Murugesu is a journalist by the name of jason arunn.

2EMC9HJ The Facebook app is seen on an Apple iPhone X in this photo illustration on January 31, 2019. (Photo by Jaap Arriens / Sipa USA)

The effects of having high income friends are shown in the analysis.

Alamy/Sipa US.

Children who grow up in low-income households but who make friends from higher-income homes are more likely to have higher incomes in adulthood.

According to Raj Chetty at Harvard University, there is a lot of speculation that the individuals' access to social capital, their social networks and the community they live in may matter a lot for a child's chance to rise out of poverty He and his colleagues analysed anonymised Facebook data belonging to 72.2 million people in the US between the ages of 25 and 44, accounting for 84 percent of the US population. He says that it is a fairly representative group.

The team combined data such as the median income of people who live in the same region, the person's age, sex and the value of their phone model to calculate SES.

The household income was found to be close to the poverty line. The people who were below the SES were split into two groups.

Half of each person's friends should be in the income group. Only 38 per cent of their friends were above the median SES. More than 70% of the friends of people above the median SES were also part of the same group.

The team compared the figures to the ones produced by the Opportunity Atlas. The average household income for a person born in the US between 1978 and 1983 is determined by using census and tax data. The data is categorized by race, gender, location and parental income

If poorer children were born in areas with a higher number of rich friends, they were more likely to have higher incomes later in life.

For people below the median SES in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 49 percent of their friends are in the SES group, while in Indianapolis, Indiana, 32 percent are in the SES group. The average household income is $34,000 in Minneapolis, compared with $24,700 in Indianapolis at 35 years old.

Read more: The happiness revolution: How to boost the well-being of society

If the average person in the group were exposed to the same number of above-median-SES individuals, what would happen to adults in the below-median-SES group?

Half of the economic disparity could be explained by a lack of exposure. Living in different neighbourhoods could be one of the reasons for this. He says that you can't become friends with someone you don't know.

Hugh Lauder is a professor at the University of Bath in the UK. Students from low-income families are more likely to befriend those from higher-income families in schools with a mixed family income.

The more segregation students are, the less likely they will have the chance to befriend students from higher-income families. Enhancing the student composition in schools should be renewed by these findings.

Nature is a journal.

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