If a new study is to be believed, socioeconomic well-being may stem not from working hard or going to a good college, but from how diverse your contacts are. After processing data from the UK's communication network and an index of economic prosperity, researchers think that financial success may rest at least in part in how different the members of your network are from you and each other.
Research on the relationship between social networks and job prosperity is not new. In 1969, for example, graduate student Mark Granovetter sent mass mailings and interviewed people in Newton, MA to find out how they got their jobs. His findings were empirically similar to many others before and since: it is not our close friends, but our "weak social ties," like acquaintances or friends of friends, that are the best sources of jobs because they can connect us to new information and situations.
While sociological studies like these run all kinds of statistical controls to adjust for surveying issues, one group of researchers realized that no one has tried to do a fully data-driven evaluation of the relationship between social networks and economic prosperity. To try this new angle, they cross-referenced phone call records in the UK from August 2005 with the government's Index of Multiple Deprivation, a measure of relative prosperity derived from data on the country's communities.
They found that communities with members who called people in a diverse set of other regions—diverse both in the sense of prosperity and distance—tended to be more well-off. On the other hand, the absolute number of contacts made only had a weak correlation with prosperity, and call volume had a negative correlation with IMD rank.
One example was ailing Stoke-on-Trent, which had high call volume but low diversity scores. Prosperous Stratford-upon-Avon, however, had a diverse call profile but only made an average amount of calls.
Of course there are some issues with the style of the study: it's impossible to establish causality, as high-paying jobs may get you out in the world more, or highly paid people may simply make friends more easily. (Maybe the people in poor communities that rich people are calling are their indentured servants.) Not all communication takes place via phone, either, and it's hard to say how much of it was job-related. There are more problems, and I'd list them, but I have to go find out what my brother's girlfriend's high-powered business executive sister in Nevada is up to.