I'm surprised he didn't mention culture.

I tend to agree with most of his points, but I think culture is an enormous driving factor in generational poverty.

People in the working-class world think fundamentally differently than people in the middle class, than people in poverty, than the homeless, than the wealthy.

I grew up in the working class, or "blue collar," and to some extent rural poverty. Since getting a BS in a STEM field, I find myself in the middle class "white collar" world. Not only in work, but in all my social circles. Most of my friends fundamentally don't understand what it's like to be poor, and that it's a completely different mindset. They think poor people just don't know how to manage money. They're wrong.

Some examples. The working class (and poverty line) live paycheck-to-paycheck. They don't save. They can't save. In the middle class, saving is obvious. You're an idiot if you don't put money away. In the working class, if you try to save, an emergency will pop up, or someone will need money. And if you don't give it to them, they won't help you when you need it. The only way to "save" is to buy things you need so you don't have money when people ask. Which is completely insane from a middle-class perspective.

That's just one example. There are countless others. A Framework For Understanding Poverty does a reasonable analysis.

An anecdotal example. My father is working-class. He started working maintenance in a factory 25 years ago. Being incredibly intelligent, he worked his way up to maintenance foreman of the plant, where he was making around $100k/year. Well into middle-class wages. But he lives in a $70k house with a few toys, like a shortwave and a computer he's always wanting to upgrade. He was only able to retire from an early-retirement bonus the company was giving out. He cashed out his 401k every decade or so. I think he's had over $20k in credit card debt since before I was born, which is cyclically paid down and re-charged.

Why? Because he lives, and spends, at a working-class level, with a working-class mindset. It sounds stupid, because you're in the middle-class. It's not. It's one of the best ways to manage money—with working-class wages.

It's the same reason people who win the lottery rapidly lose it. Because middle-class people don't buy lottery tickets, working-class buy lottery tickets, and working-class financial rules don't work with middle-class money. Having money is a huge part of the middle-class, but it isn't everything. One has to learn a great deal of middle-class culture to continue to exist in it, and to position one's children and grandchildren to remain in it.

It's much more than money management, too. Things like how to apply to college, and how to make professional connections. Things most people in the middle class aren't even consciously aware of as skills.

Learning the unspoken, unwritten rules of another culture is incredibly difficult. It's even harder when people on both sides are rarely even aware of it. But it's impossible to break the poverty cycle without it.