The Poverty Trap as Economic Wrong Attractor: Scarcity Mindset, Bandwidth Tax, and the Displacement Mathematics of Structural Inequality

We apply the Displacement Framework to poverty traps, formalizing poverty as wrong-attractor capture rather than low income. The Mullainathan-Shafir scarcity mindset is formalized as a bandwidth tax: financial displacement raises total displacement superlinearly through cognitive channel reduction. Seven self-reinforcing feedback loops are mapped as coupled attractor mechanisms.

Wealth concentration deforms the landscape, raising minimum displacement for the bottom quintile. Cash transfers and UBI are analyzed as perturbations sufficient for self-organized return. Generational poverty is modeled as an AR(1) process with intergenerational displacement elasticity.