Having rich childhood friends leads to higher adult income - US study

An analysis of 21 billion Facebook friendships shows that children from poorer homes are likely to earn more later in life if they grow up in areas where they can become friends with wealthier kids.

It has long been believed that having rich friends can help children rise up out of poverty, but previous research has had small sample sizes or limited data, according to two studies published in the journal Nature on Monday.

So a team of US-based researchers turned to Facebook, the world's largest social database, with its nearly three billion users offering unprecedented scale and precision to examine the issue.

They analysed the privacy-protected data of 72  million US Facebook users aged between 25 and 44  years. The Facebook friendships were used to represent real-world friendships.

The researchers used an algorithm to rank users by socio-economic status, age and region, among other factors.

They then measured how much richer and poorer people interacted with each other and created the term "economic connectedness" to represent the share of a person's friends who were above or below the average socio-economic level.

They then compared this measure with previous research into...