The essence of poverty: It is a social condition shaped and continuously reinforced over the long term by structural forces. Its core is not about how individuals make choices under local constraints, but about how these constraints are constantly produced by institutions, history, and power relations, systematically compressing people's opportunities. In this sense, poverty is not a "result of choice," but a distributional structure with pre-set boundaries that causes different groups to have continuously diverging starting points in education, healthcare, capital, and risk resilience, and to be perpetuated across generations. Reducing poverty mainly to information asymmetry, incentive deviations, or local market failures can explain some behavioral phenomena, but it tends to obscure deeper issues: who defines the rules, who allocates resources, and why these rules remain stable over time in favor of certain groups and disadvantage others. Therefore, poverty is not merely an issue of efficiency or decision optimization, but a structural mechanism that continuously reproduces inequality itself.