The world is agog with tales of the “nouveau poor.” The well-to-do are tightening their belts: Wealthy women are reappearing in the same designer dresses, shoppers are shyly pulling coupons from their pockets, and flying commercial is back in style.

But the rich and the middle class are not the only ones losing money. Millions of poor people around the world have been plunged even further into deep poverty. For them this means taking children out of school to help scavenge for food; praying instead of seeing a doctor; selling the last of the gold earrings so that the family can eat for a few more weeks. For the poor, there is nothing “nouveau” about tumbling deeper into poverty.

The common perception about poverty is that we are slowly pulling people out of it. The truth is otherwise: Though the world pulls many millions out of poverty each year, it counteracts those gains by sending millions who were not poor into poverty. We must understand this two-way highway if we genuinely aspire to end poverty. A study we conducted at the World Bank, “Moving Out of Poverty: Success from the Bottom Up,” sought to survey this two-way highway, investigating who escapes poverty, who falls in, and why. Among our diverse findings, two striking truths stood out.

The first is that poor people, contrary to their image in the developed world, are born capitalists in the Horatio Alger mold, more capitalist than the average New Yorker or Londoner. They believe in the power of their own effort — they try and try, and even if they are foiled or cheated, they try again. Though the poor are commonly believed to be fatalistic, our conversations with 60,000 poor people in 15 countries showed this to be patently untrue.