Information Inequality: How Race and Financial Access Reflect the Information Needs of Lower-Income Individuals
Patricia D. Posey
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2023, vol. 707, issue 1, 125-141
Abstract:
The media landscape is more expansive than ever and offers increasingly fast and cheap ways to consume information. However, many racially and economically marginalized communities live in information environments that fail to provide in-depth coverage of critical topics, such as day-to-day finance. I offer an overview of financial access and news deficits to argue that financial institutions and news providers have historically underserved racially and economically marginalized communities, contributing to information gaps in financial news and the need for alternate sources of information. I investigate how the placement of brick-and-mortar fringe economy financial providers, such as payday lenders, affects how people learn about and make sense of their financial options. I show that these sorts of concrete neighborhood characteristics influence how people participate in today’s economy and share information. Because economic participation is an essential element of citizenship, I propose that these kinds of disparities in neighborhood characteristics and financial access should influence the ways in which we conceive of and deliver information to marginalized groups.
Keywords: information inequality; race; income; financial access (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00027162231219551 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:707:y:2023:i:1:p:125-141
DOI: 10.1177/00027162231219551
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications (sagediscovery@sagepub.com).