My Phone Stopped Ringing When I Lost My Job. Were They Ever Calling Me?

I was still the same person. My memories hadn’t disappeared. My sense of humour hadn’t vanished. But the phone that once kept ringing had suddenly gone quiet.

Let me tell you how it got so loud in the first place.

There was a time when I was earning roughly ₹60,000 a month from a job. On top of that, I was making another ₹50,000 or more from stand-up comedy. Some months, probably more.

I wasn’t rich rich. Nobody was writing a case study about me at IIM. Ambani wasn’t losing sleep.

But by the standards of the people around me, I was “doing well.” And in India, “doing well” is not a financial status. It’s a broadcast signal.

Because during that phase, my phone behaved like a customer care helpline.

Relatives called. Neighbours called. Distant relatives called.

The Relatives You Need a Flowchart to Explain

And then there was a special category. People connected to me through a chain so long you’d need a whiteboard, a marker and two cutting chais to explain it.

At one point, I was getting calls from the mother of the son of some distant relative.

Read that again. The mother. Of the son. Of a distant relative.

That’s not a family member. That’s a security question. Please enter the name of the mother of the son of your distant relative to reset your password.

These were not people with whom our family shared some deep, sacred bond. With some of them, we barely had a relationship at all. Let’s be honest, we didn’t particularly care about each other. Nobody was crying at anybody’s farewell.

And yet, while I was earning well, there was never a shortage of reasons to call.

Then I lost my job.

I stayed at home.

And the phone went quiet.

Not completely. But enough that I noticed. And once you notice silence, you can’t stop hearing it.

It wasn’t only relatives. Long-distance friends became distant in a much more literal sense. People who once seemed keen to keep the friendship going simply drifted off. Even some people who had looked eager to become my friends quietly shut down the project, like a startup that ran out of funding.

I do stand-up comedy. Silence is an occupational hazard. You learn to survive a quiet room.

Nobody trains you for a quiet phone.

So What Exactly Were They Calling?

Here’s the part that bothered me.

Nothing about me had changed in any way that should matter. Same memories. Same jokes. Same opinions. Same face, unfortunately.

If you had hidden my bank statement and my employment status, you would have been talking to exactly the same human being.

So what exactly had all those people been calling?

Now, let me be careful, because this is where most people writing about this go completely off the rails. They lose a job, the phone goes quiet, and they write a viral post titled “Money Shows You Who Your Real Friends Are” with a sunset and a violin in the background.

I don’t know what was going on in every person’s mind. Some of them were genuinely busy with their own lives. Some friendships were already running on fumes and would have died anyway. Some people probably didn’t even know I’d lost my job, and just didn’t think to call, the way you don’t think to water a plant you forgot you owned.

I’m not claiming everyone who stopped calling was fake. I’m not claiming the world owes me a phone call.

But the contrast was hard to ignore. When I was earning well, a surprisingly large number of people wanted to talk to me. When I wasn’t, far fewer did.

Which leaves me with a question I’ve been chewing on ever since:

If your income changes how people treat you, are they respecting you, or are they respecting your financial position?

So I went looking for an answer. Not in Instagram reels. In other people’s stories, in research papers, in furious Reddit threads, and in a few surprisingly honest interviews.

What I found was messier than I expected. Some of it confirmed my suspicion. Some of it made me deeply uncomfortable about my own version of events.

Which is usually a sign you’re looking in the right place.

“From Someone He Could Talk Down To, I Became an Equal”

Let me start with someone who isn’t me, so I can pretend to be objective for a few paragraphs.

M. Pattabiraman runs freefincal, one of India’s well-known personal finance websites. In February 2025, he wrote a short post about a relative who was, in his words, neither close nor distant. You know the type. The man you can’t avoid at functions. [1]

When Pattabiraman was doing his PhD at IIT Madras, this relative used to smirk at him for not doing anything useful. Then came the unsolicited advice on being more “career-minded.” It continued through his postdoc years, including tips on how to do research, from a man with zero research experience.

That’s like getting swimming lessons from a man who’s scared of a bucket.

When Pattabiraman was choosing between jobs, the relative told him which one to take. The main criterion? Which job would make the family proud. What Pattabiraman actually wanted was apparently a minor detail.

Then the relative found out about freefincal. And about Pattabiraman’s financial independence.

Suddenly, the same man wanted his opinion on his investment portfolio.

