Cross-class friendships are a better predictor of upward mobility than school quality, job availability, community cohesion or family structure, writes columnist David Brooks, citing a recent study.
New York Times columnist David Brooks at the University of Chicago, 2012.If you had asked me a few years ago what we should focus on to expand economic opportunity in America, I would have trotted out the usual suspects: early childhood education, improved schools, stable families, neighborhood jobs. Friendships would not have been on the top of my list.
When I spoke with Chetty last week about the study, I asked him: What is it exactly about these friendships that is so powerful? I would point to the transformational power of friendship itself. That’s because your friends are not just by your side, they get inside you. If you want to help people change, help them change their friendships.
This is the key point. Your friends strongly influence how you perceive reality. First, they strongly influence how you see yourself. It’s very hard to measure your own worth, your own competence, unless people you admire and respect see you as worthy, see you as competent. Plus, if your friends say, “We’re all smart, talented people,” you’ll begin to see yourself that way, too.
Third, our friends alter our desires. Desire is notoriously mimetic. We want what other people want and tell us is worth wanting. If you grow up around friends who naturally aspire to be doctors and accountants and engineers, you are probably going to aspire to such things, too. But the upside is that friends see us and believe in us in ways we’d like to see and believe in ourselves. Friends provide the comradeship that is the crown of a good life.
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