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I don't think you need evo-psych, so much as just recognizing patterns. For the most part, people grow up in families, and they are used to socializing gains and losses across the family unit. But you can't socialize gains and losses across too large a structure without destroying the individual incentive to succeed (barring extremely high in-group loyalty). Extending this outward, you get clan/extended family structures, and this is where you start to see the failure to scale.
John is in a poor society, but has managed to scrape together enough capital to start a small food stand. If John's society has a cultural expectation of "family member has food, therefore I have food," then enough cousins come out of the woodwork, eat all of John's food for free, and ruin his potential small business. The only way John's business can survive is if he's got the cultural backing to set boundaries and refuse to socialize his gains to his cousins. (Alternatively, John tries, fails, says "fuck this" and moves to America to get away from his cousins, but more importantly, to get away from the cultural expectation that the cousins have a right to his profits.) This is a very common pattern in poor societies, and I'd say, adequately explains why they stay poor.
So, these people in poor societies look pretty dumb for not figuring out the dynamic that keeps them poor, yes? I'd say yes, but actually no. How does a potential reformer present the message "you need to not automatically share with your cousins" without coming across as a selfish defect-bot? If he's saying we shouldn't automatically share with our cousins, does that mean we also shouldn't share with our children?
This is where Ayn Rand points out that this was her core insight: "greed is good." I think she's directionally correct in many instances, but no, charity is still a virtue. It's not about whether John shares his food with his cousins or does not. It's about whether he has the right to choose to share or not--whether his society permits him to make that choice without penalty. It's a culture where a cousin may ask, but--on average--will accept a "no" without trashing John's reputation, and will himself be seen as greedy if he insists on a right to John's assets. Charity cannot exist without choice. There are various arguments for differing levels of socialism, but "creating a charitable society" is flatly wrong.
I happen to be re-reading Atlas Shrugged through audiobook on x1.5 speed mostly out of spite for its anti-fans. I appreciate her depiction of a communist dystopia which is, if anything, less dystopic than the real thing. But it's driving me insane how much her "greed is good" pitch relies on her putting pro-charity arguments in the mouths of the most snivelling hypocritical wretches you ever met, while having callipygian I-invented-calculus-at-age-twelve gigachads tell you how they only work for money.
It would be so much the better book if she left it as "yeah, communism sounds nice but everything falls apart."
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