Marketing Professor Nailya Ordabayeva discusses how to make society more resilient, in time for the 鈥渘ext disaster鈥�
Who will we be, after COVID? Will our social structures be more resilient in the post-pandemic future? Even with a long, COVID winter ahead of us, many are grappling with these questions about the after times. One of them is Carroll School of Management Associate Professor of Marketing Nailya Ordabayeva, who has contributed both聽academic research聽and public commentary to the issue of economic inequality.
This past June, Ordabayeva co-authored an article in聽, pointing to the brutal 鈥渇ault lines鈥濃�攐f age, race, gender, and socioeconomic class鈥攖hat the coronavirus has exposed in our economic structures. Rather than work to return our economy to 鈥渢he way things were,鈥� U.S. policymakers should seek to 鈥減roactively restructure society, so that we are all more resilient the next time disaster strikes,鈥� she argued together with a cross-disciplinary group of 10 social scientists.
In an interview via Zoom with the Carroll School communications staff, Ordabayeva, who is continuing her research during a sabbatical this fall, noted major changes in public attitudes. 鈥淔or decades, people were surveyed about how problematic or ingrained inequality was in society, and for decades, the sentiments did not change. You didn鈥檛 see overwhelming support for government action to reduce inequality,鈥� she said. 鈥淏ut then the coronavirus struck, hitting low-income wage earners and the uninsured particularly hard, and the change in public sentiment has been striking.鈥� Up to 80 percent of the public is now supporting action to stem the inequalities, she reported.
as she discusses the road to resilience, in the following two-minute Zoom video produced by Rachel Bird, a Carroll School content development specialist:
