Having been poor (not 3rd world poor, poor by American standards) I found the most difficult thing is leaving the poverty stricken network. You don't feel like you've made it until you reject the entire mindset. Until then, you feel like you've sold out. My mother still makes me feel guilty and shames me every time I see her. Until you've had a parent who shames you for doing better than they did, you'll never unders…
I have had a sort of reverse experience, but which has led me to believe that poverty is a "contagious mindset, nothing more" as well: My family were academics, so our bank accounts were mostly empty, our clothes were pretty old, etc, but we grew in upper middle class New York. I pretended to be blue collar in my twenties, thinking I would be the next great socialist author. However, when I got sick of, well, being p…
Not for all of them, but for disturbingly many. The problem is exacerbated by peer pressure: as soon as one tries to change something, one is booed and labeled a social climber. Because many people base their morals on what their surrounding group believes to be right, becoming rich starts being perceived as immoral.
> However, the left says "there is no cultural problem" and the right says "screw em, its their own damn fault"
Far left says there is no cultural problem because it is infatuated with the culture of poverty itself. There is this belief among many leftists that being poor is "moral" while being rich is not. So the left considers the culture of the poor to be superior and more "authentic". Similarly, in a perverse twist, the far right believes that being rich is almost equal to being moral (because wealth is God's gift to men or some other such nonsense). Basically people like to imagine their corresponding social groups as being the most moral of all.