Freakonomics guy Steven Levitt discusses a study that shows some positive correlation between the number of friends a person had in high school and his/her earnings later in life. He speculates on two possible causal mechanisms: 1) the same factors that make you popular in high school make you more competitive in the job market, and 2) high school friends can do you favors later in life that will earn you higher wages.
I tend to agree with the first point a little bit more. Not only do a person’s friend-making abilities usually correlate with their general social and networking skills, but acquiring lots of friends at an early age also helps build confidence.
On the other hand, there is another possible causal mechanism. The study connects the number of friends in high school with future earnings. Having met a variety of different people at Cornell, I have realized that people come from very different high-school backgrounds. Now, I won’t claim to have been “Mr. Popular” in high school, but I came from a school with 800 students in each graduating class, so I had at least 30-40 people that I considered “close friends.” Other people I’ve spoke to at Cornell had much smaller schools and much smaller social networks of friends. Perhaps school size is connected to population density, which is connected to market size, the real casual mechanism? Just some thoughts.
This study fails to take into account how [most] people [hopefully] “grow up” socially and emotionally after high school. Read this study again when you’re 25 (or older) and you’ll laugh at it, promise. People change so much throughout their lives, but it’s even more striking to note the change from the impressionable adolescent (who will do almost anything for “acceptance” in high school) to the self-actualized [tax-paying] adult.
However, I don’t mean to make a sweeping generalization here. Again, some people never grow up and some of us were fairly confident as teenagers and didn’t necessarily look to “the group” for our sense of self — which brings out another one of my gripes with sociology (and socialism) in that it removes individual agency from the discussion of causality, etc.
Bottom line: If high school represents the peak of anyone’s life and personal development and it’s all downhill from there, then I’m inclined to feel very, very sorry for them!
Ps. I’m curious — how is this related at all to the scope of topics usually represented on our blog? (Unless of course liberals are now using such statistics to justify bail-outs of middle-aged adults who didn’t *quite* make their varsity football team twenty years prior lol)
Whether or not people “grow up” or change after high school does not change the fact that this study finds a significant correlation between the number of friends one had in school and earnings later in life. It’s not suggested in the article or in my subsequent comments that high school “represents the peak of anyone’s life and personal development.” It suggests that, perhaps, the same qualities that help people gain friends in high school also help people in the job market. I merely suggest another causal mechanism.
In terms of how this relates to the blog, this article/post discusses non-market applications of economic theory and how they can explain how qualities from the educational/academic setting (we are at a university, after all) translate into marketable job skills.
I was not suggesting that *you* personally said high school is the climax of one’s development…
However, the study itself is really by extension doing exactly that, suggesting that at the tender age of 17 or so, one’s future career is basically already in the bag if they happened to be “popular” (whatever that might entail at any given high school…)
I certainly do not dispute that good social skills in general can make a person more marketable — in both the career and relationship sense. I do, however, find fault with that kind of reductive rhetoric, especially since there are many wealthy, successful and now well-adjusted people who were the equivalent of social outcasts during their adolescence and probably just as many “popular” people who didn’t go as far in life. To be a bit of a devil’s advocate, maybe someone should study on how inflating a person’s ego prematurely can result in a lifetime of complacency (less wages?) or an utter breakdown when real life scenarios do not reaffirm their larger than average self-esteem?
I’m not sure that Levitt suggest that one’s career is basically “in the bag” at all: “They find that each extra close friend in high school is associated with earnings that are 2 percent higher later in life after controlling for other factors. While not a huge effect, it does suggest that either that a) the same factors that make you popular in high school help you in a job setting, or b) that high-school friends can do you favors later in life that will earn you higher wages.” Levitt even says that he is skeptical that the authors of the study could control for all relevant variables and that “it is likely that their estimates will overstate the importance of popularity.”
All: In the meritocratic society I work in, I find these social statistics atrocious! I have never had more than 15 close friends at once, and not all through school. Around 450 were in my class. But I am quite successful because of my hard work, and I get a decent amount of money and respect for it.