Employing the mathematics of network analysis, a team of researchers including SFI Omidyar Fellow Nathan Eagle found that communities in which people have more diverse social networks, at least as gauged by their phone calls, also tend to be more prosperous.
Longstanding social theory suggests that the extent of relationships among members of a community affects individuals’ well-being. And previous research has hinted that individuals with more diverse social networks tend to find jobs more easily, earn higher salaries, and have more success as entrepreneurs. But is there a similar link between the diversity of social connections and the prosperity of a whole community?
To find the answer the team combined data from two sources: a government index of relative prosperity of 32,482 communities throughout the U.K., and U.K. phone records that contained more than 90% of the cell phone calls and over 99% of the landline calls made in the country during August 2005. They then developed a network with some 65 million points, or “nodes,” connected by some 368 million lines, or "edges," with each node denoting a phone and each edge denoting phone contact.
For each person’s phone within an exchange, the researchers then calculated two measures of diversity of contacts. Finally, they looked for a correlation between their measures of prosperity and diversity. They found that communities registering more social diversity also tended to be more prosperous.
Eagle notes that the researchers cannot tell whether social diversity promotes prosperity or the other way around. "The causality probably works both ways," he says.
He hopes the results will influence public policy officials to consider not just giving aid to poor, insular communities but also finding ways to help people foster relationships with others outside their communities.