Fostering cross-class connections is library work

A recent study shows truth in the saying, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Published in Nature, it examined Facebook relationships of 72 million people—84 percent of U.S. adults 25 to 44—and found that the biggest determining factor of a neighborhood’s less wealthy children obtaining positive economic mobility as adults was how much they connected with people outside their economic strata.

When at least 70 percent of an economically disadvantaged child’s friend group was made up of those with more money, that child had a higher future income by an average of 20 percent, compared with those whose friends were poorer; more difference than was made by school quality, family structure, or job availability.

The analysis did not directly measure the role of race: the Facebook data didn’t include it, and the authors didn’t use techniques to guess race sometimes used by other researchers. They found fewer cross-class relationships in racially diverse places; racial discrimination in the labor market and mass incarceration hurt Black people’s income in both segregated and integrated areas, but high economic connectedness lead to higher economic mobility in white, Black, and Hispanic neighborhoods.

As the paper says, half of social disconnection between low- and high-income people is due to lack of exposure, as people often live, go to school, and work in places segregated by income. The other half is friending bias: choosing, in heterogeneous groups, those like themselves.

“Growing up in a more connected community may improve children’s chances of rising up through a variety of mechanisms, from shaping career aspirations and norms to providing valuable information about schools and colleges to providing connections to internship and job opportunities,” the authors speculated.

“People interested in creating economic connectedness should equally focus on getting people with different incomes to interact,” one principal investigator, Johannes Stroebel of NYU, said in the New York Times.

The paper’s authors say that, while work has begun on increasing exposure, such as through admissions policies and zoning, friending bias can be addressed institutionally too: it happens more in large groups and divisions such as academic tracks. Even building design matters.

As the Times points out, libraries, one of the few places used by all classes, are well suited to foster friendships.

Sustained intentionality will be required, as building friendship takes time: University of Kansas Professor Jeffrey Hall says it takes 40–60 hours to form a casual friendship, 80–100 hours for a full friendship, and more than 200 hours to become good friends.

While not all that interaction can take place at the library, bridging programs should facilitate those first 40 hours. To do so, libraries will need to build programs that appeal to, and welcome, patrons from a cross-section of demographics, in locations and at times accessible to patrons of all income levels, and market to them all. Then programming librarians will need to structure them to encourage interaction between participants from different backgrounds, and ensure that the same attendees come back and talk with each other repeatedly, through offerings like camps, scouting, book or craft clubs, and robotics or e-sports teams. The study emphasizes the benefits of cross-class connections as children, but bridging economic divides among adults can only help.

While the paper is focused on the economic benefit to lower-income people, I believe the potential impact on the better-off is also important. Rather than coming in as a savior, they stand to gain a firsthand understanding of what it’s like for others, and therefore, of their own privilege. Hopefully, that can lead not only to an appropriate hand up for those they know personally, but also to efforts to reduce income inequality for everyone. And as working class author Sossity Chiricuzio told me, they can “learn from the many skills of survival, coalition building, and social awareness that folks who are poor have created to sustain themselves.” As always, libraries cannot serve as a panacea for all ills. But it is still worth providing opportunities to meet those from different backgrounds and forge lasting friendships.