CSI Faculty Affiliate Vida Maralani was featured in The Atlantic article: "The Pandemic Will Cleave America in Two: Some will emerge from this crisis disrupted and shaken, but ultimately stable. Others will come out of it with much more lasting scars."
“If you think about the possibility that people have to declare bankruptcy or foreclose on their house or lose their car, that takes a long time to recover from,” said Vida Maralani, a sociologist at Cornell University who studies inequality. “If you have to use up all your wealth, that’s really different than ‘Gee, I lost the money [I put down] on a summer Airbnb and now I can’t vacation.’”
According to the Federal Reserve, just under 40 percent of American adults wouldn’t have enough cash on hand to cover an unexpected $400 expense, and that was before the pandemic cut off so many workers’ earnings. Having even a few thousand dollars saved up can make this time less stressful, Maralani said. It can be the difference between being able to cover a couple months’ expenses, like rent or car payments, and wondering where the money for them will possibly come from.
For parents with kids at home, “you suddenly have a very different act to juggle than you had before,” Vida Maralani, the Cornell sociologist, said. Many parents who are able to work from home, especially mothers, are stretched as they try to do their jobs while looking after their children all day.
Maralani speculates that children whose parents have more time and resources may receive more and better home instruction than their peers, which may produce short-term or possibly even long-term learning gaps.
