What 21 Billion Facebook Friendships Say About the Economic Ladder In the US (theverge.com) 53
Meta publicly released information on 21 billion Facebook friendships as part of a research project looking at economic inequality in the United States, the company announced today. Along with new insights into the intersection of money and friendships in America, the partnership between Meta and the researchers gives us another look at who Facebook is willing to share data with -- and why. The Verge reports: The research team wanted to understand why people in some places in the US were more likely to move between economic brackets than in others. Using the information from Meta, along with other data, a research team built a dataset for a pair of studies on economic mobility, published Monday in the journal Nature. One study found that people who grow up in areas where there are more friendships between high- and low-income people are more likely to move out of poverty and up the economic ladder. "Growing up in a community connected across class lines improves kids' outcomes and gives them a better shot at rising out of poverty," Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist and lead researcher on the study, told The New York Times.
Many places, though, don't allow for much interaction between high- and low-income people, the second of the two studies found. And even when a neighborhood does allow for that kind of interaction, people are still more likely to befriend people in similar economic brackets. [...] [T]he full dataset, which covers 21 billion Facebook friendships, is available through Facebook's Data for Good program. People can search the public-facing website and see the economic connectedness of various communities, including their own. Researchers can download the data for additional studies. [...] The new studies offer valuable insight into economic mobility in the US, and the data could help researchers understand how people in the US build relationships.
Many places, though, don't allow for much interaction between high- and low-income people, the second of the two studies found. And even when a neighborhood does allow for that kind of interaction, people are still more likely to befriend people in similar economic brackets. [...] [T]he full dataset, which covers 21 billion Facebook friendships, is available through Facebook's Data for Good program. People can search the public-facing website and see the economic connectedness of various communities, including their own. Researchers can download the data for additional studies. [...] The new studies offer valuable insight into economic mobility in the US, and the data could help researchers understand how people in the US build relationships.
What I am more interested in (Score:5, Interesting)
Social mobility should work both ways. So do rich people with a lot of poor friends have more likelihood of becoming poor too?
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The point is not that they're hoarding all the wealth, but that their wealth puts you at a serious competitive disadvantage should you decide to enter their field of industry as a newcomer.
Hence why someone as rich as Musk decided he wanted to buy Twitter, rather than just start his own microblogging site. Turns out even with all that money you're still at a disadvantage against a wealthy incumbent.
Re:What I am more interested in (Score:5, Insightful)
That is not wealth removed from the economy. That is wealth added to the economy
Except when the wealthy buying up real estate at a high rate that caused housing prices to skyrocket while working class experienced income loss during pandemic. So yes, Bezos doesn't own it all but wealthy people now own much more of property.
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> You can't start a business, because Elon Musk has started them all?
That is somewhat right. For example, create a retail store that sells stuff. Now you have to compete with Amazon, which is impossible, so you can't do that. So what can you do? People have some basic needs like food, shelter, meds, entertainment etc. All of those basic needs are full of competition. You need to create something really unique, and even when you do, the big guys will probably take it from you. Either violently or by buyin
Re:What I am more interested in (Score:4, Insightful)
if companies can buy out the politicians to make their own laws, your country is no longer democratic. And the rich get richer, and the "middle" class becomes the new poor.
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Can you name a single time and place when the rich people weren't running the government at any time in history? Newsflash: it ain't ever happened.
Democracy, my ass.
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Re:What I am more interested in (Score:4, Interesting)
While I agree that wealth isn't a fixed quantity, there is a form of what one could call class warfare going on.
We have a very odd view in America that many of the privileges a child receives should depend on their parents.
Bill Gates wrote his first computer program at a private prep school back in the 1960s. Jeff Bezos got hundreds of thousands of dollars from his parents to start Amazon. Elon Musk's father also invested in one of his early companies (and famously, his father is known for owning half of an emerald mine). This isn't an uncommon theme.
Yes, there are rages to riches stories, but they tend to be the exception, rather than the rule.
