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This is Scientific American’s Sixty-Second-Science. I'm Karen Hopkin. This'll just take a minute.

Social networking is all the rage. Seems the more people we know, the better we feel. But that drive for being connected may enrich more than our social lives. Because a study in the journal Science shows that the more diverse our personal networks, the stronger the local economy.

The fact that having broad social ties can financially benefit an individual makes sense. The more people you know, the more job opportunities you might be made aware of. After all, that’s what networking is all about.

But just how far do the benefits of these far-reaching associations really reach? Using reams of phone records, both landline and cell, scientists mapped out social networks across the entire United Kingdom. And they compared those maps with detailed¹ information on regional economic conditions.

The results showed that communities in which residents have more extensive connections are indeed more prosperous, presumably because economic opportunities are more likely to come from contacts outside a tightly knit local group of friends. So keep building those social networks. It’s not a total waste of time. It just might be your own personal economic stimulus² package.

Thanks for the minute for Scientific American's Sixty-Second-Science. I'm Karen Hopkin.