The point, if this has one, is that the "cheap and subpar products that need to be replaced repeatedly" are the only products on the market. This is the necessary and automatic result of competition.

It’s connected to an explanation that some people are poor because of a cycle of pathology. I remember a single mom who had three kids who we would try to help by giving them some board games or something like that and whatever we gave them would be wrecked in two weeks or less.

This book, remarkably,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_America

Had a theory of poverty that was not reductivist but said that different poor populations were poor for different reasons (despite the author being the founder of the Democratic Socialists of America)

Certainly self destructive cycles are part of it but another part we don’t want to face up to is the inheritability of severe mental illness. Bleuler saw that the family of schizophrenics were frequently a bit odd and there really does seem to be a preschizophrenic condition that goes widely unrecognized and probably explains a lot of so-called autism that is part of the dark matter of mental health.

Certainly fewer than 50% the homeless have severe mental illness but it seems around 30% do and these are the people that you see on the street in severe states of distress and these people are exceptionally difficult to help. Some of them will do ok in a ‘housing first’ regime but others will struggle to stay housed even with the best care.