A lot of social sciences is about generating and constructing data to prove something that seems obvious to most casual observers.
Part of why is cases like this - that despite it seeming evident to many folks, there are many others who insist that poor people are to blame for being poor, and bad individual decision-making is the only reason that poverty exists.
"Our research does not reject the notion that individual behavior and decision-making may directly relate to upward economic mobility. Instead, we narrowly conclude that biased decision-making does not alone explain a significant proportion of population-level economic inequality"
Everyone needs to be careful of conflating studies that look at populations with advice for individuals. Good decisions can still improve the financial situation of individuals, but on a population scale that's not enough to sort everyone's wealth by how good their decisions were.
A long time ago I built a Bayesian Network using a large set of variables extracted from census data. Despite all of the possible causal relationships it could have constructed it determined that being black was the cause of low income. No other variable for society to address that could address that causal relationship.
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