Morgan named fourth-best county for youngsters to get ahead

In a new study, Morgan County has been identified as the fourth-best county in the nation where children have a shot at upward economic mobility. In the study, Wealth Enhancement Group, a national registered investment advisory firm used Harvard University's Social Capital Atlas, a platform that mines social network data to measure and analyze what is known as “social capital” (the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society, enabling that society to function effectively).

Economic mobility is defined as a person's ability to move themselves and their families up the socioeconomic ladder over their lifetime.

“The research draws on a privacy-protected dataset representing 21 billion friendships from Facebook made public through its parent company Meta's Data for Good project,” Wealth Enhancement’s Dec. 20 blog says. “It also uses anonymous tax records, according to the authors. The scholars assigned a score to locales according to how economically connected low and high-income people living in the area have historically been over at least a decade, per that data.” 

According to the Social Capital Atlas, 64.6 percent of those who use Facebook in Morgan County are high-income. Statistics cited by Wealth Enhancement Group indicate that the median income of Morgan County residents is $112,721. 

The study claims that friendships between people of different socioeconomic backgrounds can benefit young people in unexpected ways.

‘Those connections may provide people with the motivation, opportunities, and access to information that can help them improve their circumstances,” it says.

“It turns out the ability to cultivate friendships linking people of different socioeconomic backgrounds with one another is the strongest factor in determining whether a child can surpass the earning potential of their parents, Harvard researchers found,” the blog says. “They call this economic connectedness. Economic connectedness is a form of social capital, which is the relationships that allow us to obtain resources and opportunities to gain advantages in life.”

The study gave Morgan County residents a score of 1.29 in economic connectedness. Morgan County came in behind Rockingham County, NH (#1, 1.35 score), Douglas County, Colo. (#2, 1.35 score), and San Francisco County, Calif. (#3, 1.31 score) in the study.

Read the entire Wealth Enhancement Group blog here:  

https://www.wealthenhancement.com/s/blog/economic-mobility-us-children-MCKEMBK5YVQZBPVHN2A2GG7N2MDI

See the Harvard University Social Media Atlas data here:

https://socialcapital.org/?dimension=EconomicConnectednessλ