For humans, quality of life depends on various inputs.
Material wealth is one input among many, alongside e.g., genetic predisposition to depression, or other mental health issues.
Being relatively poor is correlated with having lots of bad inputs, not merely low material wealth.
Having more money doesn’t necessarily let you raise your other inputs to quality of life besides material wealth.
Therefore, giving poor people money won’t necessarily make their quality of life excellent, since they’ll often still be deficient in other things that provide value to life.
However, I think this is a different and narrower thesis from what is posited in this essay. By contrast to the essay, I think the “poverty equilibrium” is likely not very important in explaining the basic story here. It is sufficient to say that being poor is correlated with having bad luck across other axes. One does not need to posit a story in which certain socially entrenched forces keep poor people down, and I find that theory pretty dubious in any case.
I think something like this is true:
For humans, quality of life depends on various inputs.
Material wealth is one input among many, alongside e.g., genetic predisposition to depression, or other mental health issues.
Being relatively poor is correlated with having lots of bad inputs, not merely low material wealth.
Having more money doesn’t necessarily let you raise your other inputs to quality of life besides material wealth.
Therefore, giving poor people money won’t necessarily make their quality of life excellent, since they’ll often still be deficient in other things that provide value to life.
However, I think this is a different and narrower thesis from what is posited in this essay. By contrast to the essay, I think the “poverty equilibrium” is likely not very important in explaining the basic story here. It is sufficient to say that being poor is correlated with having bad luck across other axes. One does not need to posit a story in which certain socially entrenched forces keep poor people down, and I find that theory pretty dubious in any case.