Anecdotally, reducing poverty has greatly improved the ability of me and some people I've known in similar economic situations to be productive as professional

Anecdotally, reducing poverty has greatly improved the ability of me and some people I've known in similar economic situations to be productive as professional software developers. Being distracted by issues arising due to having no money has never been a benefit to productivity in my experience (and I'm specifically talking about the psychological side of things here, obviously if you lack the money to buy things that are productivity boosters poverty impact is much more tangible). Stress on the other hand has a different effect which is sometimes positive and sometimes negative. The way in which stress operates is fundamentally different. Specifically the notion of getting into a state of flow is very much about having the optimal amount of arousal/stress, too much leads to overwhelm and too little leads to boredom and disengagement. The issue with scarcity (of which poverty is a form) shows through even when you are working on something interesting because it's more of a background annoyance. Meditation definitely helps you feel better and widens the window in which you can get into those states of concentrated flow (because it increases your capacity to focus) but it's a bit orthogonal to the scarcity issues. Meditation greatly helps with stress levels and focus but not so much bandwidth. (I've found meditation only really helps bandwidth in the cases of pathological stress where the stress gets to the point where the brain starts to shut down but that's a different category of stress to day-to-day stress and perhaps is better described with a different wording)