Richer childhood friends boost future earnings, Facebook data shows
Monday 01 August 2022 A representative image of children holding hands. — AFP/File PARIS: Children from poor homes are more likely to earn more later in life if they grow up in areas where they can befriend rich kids, an analysis of 21 billion Facebook friendships shows. It's long been thought that having rich friends can help children climb out of poverty, but previous research has had small sample sizes or limited data, published Monday in the journal Nature. According to two studies. So a team of US-based researchers turned to Facebook, the world's largest social database, with nearly three billion users offering unprecedented scale and accuracy, to test this problem. They analyzed privacy-protected data from 72 million American Facebook users between the ages of 25 and 44. Facebook friendships were used to represent real-world friendships. The researchers used algorithms to classify users by socio-economic status, age and region, among other factors. They then measured how