Are Rich People Better At Social Distancing?
The higher a person’s income, the more likely they were to protect themselves at the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, Johns Hopkins University economists find.
When it comes to adopting behaviors including social distancing and mask wearing, the team detected a striking link to their financial well-being. People who made around $230,000 a year were as much as 54% more likely to increase these types of self-protective behaviors compared to people making about $13,000.
“We need to understand these differences because we can wring our hands, and we can blame and shame, but in a way it doesn’t matter,” said Nick Papageorge, the Broadus Mitchell Associate Professor of Economics. “Policymakers just need to recognize who is going to socially distance, for how long, why and under what circumstances to give us accurate predictions of how the disease will spread and help us establish policies that will be useful.”
Excerpted from Science Daily
