This sounds like quite an interesting case to look at. Thanks for posting this about your acquaintance.
It seems I'm getting a lot of different answers and I'm not sure if this is the case because different countries work differently but I assume it is. Places like India are known to give the wealthiest of people more money. Its interesting to look at two ways of how wealth is percieved:
1. A lot of wealthy people and conservatives at that believe that poor people are poor because they haven't made money even after being given opportunities. And in some cases this is of course true but in quite a lot of cases it isn't.
2. A lot of poor people are poor because in some cases they don't want too much money (people normally end up in debt if they get rich quickly). Some poor people are poor because they can't get anything. A homeless person can't claim unemployment benefits in most places as they don't have a fixed address and are often without relevant paperwork like passports and birth certificates...
No problem, I'm happy if it helps (or even if it doesn't haha) -- there aren't that many countries with the descriptions I've given so it could be easy to narrow it down.
You can actually also look on LinkedIn and find some people in these smaller jurisdictions who might have a lot to share (and could be happy to share). Malta, Gibraltar, San Marino, for example, all have set up blockchain jurisdictions and all have small enough networks to probably give insight.
1. You're right that most people of advantage naturally believe poorer classes simply have not used their opportunities well but social and economic situations at birth are statistically proven as huge advantages. I'm no communist or socialist ideologically but I do see a lot of problems in socioeconomic policies in developing countries where I spent a lot of my life in. Systems that really force people to be in cycles of poverty and debt, for example.
2. A lot of poor people have been born poor, very few make the transition from rich to poor in one fell swoop, although there are many blurred lines now. There is a global poverty line my country uses, but as well a national poverty line (which is many, many times the global poverty line) and there is an official Urban poverty line to reflect cost of living in the cities. Since the 1980s, my parents and my generation belong to the urban poor but I would never call myself poor... it simply means we don't own property, we are renters, and probably owe banks money. But we can eat;)
For most able-bodied adults, they don't even have unemployment benefits here but it's the same throughout most of Asia.