I’m always leery of “the poors are dumb!” as if that’s self-evident, rather than in poverty the risk-reward trade off is different and they accordingly adapt to that — as a rational choice.
Do you think escaping poverty is as simple as “just save money, dummy!”
This is exactly not what you want to do. It’s an attitude of entitlement without a sense of delayed gratification.
>> The only way a lot of people can break the cycle is to earn more, not spend less
Earning more is a result, not a means to an end. You break the cycle by improving your means. How you improve your means is entirely up to you and knowing how to balance delayed gratification has a big part to play in it.
> “We know that early-life stress impacts the brain, but until now, we didn’t know how,” Baram said. “Our team focused on identifying potentially stress-sensitive brain pathways. We discovered a new pathway within the reward circuit that expresses a molecule called corticotropin-releasing hormone that controls our responses to stress. We found that adverse experiences cause this brain pathway to be overactive.”
Read A Framework For Understanding Poverty by Ruby Payne. It explains this phenomenon and the book dates to the 1990s. Basically that the stress of growing up in poverty stunts your ability to plan for the future and you choose immediate gratification over longer-term strategic saving.