InnerCity Weightlifting in Boston has one-on-one training sessions for people to lose weight and get in shape. The gym was founded to provide opportunities for people at risk of poverty and incarceration, and to help them forge friendship with wealthier people.
A pathway to become a trainer is offered to people fresh out of jail by InnerCity Weightlifting. New trainers are put with well-to-do clients.
Jon Feinman, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit gym, says that through their career track in personal training, they help create economic mobility for people in their program as they begin earning up to $60 per hour. Feinman says that their program creates bridges between people from different walks of life and forges lasting friends. People in our program gain access to new networks and opportunities while our clients gain new insights and perspectives into complex social challenges
Friends in high places pay. It's a fact. Two studies published today in the journal Nature show that cultivating these types of relationships is important for upward mobility in America. A new research project shines a spotlight on why InnerCity Weightlifting is so important and suggests a path forward for revitalizing the American Dream.
The studies are done by a group of scholars. They crunch data from more than 70 million Facebook users with 81 billion friends to provide first-of- their-kind insights.
The scholars say that these online connections give us a glimpse of real world relationships. Due to where we grow up, the schools we attend, the jobs we do, and the activities we participate in, we form relationships that are formed in an equal society.
The places that have more connections between low-income and high-income people have higher rates of upward mobility, according to the scholars. They show that low-income people are more likely to climb the economic ladder due to cross-class relationships.
Raj Chetty does cutting-edge research that provides compelling evidence to address some of America's most stubborn problems: poverty, inequality, and declining opportunities for people to achieve the rags-to-riches success story of American
Raj has been crowned the new king of economics. Raj releases a research project just days after Queen Bey releases a new album. It's coincidence? We don't believe in it.
Raj contacted us last week to let us know about his new drop. They were kind enough to walk us through it over the phone. We got to go to the nerdiest release party.
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The story of this research project began when Raj and his colleagues published an interactive map of America that showed the likelihood of kids escaping poverty in each zip code. The map is based on extensive analysis of millions of IRS tax records.
Raj and his team have been trying to figure out why the map looks that way. Why do children in Silver Spring, Maryland, have a better chance of escaping poverty than children in Little Rock, Arkansas?
There are a lot of bad things going on in places that are close to the American Dream. They have high rates of poverty, significant inequality, a large fraction of single-parent households, bad schools, and other factors that may explain why they have a lower rate of upward mobility than other places.
Why is the American Dream more alive in certain places than in other places? Raj said something. Along the way, a lot of people talked about the idea that social capital is an important factor.
There is social capital. The value of our relationships is generally referred to. These relationships matter a lot for our well-being. Is it possible that some types of relationships could give us a boost? How do we measure that in a clear and precise way?
Raj and his team use Facebook as a proxy to see the power of relationships in the real world, even though they don't think of it as the ideal measure of genuine friendship. They do a lot of benchmarking with other sources. Raj says that the Facebook data matches other estimates of social relationships, but it allows you to now zoom in and see what these relationships look like.
Three measures of social capital are created by Raj and his team. The rate at which low-income people are friends with high-income people is called economic connected.
They measure cohesiveness by the number of friends we have with each other.
Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, used civic engagement as a measure of social capital in his book, "Bowling Alone".
Economic connection is the only measure that is associated with upward mobility. It turns out it is a big deal. Raj says that social interaction across class lines predicts upward mobility out of poverty.
Raj showed a map of America when he explained why friendship with high-income people is important for low-income people. I thought it was the same map he had shown before, the Opportunity Atlas, which showed the likelihood of Americans rising out of poverty.
Raj said that the map was actually a map of economic connection with Facebook friends. The social capital Atlas is what they call it. In places where low-income people have lots of high-income friends, economic mobility is higher.
Two maps look alike. There is something magical about cross-class friendship that leads to people rising up the income ladder. It is possible to control for things like the quality of schools, racial segregation, the rate of poverty, and the extent of inequality in a community.
Raj and his colleagues don't know what causes a community to see higher rates of upward mobility because they don't have direct evidence. It could be that high-income people help their low-income friends get jobs. It might be because high-income people are role models. It might be because high-income people shape their friends' behavior.
If you put a kid from a disadvantaged background into a community that is more economically connected, their income will be 20 percent higher. That's a big deal. Going to a four-year college has the same effect.
Raj says that the effects are not necessarily separate. Growing up in a place with lots of connections between high-income and low-income folks likely influences low-income folks to go to college, which is one of the reasons why living in a more economically connected place might give people a boost.
The problem is that many communities don't have much of it.
Raj and his team look at why some communities are integrated while others are not. Exposure andfriending bias are two factors that make up the equation.
It's pretty straightforward about exposure. How many low-income people get to know high-income people in an area? Economic and racial segregation can make it difficult for groups to interact with each other.
The problem deepens. Low-income people don't like to become friends with high-income people. This is called "friending bias."
If we were to solve the economic segregation problem by perfectly integrating every school, every college, every zip code, you would still have 50% of the social divide between the poor.
The evidence shows that friending bias can be defeated. The workplace and recreational groups are places where friendship bias is low. They found that in churches, mosques, and synagogues, it seems to be slightly negative, suggesting that low-income people are more likely to befriend high-income people in those places.
They found that people who exhibit friendship bias in one setting often don't show it in another. They looked at high schools across the nation and found that schools with the same demographic tend to have vastly different rates of friending bias.
Raj says it is about the setting. It's possible to desegregate communities and institutions by fostering friendship between people from different walks of life.
Building affordable housing in high-income areas is one of the things the government could do to economically integrate America, according to Raj. This new research suggests that revitalizing the American Dream could be achieved.
Practical steps we can take in our own communities to forge friendship between people from different walks of life are what the research project points to.
The steps taken by Inner City Weightlifting in Boston are similar. Raj and his colleagues shout out the gym at the end of their paper. The gym has been open for over a decade and is showing signs of success with lower recidivism and higher rates of upward mobility for its trainers.
Jon Feinman is the CEO of the gym. When things went wrong, our paying clients would visit our students in jail. They showed up in court to support one another. They paid for the children of our students to go to summer camp with their own children because they offered job opportunities to our students outside of the gym.
It's a good thing for a gym.
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