The lectures stopped. Pattabiraman says he could sense the increased respect whenever the man spoke, and that it disgusted him. His summary is brutal:

“From someone he could talk down to, I became an equal.”

Now look at what didn’t change in that story.

His intelligence didn’t change. His PhD was the same PhD. His face, which he admits wasn’t very expressive, was presumably the same face.

The only thing that changed was the relative’s information about his money.

And that was enough to rewrite the whole relationship.

Hard Work, Now Available Retroactively

In June 2026, Asianet Newsable reported on a post from Reddit’s r/developersIndia. [2]

The poster, who stayed anonymous, had graduated that year and landed his first job at ₹25,000 a month. He called himself an average student and said getting placed in this market hadn’t been easy. He was proud of it.

Then relatives asked about his salary. He told them.

Their response:

“What? That’s it?”

He said the comment stuck with him. Of course it did. That’s what those comments are built for. They’re not sentences. They’re splinters.

But the replies were even more revealing. One commenter said that four years earlier, while earning ₹10,000 a month at a first job, people had criticised them. Then they got an offer of ₹24 lakh a year.

And suddenly, the same people started calling them hardworking.

Hardworking.

Think about that. Hard work, it turns out, is something you possess retroactively. Like a refund that gets processed three years after you complained.

Nobody looked at the ₹10,000 version of that person and said, “Wah, kitni mehnat karta hai.” The effort was there. It was just invisible until it got converted into a number relatives understood.

It’s like a student who studied all year getting called “talented” only after the results came out. The studying didn’t change. The scoreboard did.

This is what being judged by income actually looks like. It’s rarely one dramatic insult at a wedding. It’s a thousand small recalibrations, where your character gets re-rated every time your salary is announced.

The Doubters Who Became “Like Brothers”

If you want this story with the volume turned all the way up, listen to Harshit Rana.

On Ranveer Allahbadia’s podcast, the India fast bowler described how relatives used to tell his father the boy would achieve nothing. There’s nothing in cricket, they said. Why are you running behind him? [3]

Then he played in the IPL. Then he played for India.

And the same people started calling his father to tell him what a great job he’d done.

Rana put it simply: “People change a lot once you get the fame and name.”

People call him too. He doesn’t pick up. He says it isn’t attitude. He just doesn’t enjoy talking to people who said all that back then.

Honestly? Fair.

But his story also shows something important. Money rarely travels alone. An India cap brings income, but it also brings fame, pride, and something to brag about at the next family wedding. When relatives start calling, it’s almost impossible to separate whether they’re responding to the money, the fame, or the reflected glory.

Probably all three. Mixed together like a Bombay sandwich.

And before that success arrives, there’s usually a long phase where nobody is calling at all. Except to complain.

Comedian Bharti Singh grew up in a very poor family in Amritsar. Her father died when she was two. Her mother worked as a cook in other people’s houses. When Bharti got selected for a comedy reality show and prepared to leave for Mumbai, she has said, relatives boycotted her family and passed insulting remarks about her future and her profession. [4]

I went looking for whether those same relatives later came back with mithai and smiles.

The source I could verify doesn’t say. So I’m not going to fill that gap with what I suspect. That would make a better paragraph and a worse article.

But her story makes another point clearly enough. In many Indian families, comedy is not a profession until it starts paying. Before that, it’s a “phase.” After that, it’s a “career.”

Same jokes. New label.

Your Success Is Not a Phone Number. But It Works Like One.

Here’s something I didn’t expect to find so consistently.

A lot of the attention that arrives with success isn’t respect at all.

It’s a request wearing a nice shirt.

On Blind, the anonymous professional network, one user from a tier-3 city in Uttar Pradesh wrote that after working in the US and then joining Microsoft in India, he kept getting calls from uncles, cousins and childhood friends. Most of them wanted money. Anywhere from ₹50,000 to ₹5 lakh. He had lent a couple of lakhs that never came back. Relatives he refused gave him a cold shoulder when he went home for Diwali. [5]

(Full disclosure: Blind blocked me from opening the actual page, so I read this through search results. I’ll flag every account where that happened.)

In another Blind thread, a commenter said relatives living in the US had ignored them for years. Then their father mentioned a strong job offer during a conversation. The relatives called with an invitation for Christmas. [6]

First call in five years.

Merry Christmas. Please bring your CTC.

