I'm not sure this is a sound analogy, but imagine someone picking up cigarettes for the first time and building up tolerance over time as they go from one cig a day to two, three, four and so on. Now, compare that to someone suddenly smoking 10 cigs per day. The latter person is more likely to get wrecked from the side effects.
Edit: I checked your profile and saw that you're the co-founder of Industry Dive, damn. I love your newsletters and websites!...especially Payments and Banking Dive.
Not sure if that's true by number of gamblers, but my gut says it's mostly true weighed by the amount of money gambled away. I say mostly, because we don't count rich kids / oligarchs wasting money for fun, who might dominate the value chart.
Most people who are the poorest are usually the ones who know exactly where their dollars are going. They can tell you exactly how much a carton of eggs and milk are.
You're making the assumption that everyone plays the lottery because they think it is a smart financial decision.
It's easy to say "well, lotteries have a negative expected payoff". And that's true, but it can still have a less negative payoff than a payday loan or having your car repossessed.
The utility of $2*X is not exactly twice $X. It can be more or less, and that can differ between different people.
That said, it's more likely that someone whose life ended in poverty is not as smart as someone who can live comfortably. IQ generally correlates with income (you can google a few studies).
There are surely tons of reasons that can push smart people into poverty (bad health, poor environment leading to poor choices) but that shouldn't obscure the general trend.
That said, I think over a certain IQ, other traits of your personality or the environment will have the predominant effect in determining whether you'll end up poor or not.
Similarly, over a certain amount of money, I'm sure there will be more variance. Making 5k more than your peers doesn't mean you're smarter than them - and the fact that you're all able to earn a living and save some money means you're all smart.
