AP: Post-Katrina Dialogue on Poverty Fizzled

[Rose Siding]

snip>
Not long after Katrina struck, the Census Bureau released figures showing that the poverty rate had climbed for the fourth straight year. More than 37 million Americans live below the federal poverty level (defined as an income of $19,000 for a family of four), including 12 million children.
...
Stanford University researchers Emily Ryo and David Grusky, hearing pundits insist that Katrina "unleashed a newfound commitment among the public to take on issues of poverty and inequality," decided to measure this supposed awareness-raising effect...

Interpreting the findings, Grusky, a professor of sociology, says they show a majority of people already accepted that there was a problem and were doing something about it. The rest, he says, either see poverty as an individual problem or simply don't care.

"This idea that it's a dirty little secret, this poverty and inequality," he says, "just doesn't pass muster."

News coverage could partly explain the rise in denier and realist views. Some "did not take well to the liberal lesson that they no doubt regarded as foisted upon them," Grusky and Ryo wrote in their report, and so "the `call for action' story ... was countered by the equally powerful lesson that government intervention is all about inefficiency and ineptitude."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/01/AR2006040100642_pf.html

http://www2.umdnj.edu.nyud.net:8090/eohssweb/eohss_bbp04/WorkPractices/images/handwashing.jpg

[newswolf56]

1. To make such polls meaningful, you need to include a power factor:

Though 60 percent of the sample favors government intervention to stop poverty, that 60 percent is overwhelmingly powerless. The critical factor in the equation is how the ruling class views poverty -- and we can determine the answer to that question by looking at the legislative history of the last four presidencies: make the realities of poverty so relentlessly savage that people will either kill to escape it (note the huge and growing prison population) or die -- mostly the latter.

[KoKo]

2. Doesn't this seem a defeatist article? Put out there with just a few

chosen comments by this AP Reporter (caveat: I don't trust anything from the AP these days)

This article seems to support the conclusion that folks either don't care, don't know what to do, and figure their government shouldn't be bothered with it, either. It's sort of a hollow article, mean to lead the reader to feel sort of "ho...hum." :shrug: