Having Rich Childhood Friends is Linked To a Higher Salary as an Adult (newscientist.com) 96
Children who grow up in low-income households but who make friends that come from higher-income homes are more likely to have higher salaries in adulthood than those who have fewer such friends. From a report: "There's been a lot of speculation... that the individual's access to social capital, their social networks and the community they live in might matter a lot for a child's chance to rise out of poverty," says Raj Chetty at Harvard University. To find out if that holds up, he and his colleagues analysed anonymised Facebook data belonging to 72.2 million people in the US between the ages of 25 and 44, accounting for 84 per cent of the age group's US population. It is relatively nationally representative of that age group, he says.
The team used a machine-learning algorithm to determine each person's socio-economic status (SES), combining data such as the median income of people who live in the same region, the person's age and sex and the value of their phone model as a proxy for individual income. The median household income was found to be close to $58,000. The researchers then split the individuals into two groups: those who were below the median SES and those who were above. If people made friends randomly, you would expect half of each person's friends to be in each income group. But instead, for people below the median SES, only 38 per cent of their friends were above the median SES. Meanwhile, 70.6 per cent of the friends of people above the median SES were also a part of the same group.
The team used a machine-learning algorithm to determine each person's socio-economic status (SES), combining data such as the median income of people who live in the same region, the person's age and sex and the value of their phone model as a proxy for individual income. The median household income was found to be close to $58,000. The researchers then split the individuals into two groups: those who were below the median SES and those who were above. If people made friends randomly, you would expect half of each person's friends to be in each income group. But instead, for people below the median SES, only 38 per cent of their friends were above the median SES. Meanwhile, 70.6 per cent of the friends of people above the median SES were also a part of the same group.
No... reaaaaally??? (Score:1)
I'm shocked...
Re:No... reaaaaally??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Science and these studies aren't about trying to shock you, but Science is to measure and show what we think intuitively is actually true or not.
There is a lot of stuff that we intuitively know, a lot of what we think is just common knowledge and is true, is actually true, but there is also stuff that we think is true and makes a lot of sense, until we study it and find out that it isn't true, but we were just following a superstition.
Over the course of human history, we have explained why some people are poor and others are not, often without any real science behind it, and just making some sort of assumptions, or using the Pseudoscience at the time to make a connection where it may not be made. ...
You are poor, because you are a Sinner and you had displeased God/gods.
You are poor, because you were born with improper genetics, or in a wrong class of people.
You are poor, because you are lazy.
You are poor, because you are stupid.
They found out that if you grew up in a poor family, the chances are you will be poor, but they were always cases where someone had broke the chain.
This study, seems to show that your tolerance towards poverty is often influenced by your peers and your family.
If you grow up in an impoverished area, with poor family and friends, That is how you model your life as. Just as long as you have food, and shelter you are doing fine. If you grew up with middle class or wealthy friends then there is a different life style to help influence your behavior.
I grew up Lower Middle Class. Some of my best friends were Upper Middle Class. I got to play with my friends newer and faster computers making me want to upgrade my TI99-4a, and work to get one, which then I learned to program and find something I felt talented in. Seeing that my friends Father was active and involved as he worked 9-5 vs 2-1, who also hanging out with him had also had me learn stuff too, as he was an engineer I got to learn a bunch of cool stuff that my family considered a waste of time and effort. While my family, taught me to do whatever it takes to get the job done, other families taught me to follow my interests and passion, and lucky for me my parents were accommodating to that at the time.
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You are poor, because you are a Sinner and you had displeased God/gods.
You are poor, because you were born with improper genetics, or in a wrong class of people.
You are poor, because you are lazy.
You are poor, because you are stupid.
Those can be reasons. Sometimes you are poor because of luck, or bad decisions. Or you lack drive.
They found out that if you grew up in a poor family, the chances are you will be poor, but they were always cases where someone had broke the chain.
This study, seems to show that your tolerance towards poverty is often influenced by your peers and your family.
