Want to grow up much?"Nature" teaches you to do this

Wen ｜ Zhao Xixi

If children grow up between a community with different socio -economic classes, their probability of increasing their economic status in the future may be greater.

This result comes from the research and analysis of nearly 21 billion cases of friendship in the American social media, and it was published on August 1 on "Nature" with another paper.

The intensity of a person's social network and community (their social capital) is considered to have an important impact on different fields, including economy, health and education.

However, it turns out that social capital is difficult to measure. Small -scale surveys or data sets that are concerned about the current research can only be covered to a specific community.

Raj Chetty of Harvard University and colleagues used the "Facebook" data to build different indicators to measure social capital for all postal codes in the United States, high schools and universities, and analyzed.

These privacy -protected data is based on a sample consisting of Facebook users of more than 70 million to 44 years old, and judges the socio -economic status of these people by combining multiple indicators. Smart mobile phone models and college.

The author found that they are called an indicator of Economic Connectness -the proportion of friends with high socio -economic status in people with a low socioeconomic status -is one of the indicators that currently found the most predictable income flow flow. Essence

According to the author's estimation, if children with low social and economic status in the United States are similar to that of children with a high degree of economic connection and average social and economic status, these children's income will increase by 20%after adulthood.

In another paper, CheTTy and the co -authors try to understand which factors determine the social exchanges between different socioeconomic status.

They distinguish between exposure differences (the proportion of individuals who encounter high socio -economic status in school or religious groups) and dating bias -individuals become friends with high socio -economic status in their own circle.

The author found that about half of the social fracture of American society was caused by exposure (segmentation), and the other half was caused by friends' bias. The author uses evidence that changing the system structure and policy can alleviate the bias of dating.

Using these new indicators and constructed, researchers and decision makers can learn from those areas with high social capital levels and provide assistance to communities that want to improve economic associations and other social capital forms.

In order to promote the development of such work, the author disclosed statistics on various social capital coded, high schools, and universities on the www.socialcapital.org.

Related thesis information:

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04996-4

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04997-3

"China Science News" (2022-08-03 The 2nd edition of the original title "Childhood" rich "friends who are more adults and revenue high"))

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