No, poverty is all about the lack of money. You cannot pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots. A relevant article about "the psychology of scarcity": https://thecorrespondent.com/4664/why-do-the-poor-make-such-...

You are saying that it's no good to advice people with severe mental health issues to do better if they are poor (fair), whereas the article says early poverty increases the chances of having these disorders (also fair). The causation in two arguments is reversed, however (poor -> mental disorder, mental disorder -> poor), and this is where the OP's argument fits, I think... you become more likely to develop mental disorders because of certain aspects of poverty (malnutrition? bad habits/lifestyle? etc.), however for someone who believes in personal responsibility, that may be to a significant degree because you "didn't do better".

No! They're poor because their parents were poor or because they grew up in a poor neighbourhood and lacked access to a proper education.

This article highlights one egregious myth but far more pernicious is the one you just highlighted: that poverty is a personal or moral failing rather than a lack of opportunity.

It's really simple: people are poor because they don't have enough money. Don't let yourself fall into the Just-World Fallacy.

Not sure we need to invent new phrases here, what's being debated is idealism and materialism. Thinking of individual 'minds' as primary actors is popular because as a society we're still stuck in some sort of Enlightenment/Christian mix where we assume 'success' is the result of moral virtue, good works, reason and so on.

People are allergic to material, systemic, biological explanations of poverty because it messes with a lot of moral assumptions and thus we're stuck in this therapeutic discourse.

This is quite silly. Through all of human history the vast majority of people have been miserably poor, and it's only recently that a slice of humanity has managed to claw their way out of poverty. Poverty should be considered the natural state of humanity, not an anomaly that needs explanation.

How lucky we are that "scholars have identified for us" what poverty is, so that we don't have to think about it for ourselves, not the lack of money, which would be easy to solve by giving money to the poor, but rather a "multi-dimensional phenomenon", which can only mean that it requires more scholarship to address.

I first began to encounter this when I as an idealistic teenager looked into why poverty/hunger still existed when we had enough food/money to wipe it out. Aid to low income countries often wouldn't get to the intended recipient. Their leaders would live like kings while kids would die from malnutrition. It just baffled me (still does) how someone could be so selfish.

Then I realized we in the US have it just around the corner. I knew someone who worked at a "remedial" high school where the kids struggled with hunger, homelessness, and addiction. All the schools in the area would shuffle any kid in danger of flunking to make sure their numbers looked good. They lived in neighborhoods I as a middle-class person would never venture into. We just do a good job sweeping massive poverty in the US under the rug.

This was a middle of the road state - then you look at states such as Mississippi and you wonder how we can live with ourselves.

You know this how exactly? I'm guessing you have never lived in poverty, but even if you have, you're making a demonstrably false generalization. Poverty permeates every aspect of the human experience. Studies have shown a clear correlation between it and suicide, likelihood of arrest and imprisonment, depression, and virtually every other negative thing a person can experience. Impoverished parents are inflicting their poverty on defenseless children that had no say in the matter.

"We have shown that poverty traps exist. People are poor because of a lack of opportunity. It is not their intrinsic characteristics that trap people in poverty but rather their circumstances. Poverty is not an innate condition. This has implications for how we think of development policy and for the value of eliminating global poverty."

If you give a poor farmer a tractor, then that raises more taxes for the corrupt government, which will spend the money on perpetuating corruption, and then they collapse, and then there's a power vacuum, and then a civil war, and it just keeps going

There have always been groups that want to solve poverty. People who have experienced poverty and people who live in poverty want to solve poverty. Yet poverty continues, because it's not a problem anyone knows how to solve

Do you have evidence to back that up? I can think of a number of examples to the contrary offhand: The French Revolution was preceded by a financial crisis and poverty, as was the rise of the Nazism in Germany. There's Mohamed Bouazizi, the poor and repressed fruit vendor who helped launch the Arab Spring in Tunisia. And even the Occupy and Tea Party movements that have each arisen in response to the economic situation within the US.

Even if you had proof (you don't) that bad work ethic makes up a "huge" (not clearly defined) proportion of poverty (it doesn't), the symptom is not the stem.

Poverty stems from poverty, and a lack of a support structure to help impoverished people become "upwardly mobile". This is easy to see, and easy to prove, as most people in poverty simply do not have access to enough resources to overcome poverty. Work ethic often doesn't even factor into it because simply being able to work is a big problem, not a lack of will.

> the wealthy and the poor both have to make changes to end poverty. [..] It's not up to a rich savior class to come and fix the dirty people from the outside.

It's up to the whole society. In the US, the issue is systemic. If the people willed it, their elected representatives could simply pass laws to put the support structures in place to end poverty as we know it in 10 years.

Over half of our national budget is spent on a military that loses nonsense wars in broken countries. We imprison more people than the two other biggest imprisoning countries combined. We don't care for our poor. We don't care for our veterans. We don't care for our mentally ill or drug addicts. We don't care for black people, trans people, women, etc. We just don't care.

We don't need a wealthy elite to fix our problems. We need to join the rest of the developed world in giving a shit about our people at all.

"most people can end up miserably poor" == "ever-increasing inequality"

Which begs the question - is the misery of poverty due to the lack of access to important goods or services, or because of the relative wealth standing?