Yes, I broke those chains. And my tolerance for poverty is pretty low - for myself. If you come from a poor family or location, you will have to work pretty hard to break those chains, and it will take time. It will also take strategy and planning. I put myself through college, worked quite hard. I am driven, and yes, pretty intelligent. I also shifted work to remain relevant to the workforce, and lived with
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The biggest reason for child poverty today is single motherhood. The 85% of black children raised by single mothers are the primary reason for the teen pregnancy (which is a positive feedback loop for black girls), unemployment, addiction, and violent crime among young black men who have no prospect of marriage or a lifelong family relaitonship, except with their mothers who couldn't or elected not to marry.
It's not much better for whites, though the number is only 30% but continues to grow. Both populations are being exposed to the "no such thing as gender" cultural meme, which is aggravating the single mother situation. And the single mother factor dominates every other risk factor, even more than being a crack baby.
I'm not certain why you felt you had to post as AC, but the single mother situation is indeed an issue. And it ties into a lot of problems. Poverty, incarceration rates, education. And here's the Washington post: https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com] in response to a NYT article telling us there is basically no problem no problem, and to quit picking on single mothers.
Less and less men want to raise another guy's children.
One of the big issues with woke culture is that they deny biology and evolution to an e
Re: No... reaaaaally??? (Score:1)
No shit (Score:1)
I guess they need to do a study to find out what everyone who grew up middle class or poor already knows, simply by just being alive.
I have just one word for you (Score:3)
Are you listening?
Plastics!
Correlation vs causation (Score:2)
Correlation vs causation
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Is this all prerequisite to building support for the Feds trying to force cities zoning to allow high density housing to be introduced into nice, single family housing neighborhoods?
Is this to justify allowing more section 8 housing into regular middle class and upper middle class neighborhoods?
It just seems strange all this coming out....coindicing with such pushes by the left to
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Obama was doing this. [investors.com]
And Biden is pushing to continue forward those efforts [nypost.com]
Perpetuating white flight, exurbs, etc. People with stuff to lose — sanity among those things — won't submit to the nightmare of your urban hellscapes. You're going to need a GULAG system to achieve your aims.
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Thank you for reminding that there are still people in America advocating for increased segregation as if it is a good thing. The past 6 years have been a wake up call for people who were blind to this reality.
That second article you linked to was simply disgusting. Her assumption that she would need to (feebly) defend that she isn't a racist in her article was spot on.
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You seem to read in race, when I never mentioned that at all.
I'm just against forcing established neighborhoods of single family dwellings, that are family oriented, low crime...to incorporate high density, low income housing which has the requisite crime and danger that comes with that strata of society...and you kill home values for people that have much of their wealth tied up in
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I'm not talking about race here....
You didn't say it, but ultimately that is what it comes down to. Not saying it's overt, or even intentional, but that is part of the problem of systemic racism. There is still a distinct racial divide around homeownership. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, or bad, for not wanting the changes based on the reasoning you provide. I am, however, pointing out where it still comes back to a racial problem.
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If you want to try to claim I'm projecting, maybe you need to look in a mirror instead.
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What you are asking for is just racism by another name [washingtonpost.com]. This is why informed people read race into it.
Are you
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So, is it your belief that there are no white inner city slums? If not, then why hunt for racism when simply not wanting criminal elements moved in suffices? Projection, perhaps?
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There's no need to hunt for racism [washingtonpost.com]. The numbers prove it.
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You seem to read in race, when I never mentioned that at all.
No but there's a lot of correlation between race and poverty, so segregating people by poverty often results in segregating people by race.
Indeed, without reading the original paper, my initial reaction is to suspect a race-related root cause for these results. There were studies a while back showing that people who were better at "code switching" between more traditional ethnic behavior and dialects and the behavior and dialects of the local white culture, whatever culture that might be, were better able
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It's so useful even ASCII supports code switching; 0x0E and 0x0F
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"I'm just against forcing established neighborhoods of single-family dwellings, "
Established neighborhoods of single-family dwellings are, in fact, "forced" creations (through zoning etc) that have caused a certain amount of the problems we have with stratification. One can rarely solve a problem that was caused by a "forcing" without an opposing "forcing". Pretending the current "forced state" is actually a natural state, which it is not, is just an excuse to avoid trying to solve the problem.
