Excellent piece. The subtext — why are our academic-political institutions treating the less fortunate as irrational — is just as important as the content.
It permeates academia and politics because higher learning and the political sphere are squarely in the realm of the privileged in the USA.
Clearly there must be some physical difference between the classes to explain this discrepency and re-inforce that the rich are simply better than the poor and so deserve to be rich, despite the obvious objections raised by reality.
And just to ram this point home in a way that you would think would be unmistakable one of the authors of the Bell Curve, followed up with a book explaining why poor white people are also deserving of their fate.
"Murray goes on to provide evidence that religiosity, work ethic, industriousness, family, etc., have either remained strong or have weakened minimally in the New Upper Class, whereas these same attributes have either weakened substantially or have become almost nonexistent in the New Lower Class. "
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/26/opinion/in-america-throwi...
This is both factually and logically unsound, as well as ethically dubious even before you get into the totally pseudoscientific race angle that was used to sell these political policies to gullible racists.
†Not coincidentally, the Rhetoric of Reaction lists the standard three arguments used against social progress through history as: perversity (anything you do to help will only make things worse), jeopardy (any change will risk what we have now) and ..... futility (it doesn't matter what you do, nothing will change). Bell Curve very strongly following this latter rhetorical strategy. These arguments naturally re-occur when you're arguing against something that everyone knows is a good thing, just as FUD is a popular sales strategy when you're a comfortable monopoly. You don't have to claim to be good or even just better, you just need to undermine the alternatives and the status quo survives a bit longer.