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Maybe I'll post about this sometime, but for now, in short: I don't think the problem is related to intelligence. "Willpower" is closer, but that's a folk egregore. "Short time horizons" is better, but I think that's one of the symptoms, not the root cause. If I had to put a name on it, I'd call it "despair", as in the opposite of "hope".
There's no hope. It hurts to think about the future. At night, dreams are only about the past, or fiction, or fantastic scenarios like winning the lottery or gaining magic powers, never about what might actually happen next in day to day life. Money gets spent fast, because it's ridiculous to think of it making a difference in the future. The hole is so deep that any realistic amount of money won't help dig you out. If you pay the credit card off, it'll just be cancelled, but as long as they think they can get money from you, they'll still let you use it. The choice between eating out and eating in is simple: you can do it, it will make you feel better than otherwise, it won't make your situation significantly worse, and there's no meaningful evidence that systematic deprivation will lead to long-term benefits. Life will still be shit tomorrow, but at least you'll have a few hours of happiness today. And as shocking as it may seem, all of this is compatible with scoring highly on IQ tests.
And then, over the years, it becomes habit.
And that's when lack of self-awareness, which might be correlated with low intelligence, can cause people to lock it in. To believe that there is no other way, that they can't help themselves, that it's not their fault, that they're fine and the rest of world is to blame. And it's not like there's much evidence against that hypothesis. And from there, it's just a short step to thinking that it's people Not Like You that are doing this to you and everyone else you know: the Other, the Man, whites, blacks, Jews, men, women, liberals, conservatives, whoever. Them.
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