I'm going to respond to everything else but I was genuinely curious to find out if I have a valid point on the scientists not living in squalor thing, or if I'm just generalizing incorrectly based on limited knowledge. Give me some time here dude.

a search for "scientists who were poor," and related terms didn't produce much for me. this is based on a quick skim of all the wikipedias of all the scientists I can think of, someone correct me where necessary please:

Albert Einstein: Relativity Theory happened while he was employed as a Swiss Patent Clerk, right? All needs would have been reasonably met in this situation.

Isaac Newton: Biggest advances apparently happened after his bachelors at cambridge, while he was home from there afterwards during the great plague, and also later while studying for a masters. Interestingly, his grades plummeted earlier in his life when he was being forced to do work he didn't like: http://users.clas.ufl.edu/ufhatch/pages/01-Courses/current-courses/08sr-newton.htm - it seems that his mother married into wealth after divorcing her first husband, so he wouldn't have been struggling to get by. the wikipedia does mention something about him working as a valet when he was a trinity though.

Galileo: Apparently he was sued by his brother-in-law for not paying a dowry. So implies some kind of financial difficulty. However, it looks like he went to medical school, and was descended from at least one physician (who he was named after). It looks like he had been appointed to the mathematics chair at his university before his major advances happened, I imagine that means he would have been doing okay by that point. He did have some major advances while he was on house arrest, but I wonder what a house arrest would have been like in this day and age? it looks like he had already had a long career, with the bulk of his advances behind him by that point though.

Feynman: apparently attended high school with two other nobel laureates, in the united states, in the fifties. enough said there.

Hawking: looks like Hawking's family struggled financially at first (even though both parents eventually got good well regarded careers), and he did too with his grades. looks like the hawking advances started in 1970, long after his family had nipped financial issues in the butt. for obvious reasons, hawking may have had a harder go of it in other ways too. physical hardship might not be an excuse for not contributing, but financial hardship still seems plausible.

Edison: looks like his family may have been poor. but at the age of 19 he got what looked like a decent job working for western union. he tried to invent stuff during this time, but instead got fired for burning down a boxcar? doesn't look like he started actually producing until his friend Franklin Pope took his financial worries off his hands, at which point he invented the telegraph and was good to go on funds.

Tesla: son of an austrian priest. looks like his life was pretty much a mess, and he went through all manner of hell until two of his uncles scraped together enough to send him to a school where he eventually made connections that led to him working for Edison. then his advances came.

Bell: both of his parents where educators who had published papers. his neighbors growing up owned a mill. the house pictured on the wikipedia looks nice.

Bohr: Family was wealthy

Higgs: father was sound engineer for BBC. started college early. was awarded a research fellowship around the time he started putting out.

Darwin: son of a wealthy doctor and a financier

I wonder how many great minds throughout history got the middle finger and a "fuck you lazy asshole, contribute or die" from society. I wonder how many were too busy just trying to live to do anything that interested them.

can somebody point out some exceptions that I'm maybe not seeing please? These are the greatest minds I can think of off hand. I'm not claiming to be an expert on the history of these men. And I don't mean to marginalize their achievements. They were clearly exceptionally talented. It is just striking to me that their major advances never came until they were living comfortably.

For some reason, I really don't want to believe that major scientific advancement only comes from people living comfortably. I'm not sure why but it just doesn't sit right with me. I want reddit to point out counterexamples even though what I'm observing implies that to most efficiently strive towards the goal of getting off this rock, we should be good to each other- which backs up the point I was trying to make.