As we all - assuming we all here on HN do relatively intellectual work - can attest, thinking and deciding have energy and exhaustion costs and we have a finite capacity after which we must recharge and rest.
And many of us are familiar with how stress (deadlines, conflicts at home, weather, etc.) tax us even further, reducing our ability to think well and decide well, and leading, sometimes, to poor decisions...
...that bring their own stress and workload.
Imagine if everyday the bulk of your decision making was literally about every dollar: heat and lights or shoes? Shoes or food? Food or healthcare? Healthcare of rent? Rent or heat and light?
You would do the same thing we do when we are coding something complex and need to make progress. You would pick a thing, do something simple that isn't really enough but is enough for now, slap hic sunt draconis in a comment, and move on. Hopefully you will get back to it.
People choose the easy, convenient, less good for them food because that gives more time to consider their other trade offs, maybe even to breathe long enough to reduce some of their stress.
And they may never get back to that choice, because the choices, the strains, never end.
Poverty is a vicious circle of stress and decline. Yes, there are people who make it out, just like there are people who make the NBA or the NHL. Most people, though, suffer. Literally.
It doesn't matter how people get poor. What matters is that poor is hard, harder than most anything most of us will ever face. What matters is that we respond with compassion and consideration and perhaps try to see beyond fault and responsibility and instead try to do something to amend those situations.
Again, I haven't met these people you talk about among any of poor people I grew up around. I think the "research" you center your worldview on is a fiction. Propaganda of some sort? Maybe meant to make you slave away for more money than you need and to fear being destitute?
The poors I grew up would do things like buy a TV they couldn't afford, then trade it to someone for several ounces of weed that they planned to sell. Then smoke too much of the weed themselves and have no TV for a month or two.
My point was that if you are poor, and you don't choose to live frugally and save what you can, then you are implicitly choosing to remain poor. This is not to say that everyone can escape poverty, because I don't think that's true, but there are people who don't do themselves any favors and it isn't helpful to blame the consequences of their bad choices on everything else.
A job can be critical and also have WAY too many bodies versus jobs.
I still think that the greatest tragedy that happened after 2008 wasn't the obscene amounts of corruption and the mismanagement of assets and misallocation of resources, they were extremely bad, but it wasn't the worst thing. What i think was the worst thing to occur was the massive displacement of qualified STEM degreed workers who ended 'falling thrugh the cracks' over the yaers because the positions that were marketed them as 'waiting for you when you're done' vanished overnight. I have met so many aspiring biologists, chemists, and physicists/mathematicians who ended up in finance or some other aimless thing because debt and bills needed to paid who had pursued their degrees to try and take on climate change, mass hunger, food security etc... many of thier collective idealism turned to angst then morose and even bleak inevitable outcomes for the near future in such a short time. Many never really recovering from the depression, and feeling as how Society failed them despite 'doing the right thing.' I know I felt that way, but I was determined to not let it occur and I used it as fuel to push through it, but I have serious survivor bias and I still deal with PTSD from it all--it's a work in progress, but I think it was a phyrric victory most times.
The real tragedy of the last decade will be one of the loss in Human Capital to the aforementioned issues, and this almost inescapable political climate in which we cannot distinguish real threats from trivial ones because we're so distracted by the vapid divisiveness that keeps people at each others throats wit perpetual tribalism.