PARIS: According to an examination of 21 billion Facebook friendships, children from lower-income families are more likely to earn more in the future if they live in neighbourhoods where they can make friends with wealthier youngsters.
It has long been thought that having wealthy friends might help kids get out of poverty, but prior studies have used small sample sizes or provided scant information.
In order to investigate the problem, a group of US-based academics used Facebook, the largest social database in the world, with its almost three billion users.
They examined the private information of 72 million US Facebook members between the ages of 25 and 44. The Facebook friendships served as a stand-in for actual friendships.
