I lifted or paraphrased the terms from the benefits that the author ascribes to kinship society; not sure how that’s buzzword-y unless you are referring to “individualist, capitalist” which seems like a pretty fair description of broadly held American societal values related to wealth.

Regardless the question still stands and I’ll put it more plainly: Do the lifetime costs and contributions(including the accrued funeral costs) to a kinship society outweigh the shared benefits? That would be my criteria for an overall “bad deal”.

And this is no shot at the author because I appreciate the exposure to another culture, but if the framing is the highest earners in a kinship society subsidize the lowest, there is also a question of the extent to which the high earners were successful in spite of or due to their kinship society membership.