[AussieWog93]

The article talks about the failure mode of kinship groups, but doesn't go into the fact that new migrants often enter into kinship networks that help them succeed. You see the same in religious communities as well - people pitching in not to leech off one another but to help everyone move ahead.

Maybe the problem is with Ghanaian values and not kinship itself.

[sfRattan]

I think mutual aid organizations and friendly societies of various kinds among American immigrants (at least historically) benefited from a strong selection effect: people willing to immigrate to a faraway country without a welfare system in pursuit of opportunity and wealth. That population is highly self-selected for work ethic, risk tolerance, and self-discipline. Those values probably stabilize social dynamics and minimize the wealth immolation and tall-poppy effects described in the article.

In other words, if everyone in a mutual aid society is a crab who crossed half the world and an entire ocean to escape the bucket, eventually said crabs stop acting like you'd expect crabs in a bucket to act, and their social dynamics are consequently less suffocating.