title: Socioeconomic correlations and stratification in social-communication networks.
abstract: The uneven distribution of wealth and individual economic capacities are among the main forces, which shape modern societies and arguably bias the emerging social structures. However, the study of correlations between the social network and economic status of individuals is difficult due to the lack of large-scale multimodal data disclosing both the social ties and economic indicators of the same population. Here, we close this gap through the analysis of coupled datasets recording the mobile phone communications and bank transaction history of one million anonymized individuals living in a Latin American country. We show that wealth and debt are unevenly distributed among people in agreement with the Pareto principle; the observed social structure is strongly stratified, with people being better connected to others of their own socioeconomic class rather than to others of different classes; the social network appears to have assortative socioeconomic correlations and tightly connected 'rich clubs'; and that individuals from the same class live closer to each other but commute further if they are wealthier. These results are based on a representative, society-large population, and empirically demonstrate some long-lasting hypotheses on socioeconomic correlations, which potentially lay behind social segregation, and induce differences in human mobility.
authors.affiliation: Univ Lyon, ENS de Lyon, INRIA, CNRS, UMR 5668, IXXI, 69364 Lyon, France.
authors.forename: Yannick
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Leo
authors.affiliation: Univ Lyon, ENS de Lyon, INRIA, CNRS, UMR 5668, IXXI, 69364 Lyon, France.
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Fleury
authors.affiliation: Univerisidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Ingeniería, Av. Paseo Colón 850, C1063ACV, Buenos Aires, Argentina.|CONCIET, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
authors.forename: J Ignacio
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-2910-9320
authors.initials: JI
authors.lastname: Alvarez-Hamelin
authors.affiliation: Grandata Labs, Bartolome Cruz 1818 Vicente Lopez, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
authors.forename: Carlos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Sarraute
authors.affiliation: Univ Lyon, ENS de Lyon, INRIA, CNRS, UMR 5668, IXXI, 69364 Lyon, France marton.karsai@ens-lyon.fr.
authors.forename: Márton
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-5382-8950
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Karsai
mesh_terms: D040421:Cell Phone; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007843:Latin America; D008297:Male; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011157:Population Dynamics; D012944:Social Support; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors
keywords: human mobility; rich clubs; social networks; socioeconomic status; stratification