*Poverty Is a Systemic, Not Individual, Failure.*

If you want to blame it on individual poor people, you can spin the facts that way. When a system becomes hard for certain groups to cope with, some people will crack before others.

Why would certain people crack sooner? Perhaps their personalities or other characteristics are more predisposed to cracking. Perhaps they have bad luck. There is always randomness that affects the outcomes in specific cases.

But those causes of randomness have little to do with political questions — the aspects what make a system better or worse. That is what governments can adjust so that fewer people crack — or, for those who seek scapegoats, so that more people crack.