As a person who was extremely poor by western standards (in 2002, I earned 10 USD per month in Uzbekistan) and who lived among poor people for 22 years, I can say that poverty is a personal choice, period.

Here is my answer on Quora with more details:

https://www.quora.com/Are-poor-people-lazy/answer/Eldar-Gayn...

I copy this answer here:

I born in Uzbekistan in relatively poor family. At age of 18 (2002 year), I started work in internet cafe (~5 computers) as a network administrator (although, I was blatantly ignorant at that moment) for salary … 10 USD per month. I didn’t studied at school and dropped of university since education system in Uzbekistan is just literally fake.

Since then, I lived and worked in Moscow, Stockholm and currently in Amsterdam and receive good salary as a software developer (pretty close to upper bound according to GlassDoor). Although, I still don’t have any degree!

So I think I’m qualified to answer this question.

Short answer: From my long and close experience living among poor people I can say that most people stay in poverty all their live because they are lazy. And in most cases, it’s their fault that they stay in poverty (especially for those who live in english speaking rich western countries like US).

Long answer:

You may wonder how poor people can be lazy if they do hard manual job 10 hours per day. I think laziness have several different dimensions.

In general, I consider laziness as unwillingness to do some actions which could be beneficial for you in long term but require sacrifices in short term.

What does it mean for poor hard working people in practice?

It means that although they are willing to do hard job for 10 hours per day, they are unwilling to invest their free time to learn skills which can give them higher income in distant future.

They consider it’s easier and more realistic to do hard work right now because they almost instantly benefited from their job even if it’s hard labor job than studying something which don’t bring them instant profit and require commitment over very long period of time.

It may sound counter-intuitive but it’s fairly logical. If you wash dishes, you guaranteed to get almost instant profit (by end of the day, or week, or month). If you are reading some theory in a book, you don’t get instant profit at all. For them, it seem a big sacrifice to do something and get nothing in relatively short term.

Also, they have little time aside from their main job. For them, it looks quite irrational to read some technical books instead of drinking beer and watching football.

So poor people are quite lazy for learning new skills and prefer to do any hard job with instant profit instead.

All my life, I heard from poor people that I read completely useless stuff and waste my time. Learning mathematics and algorithms for them is completely nuts, useless stuff. I very often heard popular jokes like (this joke was popular in my post-soviet school in Uzbekistan): Why anyone need an integral? Integral is needed only when you need to get some stuff dropped into public toilet (they refer to stick having form of integral symbol).

So they drank a beer for years while I studied “useless garbage”. Now, they are still in Uzbekistan struggling to feed their new families and I’m in Amsterdam, able to travel around the world.

To me, it’s very unlikely to image highly curious person who are hungry to lean new stuff and still staying in poverty for years.

Those who are not lazy to learn get out of poverty soon or later. Just like me :)