Opvallend en relevant onderzoek ontdekte ik via de NY Times: Vast New Study Shows a Key to Reducing Poverty: More Friendships Between Rich and Poor. Het onderzoek gebeurde op basis van heel Facebook-data en werd gepubliceerd in Nature. Op basis van miljarden connecties tussen mensen, besluiten Chetty en collega’s dat arme kinderen later aanzienlijk meer verdienen als ze in een gebied wonen waar ze meer vriendschappen hebben die de klassengrenzen overschrijden.

Concreet betekent het dat als arme kinderen opgroeiden in buurten waar 70 procent van hun vrienden rijk was – het typische vriendschapspercentage voor kinderen met een hoger inkomen – dit hun toekomstige inkomen gemiddeld met 20 procent doet toenemen.

En ook opvallend: deze vriendschappen lijken een grotere impact te hebben – in de VS althans – dan de kwaliteit van de school, de gezinsstructuur, de beschikbaarheid van werk,…

Abstract van het onderzoek:

Social capital—the strength of an individual’s social network and community—has been identified as a potential determinant of outcomes ranging from education to health. However, efforts to understand what types of social capital matter for these outcomes have been hindered by a lack of social network data. Here, in the first of a pair of papers⁹, we use data on 21 billion friendships from Facebook to study social capital. We measure and analyse three types of social capital by ZIP (postal) code in the United States: (1) connectedness between different types of people, such as those with low versus high socioeconomic status (SES); (2) social cohesion, such as the extent of cliques in friendship networks; and (3) civic engagement, such as rates of volunteering. These measures vary substantially across areas, but are not highly correlated with each other. We demonstrate the importance of distinguishing these forms of social capital by analysing their associations with economic mobility across areas. The share of high-SES friends among individuals with low SES—which we term economic connectedness—is among the strongest predictors of upward income mobility identified to date. Other social capital measures are not strongly associated with economic mobility. If children with low-SES parents were to grow up in counties with economic connectedness comparable to that of the average child with high-SES parents, their incomes in adulthood would increase by 20% on average. Differences in economic connectedness can explain well-known relationships between upward income mobility and racial segregation, poverty rates, and inequality. To support further research and policy interventions, we publicly release privacy-protected statistics on social capital by ZIP code at https://www.socialcapital.org.