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That's pretty much what happened in my home town. Instead of creating segregated areas for the poor, the "social" houses were put into various neighborhoods. Kinda like a social experiement. My apartment was next to one such "social" house. A lot of these people quickly noticed that the "posh" people around them aren't the most handy ones when it comes to plumbing, bricklaying or other "menial" jobs. And we quickly noticed that these people are really good at that. Hell, my car never worked as great as it d
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So, two anecdotes that cancel each other.
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I guess we can deduce that it was a good idea to ship all our misbehaving people across the ocean.
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Next thing you know they will be bussing them Ni--ers into our schools!
-You are basically repeating the arguments against school integration from the 1950s.
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to allow high density housing to be introduced into nice, single family housing neighborhoods?
The 'burbs aren't nice. They are a soul crushing ugly ponzi scheme partly subsidised by poor people. It's utter insanity that they still exist.
It's astonishing, actually, and I didn't know about it until recently, but the burbs are financially unsustainable. If you're a conservative you should be against them for fiscal reasons, if you're a liberal there's plenty of additional reasons, and if you have any art in yo
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Correlation has use. Even if it isn't the cause. Because it brings two things that may have a common source that may not have been considered.
Correlation the amount of spider webs I need to clean up is tied to how often I have my windows open.
So yes Open Windows don't create Spider Webs. However Open Windows allow Spiders inside the house. And Spiders make Spider Webs. So If I open my windows, I will bring in spiders into my home and they make webs. I don't have to see the spiders entering my Open W
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The other variables are professional but low income parents. And the like.
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Wait ... your path to non-professional work was education?
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Yup. We are primarily basing our societies and policies on the output of junk pseudo-science cooked in an echo-chamber.
https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21831948&cid=62760116
and in other news (Score:2)
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There are so few fathers who get custody, especially when the parents never married and the father can better provide child support with a larger income, that their effects are lost in the results of single mothers. That's not to judge one gender or the other as better at being a single parent, but the changes in our society have created a flood of single mothers.
I'm in the wrong line of work (Score:1)
Children are going to make friends based on the children they're around. If they live in a wealthy school district, it's because they themselves have wealthy parents. If they make friends in dance classes or gymnastics or lacrosse teams, i.e. things that get expensive quickly so they require parents to be sufficiently wealthy to put them into those classes in the first place, again, they'll be around wealthy people. Connections happen, mistakes that lead to a cycle of poverty are easier to avoid, and wouldn
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Many people don't have those few hundred extra dollars, nor the capacity to generate those few hundred extra dollars. So without a mechanism to help them and the rich who also suffer from the stratification are no closer to an improvement for everyone.
Re:I'm in the wrong line of work (Score:5, Informative)
No, this is interesting because it's not just that. They're saying that children being friends with wealthier peers correlates with more wealth later even after adjusting for family income.
Is it surprising, no. But it does preclude attributing it entirely to family wealth, like you just did.
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No, this is interesting because it's not just that. They're saying that children being friends with wealthier peers correlates with more wealth later even after adjusting for family income.
It's almost as if the OP didn't RTFA and wanted to sound smart like the usual "correlation != causation" dorks :)
I can add an anecdote: My dad went to school with a guy who ended up becoming one of the richest people in the country (not the US), and surprise surprise, once things took off for him, my dad had a great position without having to grind for years as a corporate drone. Things blew up before I even graduated so I had to get a job the regular way.
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Children are going to make friends based on the children they're around. If they live in a wealthy school district, it's because they themselves have wealthy parents.
What they looked for in the study was whether communities with more integrated wealthy and poor families had better outcomes for the children of the poor families. This is also pretty obvious, but they indeed found that it did.
Researchers used a machine learning algorithm (Score:3)
In other words, they don't want to talk about the specific criteria they used to select the group of people they define as "low income people who belong to a social network of higher-income people." Or maybe the criteria are so complex that they can't clearly communicate what those criteria are.
Or maybe they're just using a buzzword (Score:2)
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Yeah, the math is there, but I don't buy it. For example, SES (socio-economic status) is defined as:
- The median household income of the participant's zip code
- The price of the facebook user's phone
That's a pretty imprecise shortcut. For example, I'm considered "upper" income, but I have a Moto G phone, $200 unlocked. My 27-year-old son is "low" income, but has the top-of-the-line Samsung, $1,200, which he thinks was "free."
