One thing that was always abundantly clear is that long-term thinking and discipline is something that you are, it isn't particularly context dependent nor something you can teach beyond natural inclination. Virtually all of the poor people I grew up and lived around with these manifest traits got out of poverty eventually and never came back. For these people, a positive mindset may be helpful. That combination of long-term thinking and discipline are like compound interest, given enough time you can build substantial value on it no matter how little you start with.
In this sense, poverty is a personality trait trap. If you don't have these traits and you find yourself in poverty, you are stuck because you'll never spontaneously develop these traits. All of which creates a selection bias where the population of people in poverty are naturally depleted of these helpful traits. Many people are born into this position.
If you are in a middle-class situation and lack these traits, you can nonetheless afford some drag loss as a consequence of having excess income -- the median US household can afford to frivolously waste ~$12k/year without materially changing their position beyond lack of wealth accumulation. That is a large de facto safety net for lack of long-term thinking or discipline. Poor people don't have this. Being middle-class doesn't create long-term thinking or discipline, as is also amply evident, but you can afford to make more poor life choices.
In a sense, I agree with the article that it won't materially change outcomes. Even if you can divide people in poverty by these traits, the people with them are likely to get out of poverty regardless, and it does nothing constructive for people without them.
This doesn't seem particularly surprising to me. If you look at the ideologues, you have some people arguing that if you just bootstrap your bootstraps you can bootstrap your way out of poverty. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have people basically claiming that it's all random and you owe absolutely none of your success to your own abilities. The truth, as with all things, is somewhere in the middle. The truth being in the middle, it stands to reason there are certain intrinsic personality traits that would predispose someone to financial/material/commercial success. And if there are traits that would predispose someone to success it stands to reason there would be traits equally predisposing other people to failure.
How do you know that these values can't be taught? It's not like it has been tried with any seriousness as of late. On the contrary, these values (literacy, education, strong self-discipline, public-mindedness) used to be rather widespread in the 19th century, pre WWI, and that seemed to help poor folks cope a lot better with their circumstances even in a society that was both much poorer as a whole and much more unequal!
These aren't values, so you can't teach them as such. They are cognitive traits connected to biology and likely hereditary. It is like saying everyone can be equally good at spatial ability, which facilitates many concrete skills, with training, despite being robustly and strongly connected to genetics. If these could be addressed with training, we wouldn't need drugs to treat things like ADHD or depression.
There is no evidence that people in the 19th century were more or less self-disciplined than they are today. Countless people from that era demonstrated a widely documented lack of discipline in all things. Human nature is what it is.
I'm not convinced that long-term thinking isn't a strategy that can be taught. Cognitive traits may make it come naturally to some people, but I would describe it as more of a "habit" than an "ability"
In this sense, poverty is a personality trait trap. If you don't have these traits and you find yourself in poverty, you are stuck because you'll never spontaneously develop these traits. All of which creates a selection bias where the population of people in poverty are naturally depleted of these helpful traits. Many people are born into this position.
If you are in a middle-class situation and lack these traits, you can nonetheless afford some drag loss as a consequence of having excess income -- the median US household can afford to frivolously waste ~$12k/year without materially changing their position beyond lack of wealth accumulation. That is a large de facto safety net for lack of long-term thinking or discipline. Poor people don't have this. Being middle-class doesn't create long-term thinking or discipline, as is also amply evident, but you can afford to make more poor life choices.
In a sense, I agree with the article that it won't materially change outcomes. Even if you can divide people in poverty by these traits, the people with them are likely to get out of poverty regardless, and it does nothing constructive for people without them.