And we can see why - wealth gives access to a better life. Better education - access to private education instead of public education. Healthier environments - it's the poor neighborhoods that tend to be more polluted. Safer environments - gated communities, even wealthier neighborhoods hiring their own police officers. Even smarter parents - stress negatively impacts IQ. And the ability to take risks and have something to fall back upon.
Wealth provides a pretty big boost up.
And in many ways, we're shooting ourselves in the foot. As wealth accumulates and perpetuates itself, it gains political power that's more dedicating to protecting itself than helping society. The US suffers from both an economic hit and a social hit by not providing everyone better opportunities.
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"Wealth provides a pretty big boost up. "
I agree, but wealth is not as big a factor as it used to be. In the UK between about 1260 and 1800 being moderately wealthy resulted in about twice as many surviving children as the poor.
This resulted in an intense selection for whatever psychological traits it takes to become wealthy.
Of course, it is only possible to accumulate wealth in a society with stable property rights.
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It's hard to believe that any educated person can believe this zero-sum theory of wealth. Try just to think just a little—I know it's hard.
Imagine going back 10,000 years, before people had invented agriculture, where everyone is scraping the ground for tubers, grubs, trying to find small fruits, or maybe catch an animal, to survive on. Now, in that world, where is t
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Fact Check: TRUE
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To even think otherwise makes you a MAGA racist, *phobe, etc.
Translation: "I'm not personally racist or homophobic, I just voted for them."
Lemme give you a little quick primer on representative democracy: the politicians you're electing represent you. So, if you don't like being represented by someone who is saying don't feed the gay kids [go.com], you might want to consider not voting for that politician next time around. Don't vote for these whack-jobs and people will stop associating their beliefs with yours. It's a crazy concept, I know.
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Yeah, you're right, the rich get that way by exploitation.
I'll leave it to the Walmart lovers to explain away the deaths of workers, and the heat deaths of UPS and FEDEX workers this last month.
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If the guy who makes a million dollars a year loses 50,000 per year he skips a vacation.
If the guy who makes 60,000 dollars a year loses 50,000 per year he starves.
If the guy who makes a million dollars a year gains 50,000 per year he buys his kids the latest gaming consoles.
If the guy who makes 60,000 dollars a year gains 50,000 per year he moves to a nicer neighborhood.
The same amount of money hits very differently if you're rich or poor; it is much harder for the rich man to lose everything than it is fo
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If the guy who makes 60,000 dollars a year gains 50,000 per year he spends the next couple years paying off the crippling debt he accumulated the past few years, which should take him long enough that by the time he could afford to move into a nicer neighborhood, he can't anymore because prices skyrocketed due to the guy making a million already hoovered up all the real estate and flips it.
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Wow..way to go Capt. Positive!!
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And what value are your hypothetical numbers supposed to demonstrate? It's pretty obvious that having your annual income shift by 83% is vastly more significant than having it move by 5%, so what's the point? That raw numbers often fail to show meaningful relationships?
If you want to win, (Score:1)
If you want to win big. you have to risk big.
Some baseball movie from the 90's. At the time, I was impressed that somebody had the guts to say it out loud.
Nobody has the guts to say the bottom line message out loud.
If you refuse to risk, you cannot possibly win.
Re:If you want to win, (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:If you want to win, (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, there's risk and there's risk.
If a truly rich person risks 50 million dollars on a business, and it fails, it will affect their lifestyle not at all. It may not even affect their ability to try again. Oh, and, because they (and, yes, their families) have a lot of connections and a very good knowledge of how to work the system, they will be able to take a lot of their risks with other people's money.
If I risk half a million dollars on a business, and it fails, I will still be living in the same house and eating the same food, and I won't be worrying about being on the street at retirement. And, because I have just a few connections and a reasonable grasp of how to work the system, I actually have a reasonably good chance of taking some of my risks with other people's money.
If an actually poor person risks ten thousand dollars on a business... well, never mind, because they don't even have the ten thousand dollars, and they are NOT going to be using other people's money.
But you keep telling yourself whatever makes you feel more comfortable.
Re:If you want to win, (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to risk.
If you want to win big. you have to risk big.
