Opinion What are friends for? Climbing the income ladder, for one. – The Washington Post

It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.That bitter aphorism has been part of American parlance for at least a century. Now it has gotten a powerful empirical boost. A team of researchers led by Harvard’s Raj Chetty used data from 72.2 million Facebook accounts to analyze how likely people at the bottom of the ladder are to have friendships with people near the top. What they discovered wasn’t entirely surprising:People with higher incomes have a lot of higher-income friends, while those with lower incomes mostly socialize with each other. And that effect seems to be particularly strong at the top.If you are in the top 10 percent by socioeconomic status (which social scientists abbreviate as “SES”), then on average a third of your Facebook friends will also be in the top 10 percent. Meanwhile, the bottom half of the distribution will provide maybe 1 in 6 of your friends.Some of this is obviously an artifact of our educational sorting system: If you went to Harvard Law School, you probably know a lot of rich lawyers. But that’s clearly not all that is going on here. Chetty, et al., looked at neighborhoods as well as individuals and found that…
Read More