It seems that poverty and reduced opportunity is generally inherited. And it's maintained by the content of social circles which themselves are dependent on who is in your local neighborhood. We need to facilitate more friendships between the rich and poor.
Over the last four decades, the financial circumstances into which children have been born have increasingly determined where they have ended up as adults. But an expansive new study, based on billions of social media connections, has uncovered a powerful exception to that pattern that helps explain why certain places offer a path out of poverty.
For poor children, living in an area where people have more friendships that cut across class lines significantly increases how much they earn in adulthood, the new research found.
Previously, it was clear that some neighborhoods were much better than others at removing barriers to climbing the income ladder, but it wasn’t clear why. The new analysis — the biggest of its kind — found the degree to which the rich and poor were connected explained why a neighborhood’s children did better later in life, more than any other factor.
The effect was profound. The study found that if poor children grew up in neighborhoods where 70 percent of their friends were wealthy — the typical rate of friendship for higher-income children — it would increase their future incomes by 20 percent, on average.
These cross-class friendships — what the researchers called economic connectedness — had a stronger impact than school quality, family structure, job availability or a community’s racial composition. The people you know, the study suggests, open up opportunities, and the growing class divide in the United States closes them off.
Researchers say economic connectedness is a better predictor of a community’s upward mobility than any other characteristic studied yet.
Bringing people together is not enough on its own to increase opportunity, the study suggests. Whether they form relationships matters just as much.
“People interested in creating economic connectedness should equally focus on getting people with different incomes to interact,” Professor Stroebel said.
Growing up, Jimarielle Bowie says, her family was lower-middle class. Her parents divorced, lost jobs and lost homes in the housing crisis of the late 2000s. So when she made friends in high school with girls who lived on the rich side of town, their lifestyles intrigued her. Their houses were bigger; they ate different foods; and their parents — doctors, lawyers and pastors — had different goals and plans for their children, including applying for college.
“My mom really instilled working hard in us — being knowledgeable about our family history, you have to be better, you have to do better,” said Ms. Bowie, 24, who goes by Mari. “But I didn’t know anything about the SAT, and my friends’ parents signed up for this class, so I thought I should do that. I had friends’ parents look at my personal statements.”
Ms. Bowie became the first person in her family to get a postgraduate degree. She’s now a criminal defense lawyer — a job she found through a friend of one of those high school friends.
“My experience meeting people who were more affluent, I got to get in those circles, understand how those people think,” she said. “I absolutely think it made a significant difference.”
But the new study is the first to show that living in a place that fosters these connections causes better economic outcomes, using a significantly larger data set than other studies, covering 21 billion Facebook friendships.
The researchers limited the data, which did not include names, to active Facebook users. They estimated users’ incomes based on their ZIP codes, college, phone model, age and other characteristics.
For each low-income Facebook user, the researchers determined where the person was currently living, and how many high-income friends they had. That gave them a measure of how economically connected each neighborhood was. Then they compared the new data with earlier research that used tax records to measure how much a particular neighborhood raised low-income children’s economic prospects.
The researchers were also able to link almost 20 million users to both their high school and to their parents on Facebook. Using those ties, they repeated their analysis, this time on high school connections between children of rich and poor parents, to measure the impact of relationships made early in life. They did a similar analysis for teenage Instagram users. And they built on an earlier analysis of siblings who moved at different ages to show that it was the place that made a difference, versus something about the families who moved to those places.
Each analysis had the same result: The more connections between the rich and poor, the better the neighborhood was at lifting children from poverty. After accounting for these connections, other characteristics that the researchers analyzed — including the neighborhood’s racial composition, poverty level and school quality — mattered less for upward mobility, or not at all.
“It’s a big deal because I think what we lack in America today, and what’s been dropping catastrophically over the last 50 years, is what I call ‘bridging social capital’ — informal ties that lead us to people who are unlike us,” said Robert Putnam, the political scientist at Harvard who wrote “Bowling Alone” and “Our Kids,” about the decline of social capital in the United States. “And it’s a really big deal because it provides a number of avenues or clues by which we might begin to move this country in a better direction.”
Our friends shape what we see as normal. If our friends decide that being 15 pounds heavier is normal and acceptable, then we’ll probably regard being 15 pounds heavier as normal, too.
This is the key point. Your friends strongly influence how you perceive reality. First, they strongly influence how you see yourself. It’s very hard to measure your own worth, your own competence, unless people you admire and respect see you as worthy, see you as competent. Plus, if your friends say, “We’re all smart, talented people,” you’ll begin to see yourself that way, too.
Second, your friends shape how you see the world. A few decades ago, a theorist named James J. Gibson pioneered the theory of “affordances.” The basic idea is that what you see in a situation is shaped by what you are capable of doing in a situation. Dennis Proffitt of the University of Virginia has demonstrated this theory in a bunch of ways: People who are less physically fit perceive hills to be steeper than people who are fit, because they find it harder to walk up them. People carrying heavy backpacks perceive steeper hills than people without them.
The phenomenon works socioeconomically, too. Kids who grew up with college-educated parents walk onto the Princeton campus and see a different campus than kids who have never been around a college at all. Without even thinking about it, more-affluent kids might communicate to their less-affluent friends ways of seeing that make such places look less alien, less imposing, more accessible.
Third, our friends alter our desires. Desire is notoriously mimetic. We want what other people want and tell us is worth wanting. If you grow up around friends who naturally aspire to be doctors and accountants and engineers, you are probably going to aspire to such things, too.
Entering into a friendship can be a life-altering act, and entering into a friendship with someone different from yourself can be life-transforming. The philosopher Alexander Nehamas argues that when we enter into a friendship, we’re surrendering our future selves to that relationship, in part because the friend may call forth parts of ourselves that don’t yet exist.
Writing in Comment magazine, David Henreckson observes that when you venture into a new friendship you may wind up taking on new interests, new pursuits and even new enemies. It’s daunting: “If in the early days of a relationship we knew all the ways that a particularly intimate friendship would change us, how it might transfigure some of our core values, we would be excused for being a little bit reluctant to jump in.”
We had campers whose parents led Goldman Sachs, campers from the poorest areas of Brooklyn and the Bronx, and campers like me from in between.
Camp wasn’t the rich kids tutoring the less-rich kids on how to live. Camp was a place where we lived, for a month or two each summer, intensely intermingled lives. We learned about one another’s worlds and created the joint world out of our own friendships. We learned a capacity that I wouldn’t have been able to name until decades later — social range.
Those unexpected friendships, the social scientists tell us, turn out to be awesomely powerful.
No comments:
Post a Comment