According to international experts who analyzed 21 billion Facebook friendships in the US, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is true.

Children’s prospects of improving their future economic standing may be improved by growing up in a community where people of different social classes interact.

The conclusion, which is supported by an assessment of around 21 billion Facebook friendships in the US, is made public as part of two studies published in Nature.

It has been suggested that a person’s social capital, or the quality of their social network and community, has a significant impact on a variety of areas, including economics, health, and education.

However, assessing social capital has proven to be challenging, with previous research concentrating on limited datasets or surveys that only include a small number of communities.

Raj Chetty and colleagues created and analyzed a number of unique metrics of social capital for every ZIP code, high school, and college in the US using Facebook data.

The anonymized data came from a sample of more than 70 million Facebook users in the US between the ages of 25 and 44, and socioeconomic status was calculated by combining factors including college attendance, cell phone model used, and median income by ZIP code.

The proportion of friends with high socioeconomic status among those with low socioeconomic status, which the authors refer to as economic connectedness, is one of the best indicators of upward income mobility observed to date, according to the authors.

The authors think that if children from low-income families grew up in counties with the same level of economic connections as the average child from a high-income family in the US, their incomes as adults would go up by 20%.

In a second study, Chetty and his co-authors tried to figure out what makes these kinds of social interactions happen across different levels of income.

When comparing groups, they distinguish between variations in friending bias and differences in exposure (the proportion of high-socioeconomic status individuals a person meets in their schools or religious organizations).

According to the authors, segregation is responsible for around half of the social isolation in the US, while friending bias is responsible for the other half.

The authors show that friending bias can be minimized by changing institutional structures and regulations.

They conclude that using the new metrics used in these studies, academics and policymakers might learn from regions with high levels of social capital and provide aid to communities wanting to strengthen economic connectivity and other types of social capital.

Image Credit: Getty

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