Contested Interpretations of Economic Inequality Following Hurricane Katrina
نویسنده
چکیده
Americans are deeply divided over the meaning of the poverty and racial exclusion revealed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Media accounts of the hurricane riveted, angered, and depressed many Americans, but did not lead to a national consensus in favor of new policies to fight poverty and economic inequality. This article considers theories and research evidence that may help to explain this failure. Self-serving and group-serving biases lead many economically advantaged Americans to assign responsibility for poverty to individual actors, ignoring systemic factors. Motivated reasoning to justify existing economic and political systems and to maintain belief in a just world leads many, of all socioeconomic statuses, to explain economic inequalities as the result of purely individual factors. Media coverage of the hurricane may inadvertently have deflected attention from systemic causes of poverty by focusing attention on individual actors in the wake of the storm.
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