The international versions follow the same script. People magazine reported on an anonymous 32-year-old who grew up in a close-knit immigrant family in Canada. After he left a wealthy uncle’s company in China, the whole extended family took the rich uncle’s side and froze him out for seven or eight years. When he later became successful on his own and bought a flat in Hong Kong for his parents to use, those same relatives wanted to stay there for free and plan reunions. He refused all of them. [7]

And Bored Panda wrote up a Reddit post from a young man whose aunt had refused to let him stay with her while he studied. Years later, he finally landed his first real job after a long stretch of fast-food shifts. Her next move? Ask him to pay her son’s college fees. [8]

None of these people describe being respected.

They describe being located.

Success made them findable. Like a petrol pump on a highway. Everybody knows where it is. Nobody stops by for the conversation.

Which is why this distinction matters:

There’s a difference between people who enjoy your company and people who enjoy your access.

Both will call you. Only one of them will call when the pump runs dry.

Now, before this turns into an anti-relatives rant, let me be fair. A request isn’t automatically fake. In many Indian families, money is expected to flow toward whoever is doing better. The person asking may genuinely believe that’s what family is for. The UP techie himself mentioned that his uncles felt entitled because they had done so much for him as a child.

That doesn’t make every request reasonable. But it means the motive isn’t always greed. Sometimes it’s a very old idea of obligation meeting a very new salary.

“My Phone Stopped Ringing”

Now for the other direction. The one I know from the inside.

Jimmi Gathu is a veteran Kenyan media personality and actor. In a 2025 interview reported by K24 Digital, he said he was made redundant in 2016. Until then, he hadn’t been unemployed for 26 years. [9]

After the job went, he started calling people to tell them.

His description of what happened next could have been lifted straight out of my head:

“My phone stopped ringing.”

His version is much harsher than mine. He says people whose debts and school fees he had paid simply walked away. At one point, he borrowed KSh 1,000 from a friend he had earlier helped with something like KSh 300,000 to 400,000. The friend called the very next day, demanding it back.

Three to four lakh shillings out. One thousand shillings back, with interest charged in humiliation.

Another friend told people that Gathu had come asking for money. Public figures who fall, Gathu said, become the joke.

But in the same interview, almost in passing, he also said some people were good to him.

I want to underline that line, because it always gets lost.

Even in the worst version of this story, the phone doesn’t go completely silent. It just becomes extremely selective.

Here’s the Data Nobody Wants to See

Now the uncomfortable part.

Like most people with a quiet phone, I assumed the silence was something other people did to me.

Then I found a study that measured exactly this. Not with surveys. With actual phone records.

Jameson Toole and colleagues from MIT and other institutions used anonymised mobile phone data from a European country to follow workers after an auto-parts plant shut down in December 2006. About 1,100 people lost their jobs in a town of around 15,000. [10]

Compared with similar people who kept their jobs, the laid-off workers’ total calls dropped by 41 to 51 percent. Their circle of contacts became less stable month to month.

So far, that matches my story perfectly. Phone rings. Job goes. Phone stops.

But then there’s this detail. The drop wasn’t even.

Incoming calls fell by about 41 percent.

Outgoing calls fell by about 54 percent.

Read that again.

The people who lost their jobs were reaching out less than the people around them were.

Other research points the same way. Sociologists Jennie Brand and Sarah Burgard, using decades of data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, found that people who lost their jobs became less likely to take part in community groups and social activities, and that the withdrawal lasted long after the job loss itself. [11]

Did I Stop Calling Too?

So I had to ask myself a question I really didn’t enjoy.

Did I stop calling too?

Honestly, I can’t say for sure.

What I described at the start is what I noticed: the calls coming in. And it’s very easy to notice the calls you stop receiving. It’s much harder to notice the calls you stop making, because nobody sends you a notification about your own silence.

“You haven’t called anyone in three weeks” is not a reminder any phone company is going to build.

And losing a job does strange things to your desire to be seen. Imagine being asked “So, what are you doing these days?” eleven times a week by people who already know the answer. You don’t need to be antisocial to start avoiding that. You just need to be human.

So the data suggests that at least some quiet phones are quiet from both ends.

That doesn’t erase the pattern. The mother of the son of my distant relative was not calling because I used to call her. Trust me.

But it does mean “everyone abandoned me” is probably not the full story. Not for me, and probably not for most people who go through this.

