Most Americans don't understand real poverty. It exists outside their reality. They've never seen it, let alone experienced it.
To the article's point, it is about being in a situation where there is no viable path to not being broke. You are stuck in an intrinsic local minima financially due to a total lack of capital, leverage, and optionality that a merely broke person has and takes for granted. If you end up not being broke it is because you worked very hard and/or were very lucky. Climbing the hill to get out of that minima can be extremely difficult.
It is pretty rare in the US for an otherwise functional person to end up there, most people are born into it. You usually have to make a lot of bad choices and/or have serious behavioral issues to find yourself in this situation if you weren't born into it, which isn't the same thing. People who are homeless drug addicts aren't "poor" in the sense of the article; if they weren't drug addicts they'd merely be broke in most cases.
You don't see many of the cases of the truly economically poor who get out of poverty ending back there again. These cases are routinely conflated with people who aren't poor for structural economic reasons.
To the article's point, it is about being in a situation where there is no viable path to not being broke. You are stuck in an intrinsic local minima financially due to a total lack of capital, leverage, and optionality that a merely broke person has and takes for granted. If you end up not being broke it is because you worked very hard and/or were very lucky. Climbing the hill to get out of that minima can be extremely difficult.
It is pretty rare in the US for an otherwise functional person to end up there, most people are born into it. You usually have to make a lot of bad choices and/or have serious behavioral issues to find yourself in this situation if you weren't born into it, which isn't the same thing. People who are homeless drug addicts aren't "poor" in the sense of the article; if they weren't drug addicts they'd merely be broke in most cases.
You don't see many of the cases of the truly economically poor who get out of poverty ending back there again. These cases are routinely conflated with people who aren't poor for structural economic reasons.