I think people do stop trying eventually. Because small economies like you describe might not fix the whole mess, people get discouraged. Even I do. And look for dumb little ways to comfort themselves, etc.
OMG yes THIS.
Related to which, I wish I could track down my favorite Chesterton essay ever, which was about the asshole attitudes of the well-to-do toward being spare-changed by drunks and addicts. He pointed out that as long as you're rich enough to do it on your own dime in your own house, you can drink yourself into stupor and bodily ruin with no social consequences as long as you manage not to lose your fortune or kill everyone else; but if a combination of being dealt a lousy hand at birth and making lousy guesses and poor choices with that lousy hand has led you to the point where you're sleeping in a doorway under a smelly blanket and your shoes are lined with newspaper, how DARE you spend one penny of the charity anyone should unwillingly give you on any substance that numbs the misery and puts the bleakness at bay for an hour. If your life is that utterly shitty, apparently you owe it to the entire universe to keep yourself totally sober and hyperaware of that shittiness.
Not that he thought a permanently alcoholic permanent underclass was a good idea -- he hated it -- but he just thought it was hypocritical bullshittery of the highest class to benefit from a society that creates those rigid social strata, complain about every effort to change that societal structure to make things better for the people at the very bottom, and then act the moral scold at those whom you've just ensured can never escape the bottom for not wanting to spare themselves one small temporary comfort that won't make a damn bit of difference to the bigger picture.