There's fairly good statistics that a large portion of the people living in a cycle of poverty and drug addiction in Vancouver's downtown eastside suffer from a number of documented risk factors:
a) fetal alcohol syndrome
b) documented abuse by parents at an early age, or became wards of the state and entered foster care system, were not placed with any family members
c) drug/alcohol abuse by parents
d) molested by parents, relatives, "friends" of parents at an early age
People who are incidentally in poverty usually have children that aren't. I grew up in pretty abject poverty and saw this pattern over and over again too. My parents didn't have poor impulse control, it was circumstantial. All of my siblings were able to grind their way to a successful life despite having the deck stacked against them -- and none of them work in tech.
It is extremely frustrating. I have persistently poor friends who are unambiguously above average in both intelligence and work ethic, and with great personalities. Yet despite that, they constantly sabotage their future with poor impulse control. With good impulse control they'd be solidly middle class at a minimum.
I don't know how to fix the above situation. I've tried many times. They can't really explain why they make the stupid decisions they do, it just kind of happens.
But that’s just another correlation without a proof of causation.
There’s no clear definition of what causation is. You can invoke the tired “correlation doesn’t imply causation” any time you want, but the same quip disqualifies any alternative causation mechanism you propose, unless you serve up an actual criterion for distinguishing the two along with it. Asserting that one seems more plausible than the other isn’t enough.