Poverty as Displacement Trap: Economic Deprivation as Wrong Attractor

Poverty is not merely a lack of money. It is a multi-dimensional wrong attractor in which each dimension of displacement—economic, physiological, psychological, temporal—reinforces all others, making spontaneous return to the ground state S^0_ poverty impossible. The poverty ground state is not wealth; it is basic security: adequate nutrition, safe shelter, physical health, social connection, and the cognitive freedom to plan.

The aggregate poverty displacement D(_ poverty) measures accumulated distance from this security across all dimensions simultaneously. We formalise the wrong attractor structure, show how structural racism imposes externally enforced displacement barriers, and derive the dissolution condition under which universal basic income (UBI) can restore S^0_ poverty stability. The central proposition is that poverty is self-sustaining when D(_ poverty, total) exceeds available return capacity—not through personal failure, but through the coupled wrong-attractor dynamics of multiple simultaneous displacements.