The absolutism of your statements makes it clear that you are convinced morally of your arguments, not factually. You believe intensively in what you're saying because you think it's good, not because you've got an airtight case that it's universally factually correct.
Don't let your moral convictions bleed into your understanding of the world; it makes you an ideological zombie who can't handle statistical nuances or proportionality arguments.
I haven't found the right word for it, but it seems to be loosely related to a personality attribute:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control
Which if true, would mean nobody's changing their mind. It would be like an argument between a staunch introvert and extravert arguing over whether or not socializing is exhilarating or draining.
Except unlike that case, there can be studies to measure impact of environment on people's success outcomes. And there have been. It's a valuable topic to discuss, with accurate date - not repeating the same bootstrap fallacies that simplify the world for people's comfort.
> We found that Asian-American women performed better on a mathematics test when their ethnic identity was activated, but worse when their gender identity was activated, compared with a control group who had neither identity activated
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00111
Could it be that given the right priming, people can improve their lives? What's the effect size of society vs individual? And even if it's 90% environment and 10% the person, it's often easier to change ourselves than our environment, so shouldn't we encourage people to work on themselves?
Of course care must be taken not to make it seem like a moral failing for not "trying hard enough", I think that's where people find the "pull yourself up" crowd distasteful. But there must be some way to give people the confidence to try to work on themselves without discouraging them by making it seem like it's their fault. Does that make sense?
When you stop reasoning by anecdote, you'll look back and see how absurd your views actually are and how not based in reality they are. It is you who is making the moral argument, not I, and you've done it based on your anecdotal impression of lazy poor people, and you do so because you suffer from the just world fallacy which is again because your reasoning is based on your morality rather than on the facts. You've quite literally projected your own deficiencies onto me, you're suffering from exactly what you just told me not to do.
Poverty isn't caused by laziness or lack of work ethic, your assertion that it is so is not grounded in reality and not backed up by any evidence, it's merely a moral position you've taken because it makes you feel better somehow.
Actually it's both inflammatory and untrue; spoken by someone who's obviously never been poor or known many poor people. Being poor is not a choice nor due to people simply being lazy, regardless of any anecdotes you might come up with. Anecdotes have no place in such conversations about systemic issues.