by fear of falling down of the income scale at a time of growing inequality.

The analysis did not directly measure the role of race, which did not appear in Facebook’s data. (While there are techniques used by researchers to guess race, the authors of the new study did not use them.) But in more ethnically diverse places, the study found fewer interclass relationships. .

A “culture of success”

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

Angelo Rodriguez Middle School in Fairfield, Calif., which Jimarielle Bowie attended, had more cross-class friendships than the average for large public schools.

Fairfield, midway between Sacramento and San Francisco, is an exceptionally ethnically and economically diverse area, and three-quarters of Rodriguez High’s approximately 2,000 students are students of color. The school, which opened in 2001, served an area in the shape of an inverted C, including neighborhoods at the ends of the city — which is how Jimarielle Bowie ended up commuting to a more affluent area to go to school. It also allows some students living outside the perimeter to attend school.

In general, larger and more diverse schools, both economically and ethnically, have a lower share of interclass relations. It can be harder to make friends in large groups, and there’s a greater chance of forming cliques with people from similar backgrounds. But Rodriguez High nurtured cross-class friendships in ways that were both planned and unintentional.

“Being at Rod, you become friends with everyone,” Bowie says. That’s literally what this school does. »

The school’s campus layout, with a promenade around a central library, an outdoor stage, and a playground, may have helped. This was deliberate, said John Diffenderfer, president of Aedis Architects, who designed the campus: “Unstructured accidental interactions between students were a very high priority. »

Rodriguez High has a schedule in which classes meet for two hours each, every other day. This creates small, diverse groups that spend a lot of time together. When large schools do this, it helps foster friendships between classes, according to the study. Separating students based on academic achievement, through gifted programs or international baccalaureates, has the opposite effect.

Extracurricular activities and interest clubs also play an important role in bringing together students from different backgrounds, said Catie Coniconde, a school counselor at Rodriguez, who also graduated from that school in 2006. Half of School enrollment is enrolled in these clubs.

While sharing extracurricular interests, students begin to share common aspirations, Ms.^me Coniconde. Doing well on the SAT exam and getting into college for four years are common goals for Rodriguez, she says.

Students from more affluent neighborhoods in the city usually arrive with these goals, while many students from low-income families hadn’t thought of them before.

“It feels like a culture of success,” she says. The promotion of the four years of studies was enormous in Rod, and it still is today. »

This article was first published in the New York Times.