- A Harvard study showed that friendships with wealthy people lead to financial advancement.
- One study found that people in deprived communities often live in areas with few cross-class ties.
- Integrating low-income and high-income communities could potentially increase social mobility.
Making friends with wealthy people can go a long way in increasing your financial mobility, but you need to find wealthy people first.
Research by Harvard economist Raj Chetty has found that friendships with wealthy people can lead to higher economic status, but for this to happen, you need to live in a neighborhood where people from different income levels can interact.
Chetty and his team found that if low-income children could grow up with the same levels of what they call “economic connectedness” (a measure of how connected low-income and high-income families are) as their higher-income peers, their future earnings would be On average, that rises by 20 percent, because “rates of upward mobility are much higher” among kids who grow up in neighborhoods where low-income kids have more high-income friends.
But the potential for cross-class connections varies by region: A new analysis from the Economic Innovation Group finds that the nation's most economically disadvantaged ZIP codes also tend to be the least economically connected, putting their residents at an even greater disadvantage.
The study found that more than two-thirds of people living in poor neighborhoods with the fewest economic opportunities live in zip codes with the lowest interclass relations, with black and Hispanic communities disproportionately affected.
“This disparity reveals how the American Dream can be eroded through the compounding forces of economic hardship and limited access to the social networks that pave the way for advancement,” the researchers write.
The Southeast is home to many of the most economically disadvantaged and least connected ZIP codes in the country. These areas tend to be concentrated in rural areas, but some urban ZIP codes, including Memphis, have the lowest economic prosperity and social connections across all classes.
Meanwhile, California's Silicon Valley is home to the 10 zip code areas with the highest levels of economic connectivity and prosperity, including San Francisco's Marina District and Palo Alto in the South Bay. The Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Mountain West also tend to have high concentrations of economically connected zip code areas.
Research suggests that one way to improve social mobility is to integrate low-income communities with higher-income ones and reverse the social isolation and segregation faced by many in disadvantaged communities.
Overall, Americans are interacting less with people from different economic backgrounds. Past studies have shown that the pandemic has made it even harder to interact with people of different incomes. A 2023 study by MIT researchers found that the economic diversity of encounters in urban areas has declined by 15% to 30%.
So where should you go if you want to make friends from different income brackets? Research on places with socioeconomic mixing found that Applebee's and Olive Garden are the best options.
“The most socioeconomically diverse places in America are not public facilities like schools or parks, but affordable chain restaurants,” write researchers Maxim Massenhoff and Nathan Wilmers of the Naval Postgraduate School and Harvard University.
