&gt; <i>If they&#x27;re smart, why haven&#x27;t they found a way out of poverty yet?</i><p>It&#x27;s tempting to think you&#x27;re just trolling, but this view seems to be widespread enough that it&#x27;s worth a serious answer.<p>It&#x27;s because of the time value of money. Money now is worth more than money later - and it&#x27;s extremely non-linear, not only with time but it also varies with the amount you have. So any money you don&#x27;t have now corresponds to (literally) exponentially more money you won&#x27;t have in the future, all things being equal. Even a smart person will find this hurdle very difficult, maybe even impossible, to overcome without a large dose of luck.<p>For example, what do you do if your car breaks down? Obviously you get it fixed and then move on with your life.<p>Now, what do you do <i>if you&#x27;re poor</i> and your car breaks down? Assuming we take starving to death off the table, your choices likely boil down to losing your job because you can&#x27;t travel to it or getting a payday loan at an usurious interest rate. Ironically, if you make the conscientious choice then people on internet message boards will call you lazy, whereas if you make the rational choice then people on internet message boards will call you stupid.<p>Whatever you choose will suffice to keep you poor for long enough for your car to break down again - which it will, because at no point would you have had enough money to invest in one that won&#x27;t. Now apply this scenario to absolutely <i>everything</i>, large or small, that you ever have to buy and there is the answer to your question of why the poor haven&#x27;t found a way out of poverty yet: because being poor is <i>much</i> more expensive than not being poor.