How was your own “personal social capital” in high school? Was it just raining personal social capital all over you at prom? I can say my own social capital was mostly non-existent — I didn’t have many friends, in normal words — and, according to a new study, that means that I’m probably going to be earning less than the cool kids over my lifetime. So, fellow nerds, they were all wrong: you aren’t going to show anyone in the end, at least in terms of money. But the good news is that the statistical correlation between popularity and income found by the researchers — led by Gabriella Conti and done at the behest of the National Bureau of Economic Research — shows only an average 10 percent income advantage.The study is indeed somewhat frightening, beginning with this ominous line: “Intelligence has long been emphasized as a major determinant of success in life, but there is mounting evidence of the importance of other social skills for a range of social, economic and health outcomes” (my emphasis). From an adolescent anxiety hell perspective, it just gets worse. Based on reporting from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (a very long-term study done on over 10,000 men used for a variety of research), the researchers were able to collect data on students’ self-reported top-three best friends. It’s pretty easy to come up with a ranking from there. (Imagine scientists ranking how popular you are at your high school.)Because the WLS is very long-term, it’s also possible to look at the life outcomes for those students 40 years down the road. And moneywise, the popular kids wind up with that 10 percent wage premium. Maybe it’s some small hope (sort of/not really) that Conti et al don’t think that a tendency toward popularity is something you’re born with. “Our interpretation of the in-degree is that it is a measure of early investment in a form of personal social capital or non-cognitive skill, rather than an indicator of innate personality traits,” they write.So, the underlying suggestion is that kids should probably be conditioned early — through a variety of means — to be social, even if they might otherwise fall into the category of person that’s just shy because evolution made some of us shy for very good reasons. In any case, using money as an indicator of societal value and personal success is a joke, and the idea of torturing shy kids through social conditioning schemes for the sake of that one weak indicator kind of makes me want to hurl.
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