Poor kids with rich friends earn much more in adulthood

POOR children who have rich friends earn 20 per cent more as an adult than if they only associate with other people of the same wealth while growing up, a study by Harvard academics has found.

A person’s social circle as a child has a formative role on their schooling and choices and researchers used complex Facebook data to see how the financial standing of one’s friends affected their adult salary. They invented a term called “economic connectedness” to quantify how rich a person’s friendship group is.

This metric, they found, is pivotal in predicting upward income mobility.

The research, published in Nature, found that if a child deemed to be of low socio-economic status (SES) grows up around people of high SES then their adult income increases by one fifth.

“These data reveal the importance of social capital for climbing out of poverty. Connections between low- and high-ses individuals can affect aspirations, access to information and job opportunities,” said Oxford academic Noam Angrist and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth College, who were not involved in the research.