I bet he's entirely blind to the fact that the only reason his paper is getting so much attention is that he's an "MIT graduate".
Attending an elite school like MIT is not even a 1%'er thing, it's a 0.1% thing.
There's probably some poor person, who went to a shitty college, that's even smarter and has a better theory but we'll never hear about it. Think about their career trajectories and the inequality of their outcomes.
Of course the 99.9% contains almost all of the smartest people, but they get almost none of the opportunity. This elitism is absolutely pervasive in American society.
Microsoft: "Harvard dropout inks deal with IBM"
Google: "A new search engine from Stanford."
Facebook: "The exclusive Harvard social network"
Dropbox: "Google Drive killer coming from MIT Startup".
This paper: "MIT graduate student says income inequality is actually about housing"
Something like 95%+ of people that get into elite schools graduate. It's not hard to graduate, it's just hard to get in, and the test for getting in is so gameable and rigged that almost no one pretends it isn't anymore.
As long as the rich can spend fortunes buying elite credentials for their children, we're going to have a ruling class and a worker class.