Redesign the Cockpit

Living in poverty, having so much bandwidth wrapped up in just making it from one day to the next, decreases a person’s cognitive function, making it harder to solve problems, resist impulses, and think long-term.
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Consider this: During World War II, the military was plagued with a series of accidents in which bomber pilots would successfully complete difficult missions but inexplicably retract their wheels during landing, thus crashing their planes on the runway. No one could figure out why. The pilots were some of the military’s best and brightest. Had they gotten sloppy? Fatigued? Forgotten their training?

It turned out that, in the cockpit, the lever for the wheels looked and felt almost exactly like the lever for the flaps. In the flurry of activity during landing, the pilots were just pulling the wrong one, as Shafir recounts in his book. When the military changed the levers so they could be differentiated by touch, the crashes stopped.

The military didn’t need to get into the pilot’s heads, lecture them about personal responsibility, or tell them to try harder. They just needed to redesign the cockpit.
Article about Poverty.