New York: Having some well-heeled friends in your circle could help you better off financially, says a new study.
Quite interestingly, the study reveals that poor kids growing up in neighbourhoods with 70 per cent of their friends being wealthy means a lot financially to them.
The poor kids are more likely to see their future income going up by 20 per cent on average.
Friendship cutting across the rich and the poor divide could help the poor kids later in life earn better.
The study, published Monday in Nature, analyzed the Facebook friendships of 72 million people, amounting to 84% of US adults aged 25 to 44, reported the New York Times.
It wasn't clear previously, the report said, why some neighbourhoods were much better at removing barriers against climbing the income ladder.
The biggest analysis by far reveals that the degree to which the rich and poor were connected explained why a neighbourhood's children did better in life, according to the report.
Friends cutting across classes or what the researchers call 'cross-class friendships' reportedly had a greater impact on children than school quality, family structure, job availability or a community's racial composition.
The study suggests that people the poor getting in touch as growing up opens up opportunities, closing off the class divide.
How about moving to some wealthy neighbourhood?