Oh yes, and they combined that with a "statistically weighted" factor determine thr
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Well, you are definitely not on the upper end of the SES scale then! But it's OK, the machine learning algorithm will figure out that you're really a well-off person, because you know, that's what machine learning does.
Attend a house of worship (Score:5, Interesting)
Religious institutions are one of the best ways to get to know people across class lines. They can provide a fantastic support network, both on the giving and the receiving ends. They cut right across age lines, too. My immediate family suffered through a divorce, as did my wife's family. With the support and example of some incredibly nice people in the church, we were able to overcome those obstacles and were ultimately able to help many others ourselves. When we started out, we had nothing.
The importance of a support network can't be underestimated. Get your family to a house of worship.
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I tell people all the time that one of the things I like about being part of a church is that it's one of the only places where I meet people who aren't part of my high-earning well-educated bubble.
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Many also come with a history of religious genocide. The Crusades, the slaughter of native Americans, the Nazis, the Taliban, and the contemporary slaughter of the Hutu by the Tutsi in Rwanda all belie the positive cultural effects of religion. Joining a local religious community requires some caution and some research to avoid involvement in dangerous and despicable behavior.
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You don't agree that joining a religion requires caution to avoid joining a culture of abuse and genocide? Whether those and religion "emerge from human natue", it's a part of human nature too often cloaked in the will of one god or another, and therefore deserves some caution when participating in a religion. If you're considering any faith, may I urge you to read the faith's holy books to understand them? Christianity, for example, is founded on the human sacrifice of an entirely innocent man in one of th
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Religious institutions are one of the best ways to get to know people across class lines. They can provide a fantastic support network, both on the giving and the receiving ends. They cut right across age lines, too.
And are founded on lies, the spreading of lies, and giving false hope to the vulnerable while undermining their faith in proven sources of aid that don't depend on wishing really, really hard.
This is why job training programs exist (Score:2)
We know that many children born into poverty, aren't taught good work habits or work skills by their parents. Often, the reason their parents are poor is precisely because they don't know how to work, or how to do jobs that pay well. That lack of skill is pass on to their children.
Job training programs provide this missing training, and often helps lead to good-paying jobs and a path out of poverty. Similarly, it makes sense that poor children who have friends who are better off, learn some of the work habi
Not what you know, who you know... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many times it's now how much experience or knowledge you have, but who you are friends with.
I have seen countless examples of people who were absolutely terrible in their field being hired for a job because they were friends with someone in management who gave them a recommendation.
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In other words...water is wet.
The world has operated this way since it started spinning and Thag and Andy the cave men appeared.
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This has always been a factor, but it's also true when you're not even talking about existing friends. I remember many years ago, applying for an I.T. job with a large brewery. There was a brief technical part of the interview, but it felt like the most important part for them was walking me around the facility to meet and interact with various people and to try to gauge how well I fit with their culture. (I didn't get the job, which didn't surprise me a bit because I was sick with the flu and just getting
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I have seen countless examples of people who were absolutely terrible in their field being hired for a job because they were friends with someone in management who gave them a recommendation.
often this can be attributed to a company simply not needing a talented candidate.
unless the company is already significantly struggling with the position's responsibilities, many companies can get by just fine hiring someone who sucks.
but everyone tends to agree that it's greatly preferable to *like* the people you work with.
so if the job is between someone who sucks vs someone who is OK... but it's practically guaranteed you'll enjoy working with the sucky person (per a personal recommendation), guess w
Not surprising. (Score:5, Insightful)
Having Rich Childhood Friends is Linked To a Higher Salary as an Adult
Being friends with the rich certainly opens up opportunities for advancement through nepotism and corruption. However, even limited contact with the wealthy people will make you realise that if these muppets could improve their lot in life so can you.
Re:Not surprising. (Score:5, Insightful)
Having Rich Childhood Friends is Linked To a Higher Salary as an Adult
Being friends with the rich certainly opens up opportunities for advancement through nepotism and corruption. However, even limited contact with the wealthy people will make you realise that if these muppets could improve their lot in life so can you.
