标题: 2022.08.11跨越阶级的友谊可能促进社会流动并减少贫困 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-8-14 20:33 标题: 2022.08.11跨越阶级的友谊可能促进社会流动并减少贫困 Graphic detail | It pays to be friends
Friendship across class lines may boost social mobility and decrease poverty
An enormous new study vindicates “Bowling Alone”
Aug 11th 2022
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Published in 2000, “Bowling Alone” transfixed observers on American culture in a way that few books ever do. In it, Robert Putnam, a political scientist, argued that the steady erosion in social capital—interactions between people who are not family, close friends or colleagues—was ailing America. In the intervening decades, that theory has proved contentious. But new studies strike a blow in its favour.
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A large research team—including Raj Chetty of Harvard University, Matthew Jackson of Stanford University, and Theresa Kuchler and Johannes Stroebel of New York University—worked with proprietary data from Facebook on 72.2m young American adults. The shape of every person’s network of friends could be converted into empirical scores of social capital in a much finer-grained way than previously possible. And neighbourhood-level measures of social capital could be compared with desirable outcomes.
Most classical measures of social capital, such as civic engagement and intra-class bonding, were not correlated with improved life outcomes, the researchers found. However, one measure looked especially important. “Economic connectedness”—the extent of friendships across social classes—was strongly associated with increased rates of high-school completion, reduced rates of teenage pregnancy and increased income for those born poorer. Moving from a place where friendships across social strata are relatively uncommon (a one-in-four chance of a friendship between someone in the top and bottom halves of the class distribution) to one where it was relatively standard (a one-in-two chance) translated into an 8.2 percentile increase in future earnings.
The researchers then separated economic connectedness into two components: the share of wealthier people in a setting (exposure) and the rate at which wealthier and poorer people befriend each other (friending bias). Churches seem a more egalitarian setting than colleges. In universities, cross-class friendships form at a rate 5% lower than would be expected. In religious settings, friendships formed at a rate 3% higher than expected.
Although it uses big data, the study’s findings are largely based on correlations. (It remains hard to experimentally vary social capital.) But the imperative for integration seems stronger still. ■
Sources: “Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility” & “Social capital II: determinants of economic connectedness”, by R. Chetty et al., Nature, 2022