I agree with a lot of what you're saying but one thing that's always bugged me is how we account for sub-optimal decisions. What I mean is that if I make 60k p

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but one thing that's always bugged me is how we account for sub-optimal decisions. What I mean is that if I make 60k per year and I choose to spend very little of it by driving an un-fancy car and cooking all my meals at home and living in a small apartment (perhaps with a roommate) I might be able to save half my net income. Or I could spend nearly all of that income on a bigger place, nicer car and meals out. And then I would potentially be in the exact same mental place as the person in poverty. What if that gets scaled down to 20k instead of 60k? Is there still nothing I can do to figure out a way to save money? Even if my cognitive load is high due to being poor, which way does causation go? Maybe I consciously decided to live in a bigger place and eat more meals out and as a result I now have more financial worry. I guess what I'm asking is which way does the causation go? Does being in poverty cause you to become overloaded or does the inability to prioritize well or think under stress cause the poverty? To me this question is neigh impossible to answer because you can't look at a single decision or experiment to determine the outcome. My naive thinking about this kind of thing is that it's like a betting game. With 50/50 odds you might be up some or down some but in the long run little changes. A hundred $1 bets on a coin toss should leave you with just as much money as you started with. But if the odds change, even just a tiny bit, the outcome of a hundred bets gets really different. Having a slight edge on the house, 51% instead of 50%, can cause you to slowly but surely come ahead of the house. And similarly, going from 50% to 49% can cause you to slowly bleed to death. Now some math. A 50% chance of winning is the same as a 100% payout. For each win you double your money, for each loss you get nothing. 51% is a 102% payout. 49% is a 98% payout. We'll neglect the notion of a finite bankroll since these are small bets; our bankroll is the full $100. With 50% odds: 1^100 = 1 so you never make or lose money With 51% odds: 1.02^100 = 7.24 With 49% odds: 0.98^100 = 0.133 Now of course I don't know how this game would scale to real life. Would a person have only a few chances in a lifetime to make these kinds of "bets" or do you get these chances several times a day? And what is the quantity of the bet? Is it how much I spend, or how much I choose to spend versus my other options of how much to spend? For example if I feel thirsty I could choose to drink water from a drinking fountain (free) or buy a soda ($2). Is the bet quantity $2 (how much I spend or don't spend) or is it $1 because I either "double my money" (which is to say, I don't spend the $2) or I "lose that bet" buy the soda and spend the $2. I would tend to think it's a $1 bet. Anyhow I'd love getting some kind of real feedback on the math here rather than just "you're an asshole for not thinking those in poverty are victims"