re: Why do poor people insist on creating even more poor people?

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If poor people were able to delay gratification they would not be poor.

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there is a lot of psychological work on scarcity and how it applies to the brains of these people

essentially, they constantly live in a mindset of scarcity and their brain is simply not wired or capable of thinking long term

LINK

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A few years ago, he and Eldar Shafir, a psychology professor at Princeton, started researching a hypothesis. It went like this - when you really want something, you start to focus on it obsessively. When you're hungry, it's hard to think of anything other than food, when you're desperately poor, you constantly worry about making ends meet. Scarcity produces a kind of tunnel vision, and it explains why, when we're in a hole, we often lose sight of long-term priorities and dig ourselves even deeper.

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To be clear, it's not that poor people focus on immediate needs because that's all they want to think about. It's all they can think about. Scarcity captures the mind. In fact, the tunnel vision produced by scarcity can actually lower how you perform on an IQ test.

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