Does it pay to be cool?
Freakonomics guy Steven Levitt discusses a study that shows some positive correlation between the number of friends a person had in high school and his/her earnings later in life. He speculates on two possible causal mechanisms: 1) the same factors that make you popular in high school make you more competitive in the job market, and 2) high school friends can do you favors later in life that will earn you higher wages.
I tend to agree with the first point a little bit more. Not only do a person’s friend-making abilities usually correlate with their general social and networking skills, but acquiring lots of friends at an early age also helps build confidence.
On the other hand, there is another possible causal mechanism. The study connects the number of friends in high school with future earnings. Having met a variety of different people at Cornell, I have realized that people come from very different high-school backgrounds. Now, I won’t claim to have been “Mr. Popular” in high school, but I came from a school with 800 students in each graduating class, so I had at least 30-40 people that I considered “close friends.” Other people I’ve spoke to at Cornell had much smaller schools and much smaller social networks of friends. Perhaps school size is connected to population density, which is connected to market size, the real casual mechanism? Just some thoughts.