To complicate it further, a 2023 study of Dutch households by economists Mattia Filomena and Matteo Picchio found that after losing a job, people actually strengthened certain ties. They spent more time with close family and neighbours and used social media more. The authors said their results did not support the idea that unemployment leads to social exclusion. [12]

Now, the Netherlands is not India. A country with strong unemployment benefits is probably a gentler place to lose a job than a country with strong uncles.

But it’s a useful reminder. Losing a job doesn’t automatically empty your phone.

It sorts it.

Money Can Also Make the Phone Go Quiet

If money simply attracted people, every rich person would be drowning in affectionate phone calls.

They’re not.

On Blind, one user wrote that after he and his wife started earning a lot at good companies, his sister, brother and friends stopped calling. He later found out his friends were having hour-long calls without him. [13]

The commenters offered the usual theories. Maybe he was showing off. Maybe they felt left out. Maybe they were jealous.

Whatever the reason, his income went up, and his phone went quiet.

The exact opposite of my story.

Another Blind user, freshly hired at a FAANG company, complained that his parents now threw his salary package at him whenever they disagreed. As if his opinions only existed because of his CTC. He insisted his job didn’t define his character. [14]

So money doesn’t only buy you respect. Sometimes it buys you suspicion, envy, and a brand-new, deeply irritating counterargument: “Haan haan, ab toh bade aadmi ho gaye ho.”

And at the far end of the wealth scale, the son of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote in Business Insider that while a few people do see him mainly as an asset or a connection, the overwhelming majority don’t treat him differently once they actually spend time together. [15]

That’s either very reassuring, or exactly what a billionaire’s son would be told by people who want to stay friends with a billionaire’s son.

I genuinely can’t tell which. Probably both.

(Both Blind accounts and the Business Insider piece were read through search results only. The sites blocked me.)

Why Your Bank Balance Becomes Your IQ

So if it isn’t purely money, what is it?

The research suggests something interesting. We don’t actually respect money.

We respect what we assume money means.

Psychologists Federica Durante, Courtney Bearns Tablante and Susan Fiske have studied how people around the world stereotype social classes. A consistent finding: richer people tend to be seen as competent but cold, and poorer people as warmer but less competent. [16]

In other words, your salary gets quietly translated into a verdict on your intelligence.

Your bank balance becomes your IQ score. Read out loud by people who never asked to see either.

In 2020, Jordan Varney and colleagues ran experiments with more than 2,000 people. When participants judged others in a setting with visible income inequality, they rated the same high earners as more competent and the same low earners as less competent than they did in a more equal setting. [17]

Same people. Different context. Different verdict.

These were controlled experiments, not a study of Indian families, so I can’t claim they explain my relatives. But if visible inequality sharpens the “rich equals smart” reflex, then a country where a BMW and a cycle rickshaw wait at the same traffic signal is not exactly a neutral laboratory.

Then come the signals that stand in for money.

Yale researcher Michael Kraus and his colleagues found that people could guess a stranger’s social class better than chance from just seven spoken words. In another part of the study, people with hiring experience rated higher-class speakers as more competent and offered them better pay. [18]

Seven words.

In India, we don’t even need seven. We need one sentence in English.

Economists Mehtabul Azam, Aimee Chin and Nishith Prakash found that Indian men who speak fluent English earn about 34 percent more per hour than men who speak none, even after accounting for schooling and other factors. [19]

So English isn’t just a status symbol here. It’s partly a real economic advantage. Which makes it an even stronger signal. Which makes people judge it even faster.

Same goes for the job title. The car outside your building. The phone you casually place on the restaurant table, logo facing up. Whether you can say yes to a ₹3,000 dinner without doing mental maths.

And then there’s the great Indian institution of comparison.

The cousin in the US. Sharma ji ka beta who “settled” in Bangalore. The marriage conversation where a boy’s package is discussed with the seriousness of a cricket score. In some families, “lakhs per annum” is practically a unit of character.

I don’t have a study for this part. It’s an observation, and anyone who has survived an Indian wedding lunch will recognise it.

In many families, salary works like a public scoreboard. And relatives are simply people who check the scoreboard often.

Respect, Fear, Flattery and the Loan Application in Pre-Approval Stage

Part of the confusion comes from using one word, “respect,” for several completely different things.

Psychologists Joey Cheng, Jessica Tracy, Joseph Henrich and their colleagues describe two routes to social rank. [20]

One is prestige. You earn it by showing skill and knowledge, and people hand it to you freely.