And what doesn't make the news is all the people who tried and failed. There's no nightly news stories interviewing each small business owner who had to close up shop because they couldn't turn a profit. We make a big show of it when someone beats the odds and succeeds, but when someone throws in the towel, society collectively shrugs.
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Well, no one said you would hit a homer the first time at bat.
Successful people try to learn from mistakes AND to not let a failure demoralize or put them down.....they keep
Re:If you want to win, (Score:4, Insightful)
It takes capital AND time to start a business. Poor people save up over decades for this shot. And if their business is going down, rather than cutting losses they double down and pour more money or even borrow to save it. They are typically penniless when it fails with no option but to go back to the 9 to 5 grind. It's another decade or two before they've saved enough to try again, but now they are facing retirement. Another failed business means going into retirement penniless. The poor only get one shot at a business.
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How many people can you name that were poor or at least not at the very least well off and made it big in the past, say, 2 decades?
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Millions of people who went from "normal" beginnings to millionaire status? Name some. Please go ahead and name some. If there are millions, it should be trivial to give me a dozen names.
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Hmm. That's one.
One per week does that playing the lottery. Given those odds... screw working, buy a lottery ticket.
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The two millionaires I knew personally, G.W. and Ken Hire, both worked factory jobs until they quit to start a contracting business. They grew that organically up until they were building full subdivisions, then retired in their early 60s. Their brother, my father, stayed at the factory job and did not become a millionaire. Their houses, cars, and lifestyles remained comparable. The only real luxury my uncle had that we didn't was a 1970's bass boat that my brother inherited.
We have this habit of confus
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Better off because you spend time on Facebook? (Score:2)
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Bucket of crabs (Score:2, Insightful)
It's one thing to offer to mentor a person lower on the socioeconomic scale (SES). But watch the pushback from their old circle of friends. It's not an issue of telling people to stop hanging with the gang. But inevitably, as a person succeeds, they will find less time for the people from their past. And those people don't take that sitting down. In the extreme cases, where their old gang is actually a gang, that could result in punishment or even death. And even short of that, a lot of social and emotional
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Right, the US is full of revenge killings by gangs angry that their friends went to college and don't hang out with them enough now.
The second of two links is wrong (Score:3)
The second of two links to the supposed pair of social networking studies is wrong. They both point to the same study, Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility [nature.com].
Based on the description in the summary and the article, the second study is most likely this: Social capital II: determinants of economic connectedness [nature.com].
They're both open access, which I suppose is the least the researchers could do, given their use of random users' data using merely the users' implicit permission.
Multiple reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
The other is that one of the barriers to success is what I'll call "secret" information. By "secret", I don't mean intentionally hidden, but just not widely known. For example, I've served as a mentor for low income high school students who didn't know that it was possible to get an exemption form the high cost of college applications. Also students who had never heard of science fairs. Then there are children from parents who don't know how the whole college application process works, or what is a reasonable career trajectory. How many low income families know that its possible to get very good intern jobs at the US national laboratories - you just have to know where to look for the programs.
All these are things that school guidance counselors should know, but they don't. So having contacts with people who have higher paying jobs in these sorts of areas can be very useful.
Nepotism (Score:2)
Problems in the data (Score:4, Insightful)
So, not only are they likely to have skipped over a host of church-based volunteer groups, they're conflating them with activist groups - which are not the same thing. Yes, both volunteer and activist groups are forms of organized civic engagement, but they are hardly oriented towards the same goals and one is far more likely than the other to be intentionally directed at reducing "social capital" and cross-class engagement.
These errors in collection and categorization will naturally distort the results and should be corrected before policy makers take note.
Facebook (Score:2)
This says nothing about people smart enough to stay off of Facebook.
Better schools (Score:2)
IMHO, this has a lot less to do with who you are friends with than it does with the fact that high-income people are going to live in areas with better schools and are going to work to improve them. The low-income people living in the same area will benefit from the better school. Just today, Scott Adams posits that George Soros would be better off trying to kill off the teacher's union and improve the schools in predominantly low-income areas.