I think the second aspect is more important than people realize. It's basically role models. If everyone you know works in low-skilled trades then you'll probably decide to do the same.
But if you now have some friends who are going to get a higher education or even advanced degree, or start a business, or simply pursue a well paid career. Well then those life paths suddenly seem a lot more realistic and you just might got for it.
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Having Rich Childhood Friends is Linked To a Higher Salary as an Adult
Being friends with the rich certainly opens up opportunities for advancement through nepotism and corruption. However, even limited contact with the wealthy people will make you realise that if these muppets could improve their lot in life so can you.
I think the second aspect is more important than people realize. It's basically role models. If everyone you know works in low-skilled trades then you'll probably decide to do the same.
But if you now have some friends who are going to get a higher education or even advanced degree, or start a business, or simply pursue a well paid career. Well then those life paths suddenly seem a lot more realistic and you just might got for it.
The word 'role model' still gives large numbers of the rich far more credit than they deserve, it's more like a demystification of the rich. Once you realise that these people are not the genetically superior class of human being they purport to be, that somebody like Jared Kushner didn't win 'the great meritocracy' so much as that his father gamed the meritocracy by bribing Jared's way to the top of the heap and that elite institutions like Harvard are fundamentally corrupt for allowing that to happen, it
Obviously. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you have rich friends even if you're poor you're most likely to have other "capital" such as social habitus and manners, education or cognitive ability. You're also more likely to raise your standards of what is possible due to exposure and observation of wealth and status. And you're more likely to see the real cause of poverty vis-a-vis to the "you're too dumb" (although that can be) or "you're not working hard enough" tropes and develop strategies as not to fall into the "work yourself to death" trap to acquire wealth.
I know this from personal experience. My family went from wealth to welfare due to some stupid/bad decisions, inability to talk and plan things through and a wasteful way with money. At age 13 I was on welfare - albeit German welfare, which is not much but enough to get by, especially if you have quite a few toys that you can sell off over the course of a few years. ... Anyway, I still live minimalist today and generally approach life with a low-risk/low-reward strategy due to the experiences in my teens and having a not so reliable close family. But my social background, my education, my upbringing and my cognitive ability enables me to basically chill my way through life whilst living like a luxury student im my 50ies by setting the right priorities. I carried this through into the upbringing for my daughter, with one exemplary rule being "For books there is always money". If she wanted a book to read, I would get it, regardless of the balance on my account. Just like my mom. The payoff for education is immeasurable.
Someone from a different social background would be considered a loser, but I experience quite a bit of envy due to the freedoms I enjoy. And my background puts me in a position where I'd rather go with a lower income and live off water and oatmeal that with an inappropriately low salary for a job that should pay more and has nothing but dimwitt deciders governing my software projects. Basically my social and cultural capital enables me to tell potential bosses to go and f*ck themselves, regardless of the fact that I don't have any fortune aside from a van full of furniture and stuff (still too much), some electronic devices, two bikes and a larger Motorscooter.
That's a big plus in life and it impacts my approach to money and money-making.
So yeah, if I have an income, then it will be higher than that of a kid that grew up poor on money *and* social habitus, education, status and culture.
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Here, here. I think this is the crux of those who complain about being "slaves" because they have to work. Or even "it takes two incomes". No, it doesn't. I raised my daughter by myself by simply not "requiring" so many nifty things. For instance, every car I've ever owned has been 5-10 years old when I bought it.
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If you have rich friends even if you're poor you're most likely to have other "capital" such as social habitus and manners, education or cognitive ability. .
At this point I can say you haven't met many rich people.
facebook (Score:2)
This study does not account for people smart enough to skip using Facebook.
Not true (Score:2)
I befriended Tom Anderson on Myspace and my salary still sucks!
The conclusion (Score:2)
I have a theory (Score:2)
Have rich parents is even better.
In summation (Score:1)
But to add complication: If the key is to friend those higher than yourself, it's beneficial for those lower and detrimental to those higher. So if you consider yourself high on the economic spectrum, careful about friending too many below yourself.
Phone Model != Income (Score:4, Interesting)
All this shows is that people tend to purchase the same phone model as their friends. It probably also means that people with more expensive phones are more likely to be friends (on Facebook) with other people that also prioritize expensive phones.
