While that might be part of the problem, how much of it is self inflicted? Even people who can afford to save, don't. They blow all their money on a lifestyle. ATM I am trying to gently advise a co-worker to really start thinking about saving for his retirement. 50 years old and it's paycheck to paycheck (6 figure salary)for him.
Some people create their own rainy days....
The same argument could be applied to companies, and they all put out their hands for government money the instant this pandemic happened, and the government gave it to them (mostly, some small businesses did get screwed in that).
The difference between a company and a person, is that when a company has lost everything, it shuts down. But when a person loses everything, they don't just shut down, they take action, and that action could be violent (especially if they're backed up by a mob of people in similar situations).
It doesn't matter that these people didn't save properly, just telling them "Well you shouldn't have gone out to eat twice a week and saved that money, so you'd have three extra months to survive before you're screwed!" isn't going to make them sit and go "Oh yeah, guess I'm the screw up, I'm just going to sit on this street corner now and not bother anyone."
On the one hand, I agree with you.
Some of this -- no idea how much without crunching numbers -- is totally self-inflicted. People living well beyond their means, not saving, and then ending up totally up the proverbial creek.
On the other hand, I'm a pragmatist.
You throw 5% of the population out on the streets simultaneously, and you will experience entirely new realms of mob violence. Historically speaking, this is soon followed by a regime which bizarrely invests heavily into researching the full depths of human misery. Not good.
There has to be some sort of balance, a way to address the problem, without creating perverse incentives which harm those the system claims to aid (like our current welfare system). Maybe UBI or UBE. Not sure, but it's a problem we are going to have to solve.
Its the same question as why people eat crappy junk food and get obese. Answer 1 is everyone suddenly became stupid and morally corrupt, answer 2 is that their mind is being bombarded with hyperoptimized perfectly honed marketing strategies, carefully designed by very smart people to drive engagement and profits. One needs to adopt a hostile and skeptical attitude to every outside influence reaching you to be able to resist this. Or just shut off a lot of your media consumption, associate with people who value different things etc. But most people won't be able to do this, because once the average person gets ahead of the curve, the marketing machine is already in front of them.
Is that an unreasonable perspective?
I’m much more inclined to blame maladaptive behaviors on systemic failures to educate people and to provide them opportunity than I am to blame individuals.
Sure, in every system with live agents there will be bad actors and those with poor behavior, but when the system is overrun with examples of this, perhaps it’s the system we should be looking at, not individuals.
And then you have massive businesses with massive profits that take all that money and dump it into juicing the stock price, going into debt rather than save a penny for a rainy day...and then, when that rainy (or virus-y) day comes, they come crying to the government for a handout.
Tell me, which of these is more of a "self-inflicted" problem?
So to answer your question - in aggregate, fairly little.