It is stressful to be poor, and that stress can keep people in poverty

A story in Vice describes how financial stress impacts the brain.

“Let’s say you’re short on income or you’re thinking about financial trouble or a cost that you have to pay, your performance on other irrelevant cognitive tasks suffer, so it’s kind of like a trade-off,” Jiaying Zhao, a professor of psychology at UBC. “As you focus on one thing, your performance on other things suffers.”