I do volunteer work with with people that have trouble making rent. I help them sort out their finances, find better employment, and the organization that I volunteer with gives them money to help them stay in their homes. These people invariably have a far nicer phone than I do. In fact, that's often a significant part of the problem.
Or in other words (Score:2)
It is also about knowing how to be rich (Score:2, Flamebait)
1 What the good jobs are and how to get one. Don't expect your high school career councilor to be of help.
2. The benefits of being rich. If you have always lived in a apartment, never been on vacation etc., you might know that vacations are good but you won't know how good they are, expensive things aren't tangible.
3. That being rich is possible and not that working hard gets you things but putting off immediate gratification can pay off. There are entire segments of society
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Don't expect your high school career councilor to be of help.
If a career councilor knew anything about how to get a good job, would they choose to work as a career councilor?
This required a study? (Score:2)
I volunteer... (Score:2)
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Is it a counterexample though?
You were friends with rich and successful people. And then had the drive and ambition to go on and be successful yourself.
I got no help at all by them.
Did they show you what was possible? Did it help motivate you to know you were smarter than them, and if they could do it, so could you.
I don't dispute the influence of peers... (Score:4, Informative)
But I think it's more the influence of the FAMILY STRUCTURE of the peers.
There was also a study that showed two very similar neighborhoods (both in ethnic make up and in socioeconomic status). The study showed the make up of prison populations from those two neighborhoods was vastly over represented by one neighborhood (both overall average and between just the two neighborhoods) and very underrepresented by by the other neighborhood. Looking at the background of the inmates, they found the neighborhood that was overrepresented in prison had a 2 parent household in the low teens%. The neighborhood with better than average (and better than the other neighborhood compared) was in the mid 50% range.
The recommendation was to look more at the relationship between community make up and a note that there appeared to be some "area wide" benefit when there's a certain critical mass of 2 parent households that effects the entire community. Your "peers" would likely have a 2 parent household.
I remember this coming up after a failure of the "Weighted Pupil Finance Strategies" program (basically, take funding from well performing schools and give it to underperforming schools in an attempt to close the "learning gap". It failed. I'm thinking you can dump all the money in the world, but if there's no focus on school at home (or among your peers), you'll not see any improvement.
I think its seeing wealth. (Score:2)
I personally think that it's seeing wealth that helps some of these people get the drive. When I lived in a small neighborhood in a sub 1000 ft house I never really thought of myself as poor. Randomly one day we drove through this incredible famously rich neighborhood, for some weird reason I sat in the backseat of the car thinking to myself wow I really can bust my butt and get something like this. It almost immediately showed me that I'm going to miss out if I follow what my idiotic friends are doing.
For
An alternate view (Score:2)
Perhaps, after all the nepotism is swept aside, the explanation is a tad different? A friend of mine some years ago discovered that lizards inhabiting a tropical rainforest divided up the hunting surfaces in such a way that they were never in competition with each other. Some hunted the leaf top surfaces, some the underside and others the stems. It occurred to me that people behave much the same way -- our upbringing and experiences develop a framework that we use to interact with the world as we move throu
Irrefutable Proof (Score:2)
Rich people are just better.
Duh (Score:1)
Known for over a decade. (Score:1)
The Opportunity Insights (previously the Equality of Opportunity Project) and others have been publishing on this for over a decade. And we know the causes they have found.
1. Crime, which causes high incarceration rates resulting in low male full time employment and more single parent families.
2. Strong community ties. They found that once the White Working Class reach a household income of $US 50,000 p.a. they move as far away from their poor neighbours as they can, to suburbs with lower crime and better s
Rocket Science (Score:2)
Who pays for these kind of "studies"? Was there ever any question that knowing rich people, spending time with them, learning their habits, etc., wouldn't rub off on the unwashed who share time with them?
Rubbish (Score:1)
This is just correlation. People who know rich people live in neighborhoods where there are such people, hence are more successful to begin with. Rich people are usually not idiots, for, as you know, a fool and his money are soon parted. Hence, the rich don't hang out with idiots. Idiots don't do well later in life. Non-idiots do better.
This is more likely a result of prior similarities that result in acquaintanceship, rather than any causation.