alt Hacker NewsI think author's point is that wealth drives investment which drives economic growth. In the case of lavish funerals - warranted in kinship societies - the wealth is spent on relatively unproductive investments bearing high opportunity cost. The corollary and author's secondary point is the ineffective resource allocation e.g. through nepotism.
My main (oversimplified!) takeaway from the article is that kinship societies prioritize inherently local processes that inhibit global processes. For example, they prefer keeping internal cohesion through ritual celebration rather than maximizing economic upside through education and specialization. This makes sense - the latter requires a higher degree of trust and stability. Increasing the degree of trust and stability seems to be an evolutionary process. I found Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel [1] to give some amazing insights about this.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Stee...
Guns, Germs, and Steel is a famously awful book.
Anyway, another lens to look at kinship relationships through is as a resilience strategy to volatile conditions. Any given stress (drought, job losses, etc) are unlikely to affect everyone equally, so the network functions as a safety net under many conditions.
Venture capital applies a similar strategy in the other direction if you squint a bit. It's impossible to predict who will succeed a priori, so the capital is spread to many different bets simultaneously in the hope that the successes outweigh the failures over time. Many of the "rituals" in the VC ecosystem (ghost hiring, puffery, fad chasing, etc) aren't particularly useful for any individual company's success, but I don't think many people here on HN are going to argue it's not economically effective as a whole.