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The social connections that shape economic prospects

Data on 21 billion Facebook connections reveal that a new measure of social capital — childhood friendships between people of high and low socio-economic status — is linked to economic mobility later in life.
  1. Noam Angrist

    1. Noam Angrist is in the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6GG, UK, and at Youth Impact, Gaborone, Botswana.

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  2. Bruce Sacerdote

    1. Bruce Sacerdote is at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755, USA.

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The strength of a person’s social network is thought to be one of the main forces in shaping that individual’s education, health and economic outcomes1. However, measuring this social capital has proved difficult, with most attempts so far involving only small surveys or just a few settings. Designing experiments to measure the effects of social connections is even harder2. In two papers in Nature, Chetty et al.3,4 introduce detailed measures of social capital using 21 billion friendships from Facebook — the world’s largest data set on social connections. The scope of the data set enables them to quantify various types of social capital and explore the effects of these social networks.

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Nature 608, 37-38 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01843-4

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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