Today is the seventh class of our current nine class set. Our material today is a Planet Money story on upward mobility. I have included a transcript.
SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: NPR.
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GREG ROSALSKY, HOST:
Like most gyms, InnerCity Weightlifting in Boston offers one-on-one training sessions for people to shed pounds and get ripped. But behind the dumbbells and the treadmills is a deeper purpose. The gym is a nonprofit founded with the mission of providing opportunities to people at risk of poverty and incarceration and helping them forge friendships with wealthier people who might be able to give them a helping hand.
DARIAN WOODS, HOST:
InnerCity Weightlifting does this by recruiting people who are economically disadvantaged, often fresh out of prison. And it offers them a pathway to become trainers and then pairs these trainers with well-to-do clients. And its founder, Jon Feinman, says that they're seeing amazing results with this model.
JON FEINMAN: Personal training does create this really unique setting that allows for those power dynamics to flip, for those really genuine relationships to form because the value is going both ways, and I think that really transcends a lot.
ROSALSKY: It's no secret that it pays to have friends in high places or gym clients in high places, but a new groundbreaking research project substantiates this in a profound way. It shows that relationships that cross class lines are crucial for low-income folks to climb the economic ladder.
This is THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY. I'm Greg Rosalsky.
WOODS: And I'm Darian Woods. Today on the show - why cross-class friendships are so crucial for achieving the American dream.
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ROSALSKY: The Harvard economist Raj Chetty is, like, the closest thing we have to LeBron James in the econ world.
RAJ CHETTY: Hey, Greg. How are you doing?
ROSALSKY: Hey. Good, how are you?
I mean, he's kind of a superstar. He crunches these gigantic data sets and offers compelling evidence to fix some of America's most stubborn economic problems.
WOODS: And some years back, Raj Chetty and his team published this detailed interactive map of America. It was based on extensive work analyzing millions of IRS tax records, and it shows the likelihood of kids climbing out of poverty in every zip code in the country. They called it the Opportunity Atlas.
ROSALSKY: Ever since they built this map, Raj and his collaborators have been trying to figure out why it looks the way it does. Why is it that kids in places like the diverse D.C. suburb of Silver Spring, Md., have a much better shot of rising out of poverty than kids in places like Little Rock, Ark.?
CHETTY: And so the big question is, why is the American dream more alive in some places than others? And along the way, lots of folks talked about the idea that social capital, or who your friends with, who you're interacting with, might be an important factor.
WOODS: Social capital - that generally refers to the value of our relationships with our family, with our friends, our broader community. Sociologists and political scientists have long found that these relationships matter a lot for our well-being. But which types of relationships might give us a boost economically, and how do you clearly and precisely measure that?
CHETTY: Lots of people have thought hard about these issues well before us and have just been hampered by a lack of data.
ROSALSKY: But now Raj and his team have found a solution - Facebook data. I mean, who knows more about your social network than the ultimate social network? In a pair of new studies published in the journal Nature, Raj and his team use Facebook data as a proxy to measure people's real-world relationships.
CHETTY: Who would have thought 15 years ago that you'd be able to see 20 billion friendships and understand how people are interacting with each other?
WOODS: Raj and his team came up with various ways to measure social capital using data from Facebook. And they find that there is one particular measure that has a huge power in explaining upward mobility, and they call it economic connectedness. And that's the rate that low-income folks are friends with high-income folks.
ROSALSKY: Raj and his team find that it's the exact places that have more connections between low-income and high-income folks that have much greater rates of upward mobility. And they provide evidence that these cross-class relationships are the very reason why low-income folks are much more likely to climb the economic ladder.
CHETTY: So now, you know, you might ask, but what about the quality of schools? What about racial segregation? What about levels of inequality? There are many other variables for which you can do a similar analysis. And what we basically show is the economic connectedness variable continues to have very high explanatory power, even when you control for all those things.
ROSALSKY: Raj and his team don't have direct evidence to explain exactly what it is about having more connections between high- and low-income folks that causes greater rates of upward mobility. Maybe it's because high-income people serve as role models or help their low-income friends get jobs. Maybe it's because high-income people shape their friends' aspirations or self-presentation or norms or behavior.
WOODS: But what Raj was able to document is that if you plop a kid from a disadvantaged background into a community with more economic connectedness, their income in adulthood will be, on average, 20% higher. It's huge.
CHETTY: Social interaction across class lines is a key factor that predicts upward mobility out of poverty.
ROSALSKY: But there's a problem. Raj and his team find that there are many communities across America that just aren't very connected across class lines.
WOODS: In a second study, Raj and his team looked at why. They find it boils down to two main things - first of all, exposure.
ROSALSKY: Exposure just means how much lower-income folks are interacting with higher-income folks in an area. Do they live in a mixed-income neighborhood where they're able to bump into higher-income folks at, like, the supermarket or their schools or churches or rec centers?
WOODS: But Raj says that cross-class encounters are not enough to form relationships. Even if these groups do encounter each other, there's a tendency for them to not necessarily become friends. Raj calls this friending bias - you know, the people who kind of stay in their own cliques.
ROSALSKY: Raj says there are some settings where this friending bias is really high. One prime example is people's neighborhoods. Like, I don't know, Darian. Like, when you're walking down the street in New York City, like, are you saying hi to everybody?
WOODS: No. Maybe I should. But no, I don't.
ROSALSKY: Anyway, there are other settings where friendships really thrive - for example, churches, mosques and synagogues.
CHETTY: So it seems like something about the relationships people form in religious groups as opposed to neighborhoods - which shows that the settings, the structure of the institutions in which we're meeting people might be the key factor that governs bias, not just preferences that people have.
WOODS: In other words, friending bias can be overcome. Raj says that what institutions can do really matters for forging cross-class friendships. So they had a look at high schools across the country, and some are really cliquey. And we're not just talking about jocks and nerds and freaks and geeks. We're talking about how wealthy or not wealthy your parents are.
ROSALSKY: For example, schools with multiple cafeterias often see richer kids go to one cafeteria and poorer kids go to another. Raj and his team say there are real things that schools and other institutions can do to encourage more diverse social circles.
WOODS: Yeah. Like, maybe just have one cafeteria or, like, pizza Fridays where all kinds of different kids all come together.
ROSALSKY: Raj says there's much the government could do to revitalize the American dream, like building affordable housing in high-income areas or helping low-income kids go to high-income schools and thinking deliberately about how to foster friendships in various places. But what's also exciting about this new research project is it points to practical steps we can make in our own communities to make a difference.
WOODS: Steps like the one taken by InnerCity Weightlifting in Boston - Raj and his colleagues actually shout out this nonprofit gym at the end of one of their new papers. And this gym has been operating for over a decade. And the founder, Jon Feinman, says that it is showing a lot of signs of success. Like, there's much lower rates of recidivism and higher rates of upward economic mobility for its trainers.
FEINMAN: But to me, honestly, the biggest successes we see in this organization - it's those day-to-day interactions. It's our trainers having conversations with someone who they might not otherwise cross paths with and vice versa, that person now having a genuine friend who can advance them as just a human being, never mind their fitness goals, but as a citizen in this society.
ROSALSKY: Jon says one of their trainers bought a house with his earnings. One is now building houses for his former clients. Another uses gym connections to help them navigate electrician school. They've even had clients pay for their trainers' kids to go to summer camp with their own kids - not bad for a gym.
WOODS: The show is produced by Corey Bridges with engineering from Robert Rodriguez. It was fact-checked by Kathryn Yang. Viet Le is our senior producer. Kate Concannon edits the show. And THE INDICATOR is a production of NPR.