There's something I remember being told (or maybe read about too) related to the gift culture of extreme poverty as an adaptive behavior for survival, but that

There's something I remember being told (or maybe read about too) related to the gift culture of extreme poverty as an adaptive behavior for survival, but that paradoxically keeps people in poverty poor. The basic idea is that you and all your friends are poor and someone comes into some amount of money, all of that money is pretty much immediately spent on helping friends or just material purchases rather than saving or planning. Partly this is because there's some feedback loop to expecting money not to last long, but also because then everyone in the community is spending money on everyone else. When you need to rely on the help of friends to survive at that level, being generous when you come into money makes it more likely your friends will help you in the same way. This gets taken to an extreme where there's pressure to not save. If you're found out to have money and have not immediately spent it you'll get shamed by your peers for being greedy or for acting better than them. Then if you end up needing financial help later maybe they won't want to help you (which at poverty level could be existential). These kind of social local maxima are really hard to break out of.