"Poverty blended with hopelessness" sounds about right. I'd like to emphasize that it's not just poverty, since there are plenty of recent immigrant families who live in poverty but the kids are at the top of their class. Unfortunately, though, there's a certain kind of degeneracy some families live in: the parents have largely failed in their every endeavor, and they'll become absolutely furious if they see the kids starting to rise above that, get their lives together, and accomplish things. If you live in communities like that, it's part of the deal: no one is allowed to escape, lest they make the rest of them look bad.
Learned helplessness is poverty+some other things, though. Otherwise no one in poverty would ever leave it. Just talking about causal direction elides reality.
