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Comment by crc32 | Hacker News Reader

> We can try to transfer wealth back from the rich to subsidise the poor. But poverty is often also about the mindset, and it is well known you can't refill a well merely by carrying water into it

Are you saying that poor people are poor because of their own ignorance or poor behaviours? And therefore if you give them money they'll just piss it away?

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Nope but because they're subjected to an environment that only operates in terms of poverty.

Living in poverty is likely to develop a mindset, in order to survive, that won't scale pulling you back out of poverty. That is, where you never start making smart financial decisions or plan ahead because, you know, the life is a mess enough because of various factors due to having little or no money or peers telling you to act otherwise.

There have been a number of discussions and even anecdotal comments on HN to probe into this. For example, feeling lucky at Google gave me this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16461773

In your original comment you said "If we redistributed the world's wealth equally to all people on the planet the distribution would revert back to what the shape it has now in a matter of years or decades" - so it sounded to me as though you were against this, on the basis that it would not solve the problem.

> Nope but because they're subjected to an environment that only operates in terms of poverty.

So let's say you have now identified a root cause, and assuming we're looking for a solution - how do we fix this without a redistribution of wealth?

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