Can We Put an End to America’s Most Dangerous Myth?
New York Times, March 9, 2023
READ MORE https://sites.nd.edu/world-politics-spring-2023/can-we-put-an-end-to-americas-most-dangerous-myth/
“Bootstrapped”: Alissa Quart on Liberating Ourselves from the Myth of the American Dream
March 29, 2023 “
You wrote a New York Times piece headlined “Can We Put an End to America’s Most Dangerous Myth?” And in it, you cite a 2020 Pew study which found that 60% of Republicans say personal choices are one of the main contributors to economic inequality. What do you think accounts for this belief?
ALISSA QUART: What I think, there’s something called loss aversion, where you have people who are sort of in the middle class, let’s say — I mean, a lot of the Trump supporters, if we look back at their earnings, they earned like something like an average of $71,000 a year. These were not poor people. But they were afraid of falling down the ladder. And I think that’s something that means that they put too much value almost in the power of their own hard work and determination, to protect them from falling down the ladder. They sort of use it almost as a kind of magical thinking. And so, I think that’s reflected in that study.
LISTEN READ MORE https://www.democracynow.org/2023/3/29/alissa_quart_bootstrapped_book_american_dream