Critical Analysis

1. Social scientists have made it a priority in recent years to understand upward mobility. They have used tax records and other data to study which factors increase the chances that children who grow up in poverty will be able to escape it as adults. Based on the data from the chart above If your income is in the top percentile (99th percentile) about what portion of your friends will be in the same top 1% income group?

2. The study is based on a dizzying amount of data, including the Facebook friendships of 72 million people. (You can explore the findings through these charts and maps from The Upshot.) Based on the data from the chart above If your income is in the bottom 1% (1st percentile) about what portion of your friends will be in the same bottom 1% income group?

3. “Growing up in a community connected across class lines improves kids’ outcome and gives them a better shot at rising out of poverty,” says Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard and one of the study’s four principal authors of the friendship study. Based on all the data in the visual above, describe the relationship between friendships and income in America.

4. What do you think is the main cause of this is?

5. What is one consequence of this relationship?

6. Explain how well the data from the visual above corresponds to your own life.

7. Imagine that instead of the data in the visual above, the data showed that Americans of all income groups were likely to have friends from different income groups. What would that tell you about opportunity and mobility?

8. How do you think this lack of friendship economic mobility impacts American politics?

9. The “American Dream” is the ideal by which equality of opportunity is available to any American, allowing the highest aspirations and goals to be achieved. Based on the data from the visual above, make a claim about how close the American Dream is to reality.

10. Robert Putnam — a political scientist who has long studied social interactions, including in his book “Bowling Alone” — said the study was important partly because it hinted at ways to increase upward mobility. “It provides a number of avenues or clues by which we might begin to move this country in a better direction,” he said. Identify one policy that could make social interactions and friendships across income lines more likely.

Learning Extension

Upshot article with great graphics.

Action Extension

Share your own story about friendships across income lines in class.