(highlight:: Peer Influence on Economic Mobility - Access to Information Determines Your Outcome
Summary:
A mix of rich and poor kids interacting and influencing each other in school can lead to increased social mobility.
The presence of peers who excel academically and have ambitious plans for college motivates other students to set higher goals and follow their example. These relationships provide valuable information, guidance, and networking opportunities, ultimately shaping opportunities and aspirations for the future.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
And in practical senses, what is that? So you've obviously got, shall we say, poor kids hanging out with richer kids and their parents, what do you think is happening there that actually allows that mobility to increase?
Speaker 1
Yeah. And I think this is what separates it from these other social capital measures. A lot of it is when you look at kids in school, they're heavily influenced by their peers. I mean, kids are always paying attention to what their friends are doing. And if my friend has their parents making sure they're doing their homework and they're turning their homework in all the time and they're getting good grades and they're studying For tests and entrance exams for university and they're planning to go to university, that's my mindset. And so it sets my aspirations, it sets my norms of behavior. It also gives me basic information, you know, what does it take to get into college? They have siblings that have gone to college. If I don't have a sibling that's gone to college, you know, I don't even have any idea what college is like. These kinds of norms and information and so forth, it all comes through the network. And then, you know, in the future, years down the line, these are the people that might be able to get me an interview and get my foot in the door at some job. And so having those friends makes a huge difference in, you know, what opportunities I have, what information I have, what aspirations I have, it all feeds off each other and it ends Up being quite powerful.)
- Time 0:05:40
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(highlight:: Neighborhood Composition and Economic Connectedness
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So neighborhoods differ pretty dramatically in their composition of income, ethnicity and so forth. But it's interesting also, you know, if you look, say in given areas, some counties can be really well integrated, but then when you start breaking that down into finer and finer bits, the rich people don't necessarily live in the same neighborhoods as the poor people. So once you look inside there, they could be very heavily segregated. So some places are good at exposing where there's lots of neighborhoods that are mixed in terms of incomes and other places are highly segregated, so that, you know, the rich live in one part of the areas and the poor live in the other parts and just they never cross paths.
Speaker 2
And what do you find in neighborhoods where there is a good mix of above and below average?
Speaker 1
Yeah, so there you might say, okay, well, that should lead to high economic connectedness, right? You put them together. But surprisingly, you see very different patterns depending on where you are. So some neighborhoods, you know, you can look at two different cities that each have a well balanced 50 50 mix of rich and poor, and you can see completely different economic connectedness patterns. So where you are in the United States actually says a lot about, you know, we compare, for instance, in the paper, we compare Minneapolis to Indianapolis, two similar sized cities, similar demographics and so forth. Minneapolis has high economic connectedness. Indianapolis has low economic connectedness. You know, there can be a lot of history behind that. It could be all kinds of things that determine that.)
- Time 0:09:54
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