The other is dominance. You get it through intimidation and fear.

In their experiments, both routes made people more influential. Both even pulled more of other people’s eyes towards them. But only prestige made people likeable.

Here’s the problem. Money doesn’t fit neatly into either box.

It can look like prestige, because people assume you earned it through skill. It can work like dominance, because you control things other people need. And it adds a third thing neither box covers:

Access.

So when someone laughs a little too hard at a rich man’s average joke, it could be admiration. It could be caution.

Or it could be a loan application in the pre-approval stage.

There’s also a simpler, much less sinister explanation that deserves a fair hearing: visibility.

When you’re doing well, you’re present. You’re at the events. On the stage. In the WhatsApp group updates. People hear about you, so they think about you, so they call.

When you lose a job and stay home, you drop out of the stream of updates that keeps you in people’s heads.

Raj Chetty and his colleagues, studying friendships across the US using Facebook data, found that people’s friend networks are heavily sorted by social class. [21] When your class position moves, even for a while, it wouldn’t be surprising if your network quietly re-sorted around you.

That isn’t necessarily betrayal.

Sometimes it’s just gravity.

The Orange Seller and the Billionaire’s Son

Can you be respected without money?

Yes. But it usually arrives through some other visible signal.

Harekala Hajabba sells oranges in Mangaluru. He never went to school. According to news reports, he used his small earnings over many years to start a school for the children of his village, Newpadpu, which grew with government support and now teaches 175 students. In 2021, at the age of 68, he received the Padma Shri from the President of India. [22]

That’s the cleanest answer to the question. Absolutely, you can command respect without wealth. Hajabba did it through visible, undeniable contribution.

But notice how the respect travelled. For years, he was an orange seller. National respect arrived with a national award.

Even the purest example of respect without money still needed a status signal to reach the rest of us.

Now flip it.

In 2016, Surat diamond exporter Savji Dholakia sent his 21-year-old son Dravya to Kochi with three pairs of clothes, a little emergency money and strict rules. No family name. No phone. No help. Dravya told the Times of India, as reported by ScoopWhoop, that he got rejected at about 60 places in five days because nobody there knew him. He eventually found work in a bakery, a call centre, a shoe shop and a McDonald’s. [23]

Now, this was designed as a life lesson, not an experiment on how people treat the rich. And a lot of that rejection probably came from being a stranger without references.

But the point still stands.

Strip the visible markers off a billionaire’s son, and the world files him under “nobody.” At least for a while.

What I Actually Missed

Here’s the research that, for me, put the whole thing in perspective.

Cameron Anderson and colleagues at UC Berkeley found that what predicts people’s well-being isn’t their socioeconomic status. It’s their standing in their face-to-face groups: the respect and admiration of friends, classmates and colleagues. As that local standing went up or down, so did people’s happiness. [24]

Which made me realise something.

What I actually missed when the phone went quiet was not the mother of the son of my distant relative.

I can live without her. I lived without her for years before she discovered my existence.

What I missed was the feeling of mattering to the people in my actual circle.

Those are two very different losses. And I think I confused them for a while.

“Just Ignore People Who Only Call When You’re Rich” Is Lazy Advice

Before this becomes a motivational quote on a mountain background, let me kill a cliché.

“Ignore people who only call when you’re rich! Real friends stay! Fake ones leave!”

That’s lazy. Because life isn’t that clean.

Some people who drifted away were genuinely overwhelmed by their own lives. Some were awkward and didn’t know what to say to someone who had just lost a job, so they said nothing. Some were never really friends, just people orbiting the same events. And some, if the data is right, may have been waiting for me to call.

And some people who showed up when I was doing well weren’t opportunists either. They were just people who enjoy being around someone whose life looks interesting. That’s not a crime. That’s human.

So the goal isn’t to sort everyone into “real” and “fake” and go live in a cave with your two certified loyal friends.

The goal is to know the difference between three kinds of people:

People who enjoy you.

People who enjoy what you seem to have.

And people who were just in the same room for a while.

All three are allowed to exist. You just shouldn’t confuse them.

So, Were They Calling Me or My Salary?

After all of this, here’s where I’ve landed.

A loud part of society does treat income as a shortcut for worth. The evidence for that is real. The relative who switched from lecturing to listening. The commenter who became “hardworking” at ₹24 lakh. The doubters who now ring Harshit Rana’s father. The relatives who rediscovered family love once there was a Hong Kong flat involved.

