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Race Equity Trends > Financial Well-Being and Work

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Economic Connectedness Map

Economic connectedness is higher in south and east areas of Lincoln

Economic connectedness1 is a measure of interaction across different socioeconomic groupings that computes the share of high-income friends among low-income people. It is found to be a strong predictor of upward mobility.2 Children who grow up in communities with more interactions of persons of varying socioeconomic groups are much more likely to rise out of poverty as adults.3, 4

Economic connectedness data is available for Lincoln at the zip code level. It is drawn from privacy-protected Facebook data on 21 billion friendships, as indicated by user friend lists. This map is intended to illustrate the extent to which people with different characteristics (e.g., low vs. high socioeconomic status) are friends with each other; specifically, it is the share of high (above median) income friends among people with low (below-median) incomes. Higher economic connectedness in a zip code indicates there are more low-income individuals with high-income friends in that zip code. Please see the cited research if you are interested in additional details about how this data was obtained.

Zip codes throughout most of Lincoln exhibit average economic connectedness. Zip codes in the South and East of Lincoln generally have higher levels of economic connectedness.

Notes

Chetty, Raj, et al. (2022a). Social Capital I: Measurement and Associations with Economic Mobility. Nature, 608(7921), 108−121.

Chetty, Raj, et al.(2022b). Social Capital II: Determinants of Economic Connectedness. Nature, 608(7921), 122−134.

Footnotes
  1. Definition of economic connectedness used in cited research: Two times the share of high-socioeconomic status friends among low-socioeconomic status individuals, averaged over all low-SES individuals in the county. See equations (1), (2), and (3) of Chetty et al. (2022)* for a formal definition.
  2. Chetty, R, et al. (2022). Social Capital and Economic Mobility. Opportunity Insights. https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/socialcapital_nontech.pdf
  3. Chetty, Raj, et al. (2022a). Social Capital I: Measurement and Associations with Economic Mobility. Nature, 608(7921), 108−121.
  4. Putnam, R. D. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon and Schuster, 2016).