Popular kids in high-school will earn higher wages

Waxwork figure of Zac Efron at Madame Tussauds (Getty Images)

Zoinks! A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that kids who are more popular in high-school will go on to earn higher wages.

Popularity was measured using a concept from social network theory called "in-degree", explains Katy Waldman. This measures "the number of friendship nominations a student receives from his classmates. (The number of nominations a student gives is called out-degree, and it doesn’t correlate with increased income, since it only measures how popular the kid thinks he is.)"

Having just one more in-vote in high-school correlated to a 2% rise in income 35 years later, the researchers found.

The science, says Slate, is rigorous: all the kids in the paper are being tracked as part of a 50 year survey called the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which has been tracking ties between white male high school students since 1957.