I have to say that I'm a little confused about the point of this article. In my experience, the people who make the type of argument she describes tend to advo

I have to say that I'm a little confused about the point of this article. In my experience, the people who make the type of argument she describes tend to advocate hard work, education and financial prudence. In fact the sort of attributes that the author exhibited to remove herself from poverty. If anything she's a good advert for the kind of advice that tends to be foisted on people in poverty. My pet theory is that the key issue is really about time horizon. If you live your life day to day then you're much more likely to be poor in the long term than if you have a time horizon of years or decades. This time horizon is largely culturally determined i.e. if your parents/peer group didn't think about the future then you are less likely to. But it can be substantially affected by personal characteristics e.g. the dissolute rich kid as well as illness e.g. depression. Interestingly, I came to this conclusion because of a conversation with someone at the other end of the time horizon spectrum. I was chatting to a member of an English aristocratic family about farm husbandry (a subject about which I know absolutely nothing). It occurred to me that he made decisions that had a time horizon of a century or more. Something completely alien to my way of thinking but entirely natural to him. I realised that my time horizon, which has always been oto 20-30 years, was just a point on a spectrum. Probably typical of a child of professional parents but not special in any way. And if you have a substantially different horizon than me then you're very likely to make substantially different life decisions than me.