Why it matters: This data point, from a study published in the journal Nature today, highlights the power of friendship in the real world.
We know that accumulating friends at different stages of our lives can reduce stress, prolong life, improve our performance at work and even make us better parents. We know that friendships with our neighbors can be the difference between life and death in tragedies and natural disasters. And now we know that cross-class friendships are drivers of wealth and success for less fortunate children.
The big picture: The study authors performed a first-of-its-kind analysis of 72 million Facebook kisses among US adults.
What they found: If poor kids grew up in neighborhoods in which 70% of their friends were rich, their future incomes were 20% higher than their counterparts who grew up without those ties across the class. This was a stronger predictor of future income than factors such as family structure and school quality, as well as the racial composition and availability of work in the child’s community.
Reality check: It’s not that simple. Friendships across the classroom are becoming increasingly difficult in our divided country.
For example, for people in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution, only 2.5 percent of their friends are in the top 10 percent, Johannes Stroebel, an economist at NYU and one of the study’s authors, tells Axios. There are some cities that do better than others. In Salt Lake City and Minneapolis, nearly half of the friends of people in the bottom half of the income distribution are in the top half. But in Indianapolis, only about 30% of the poorest people’s friends are rich. And there are some spaces where cross-class ties are built more often, Stroebel says. Churches, temples and other religious places belong to this category.
What to watch: There are big policies — like school busing, differentiating college admissions by class, and increasing the availability of affordable housing — that can boost the prevalence of cross-class friendships. But we can all do more to diversify our friend circles.
