Can people move up the economic ladder? A recent study using 21 billion Facebook friendships released by Meta suggests they can. The key is who your friends are.
A paper submitted into the Nature online journal by Raj Chetty and other researchers titled “Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility,” looked at social capital by zip code.
The study examined the connectedness between different types of people, the formation of cliques in friendship groups and volunteering.
One study conducted found that people are more likely to move out of poverty and up the economic ladder in areas where low- and high-income people build friendships.
“Growing up in a community connected across class lines improves kids’ outcomes and gives them a better shot at rising out of poverty,” Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist and lead researcher on the study, told The New York Times.
According to the data, children of low-income families can expect to make $36.3K annually. The median income for Longmont residents 16 years old and older who have been employed for at least a year is $37,753.
Boulder County residents are 55.4% more likely to befriend people of a higher socioeconomic status, according to the study. This is likely because Boulder County ranks in the 99th percentile across the country in having high-income families living in the same areas as low-income families.
Although the exposure rate is high, Boulder County low-income families are 11.8% less likely to befriend someone from a high-income family than in other areas of the nation.
Longmont straddles two counties, Boulder and Weld. The numbers change depending on which county a person lives in.
Low-income Weld County children are predicted to make an annual average of $34.2K annually, a difference of $2.1K.
Only 43.7% of low-income families are likely to form friendships with high-income families.
Although the county is vast, it ranks in the 82nd percentile for high-income families living in the same communities as low-income families. However, low-income families are 13.3% less likely to befriend their high-income neighbors.
“... economic connectedness (EC)—the share of high-SES friends among low-SES people—is strongly associated with upward income mobility, whereas other forms of social capital are not,” according to the paper. “We caution, however, that this finding does not imply that EC is the best or most important measure of social capital in general.”
