IBSS-L: The Effect of Social Networks on Inequality: A Longitudinal Cross-Cultural Investigation

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This interdisciplinary research project will examine how people's connections within social networks affect whether they gain or lose wealth over time. The project will test hypotheses that advantageous positions in community-wide social networks allow some households to aggregate wealth more quickly than their peers, and it will explore mechanisms for these emerging disparities. The project will provide new insights regarding the origins and effects of income inequality on measures of individual well-being as well as to the heterogeneous mechanisms through which relatively egalitarian societies exhibit increases in the distribution of wealth within communities. Through the conduct of research using consistent methods across a broad range of site, the project will facilitate the education, training, and mentoring of early-career scholars in data acquisition and analysis. The project will result in new software for analyses using this kind of approach that will be made available for use by others through an open-source platform. Because the project will include assessments of how economic factors and policy decisions that affect the structure of networks are likely to impact the long-run distribution of wealth, project findings can assist in the design of policies and interventions to reduce inequality by fostering particular ties within a community.To assess how connections within social networks affect wealth distributions over time, the investigators will collect data in 25 locations across the globe. The data will be collected regarding who is connected to whom and what their level of wealth is at the beginning of the study and four years later. The study sites exhibit geographic and socioecological diversity, and the researchers will examine communities that includes hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, wage laborers, and intensive agriculturalists as well as varying degrees of involvement with market economies and national political systems. Data regarding network, wealth, and household characteristics will be analyzed to determine whether and how networks matter in determining outcomes of wealth and inequality. The investigators also will test the idea that bargaining power depends on social connections. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.