Money and respect are tangled together in ways most of us would rather not admit. Especially at family functions.

But it’s a shortcut. Not a conspiracy.

Most people aren’t consciously ranking you by net worth. They’re reacting to signals. Success looks like competence. Competence looks like usefulness. Usefulness looks like a reason to call.

When the signal disappears, the reason disappears. And the call goes with it.

Some of those people were never really calling you.

They were calling the version of your life that looked interesting from the outside.

And some of the silence may have come from my end. I can’t rule that out. The data says I shouldn’t even try.

Back to the Quiet Phone

I still don’t know which of my quiet contacts were opportunists, which were just busy, which friendships had already expired, and which ones I let go without noticing.

I probably never will.

But here’s what I do know.

The period when my phone kept ringing told me how my life looked to other people.

The period when it went quiet told me something far more useful.

Who was listening anyway.

I was still the same person.

That was never the question.

The question was whether anyone had been calling him.

References & Research Sources:

Personal accounts

• Pattabiraman, M. “Avoid people who only respect you for your money.” freefincal, 22 Feb 2025. Link
• Sportskeeda. “‘I don’t pick their calls now’: Harshit Rana’s stunning tale on relatives’ U-turn.” 2025. Link
• Das, Ria. “She Wouldn’t Get Married: When Bharti Singh’s Family Opposed Her Dream To Pursue Comedy.” SheThePeople, 3 Jul 2021. Link
• Chaudhry, Gargi. “Techie Lands First Job With Rs 25,000 Salary, Relatives’ Response Sparks Online Debate.” Asianet Newsable, 19 Jun 2026. Link
• Vega, Ashley. “Man Shunned by His Family for Years. Now That He’s Successful, They Want Him to Host Them for Free.” People, via AOL, 31 Dec 2025. Link
• Bored Panda. “Appalling Aunt Loses It After Nephew Says There’s No Way He’s Paying Cousin’s College Fees.” Link
• Khakayi, Valerian. “Jimmi Gathu says friends mocked and deserted him after job loss.” K24 Digital, 19 Jul 2025. Link
• ScoopWhoop. “This Billionaire Father Sent His Son To Kerala To Get A Taste Of Reality.” 2016. Link
• Gulf News. “Billionaire’s son does odd jobs in Kerala for a month.” 2016. Link
• The News Minute. “Harekala Hajabba, Karnataka fruit seller who started school, receives Padma Shri.” Nov 2021. Link
• Blind posts (search-result text only): loans from relatives, Christmas invitation, relatives stopped calling, parents and salary
• Business Insider. Essay by Steve Ballmer’s son on friends and dating (search-result text only). Link
• Zikoko. “I Regret Telling My Friends How Much I Earn” (search-result text only). Link

Research

• Toole, J. L., Lin, Y.-R., Muehlegger, E., Shoag, D., González, M. C., and Lazer, D. “Tracking Employment Shocks Using Mobile Phone Data.” arXiv:1505.06791, 2015. Link
• Brand, J. and Burgard, S. Study of job displacement and social participation, summarised by Plansponsor, 1 Sep 2009. Link
• Filomena, M. and Picchio, M. “You’ll Never Walk Alone: Unemployment, Social Networks and Leisure Activities.” IZA Discussion Paper 16579, Nov 2023. Link
• Durante, F., Tablante, C. B., and Fiske, S. T. “Poor but Warm, Rich but Cold (and Competent): Social Classes in the Stereotype Content Model.” Link
• Varney, J. et al. “Social Class Competence Stereotypes Are Amplified by Socially Signaled Economic Inequality.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2020. Link
• Kraus, M. W., Torrez, B., Park, J. W., and Ghayebi, F. “Evidence for the reproduction of social class in brief speech.” PNAS, 2019; Yale News summary. Link
• Azam, M., Chin, A., and Prakash, N. “The Returns to English-Language Skills in India.” Economic Development and Cultural Change 61(2), 2013. Link
• Cheng, J. T., Tracy, J. L., Foulsham, T., Kingstone, A., and Henrich, J. “Two Ways to the Top.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 104(1), 2013. Link
• Anderson, C., Kraus, M. W., Galinsky, A. D., and Keltner, D. “The Local-Ladder Effect.” Psychological Science, 2012. Link
• Chetty, R. et al. “Social Capital I and II.” Nature, Aug 2022; Harvard Gazette summary. Link