Gizmodo: “New research measuring over 21 billion Facebook friendships seemingly confirms something you probably already inherently knew: having rich friends helps. Researchers at Harvard’s Opportunity Insights used a massive Facebook dataset based on over 72 million users to analyze the ways certain types of social conditions impact economic mobility in a pair of papers published in Nature on Monday. The first paper focused in on “economic connectedness” a term researchers use to describe the level of close friendships between users of lower and higher income levels. According to the research, lower-income children were more likely to experience economic gains as adults if they had close connections to high-income individuals. The second paper meanwhile dug into more specific examples of how those cross-class interactions play out in the real world…”