If the conclusions they've draw are illogical then you should point out why. Perhaps the methodology is bad. If so then state why. If you are unable to point out any of these things then why do you not agree with the conclusion?
> The highly skewed distribution of economic outcomes, however, appears quite in excess of any reasonable distribution of merit. Something that is distributed “normally” cannot be the direct and proportional cause of something with such skewed distributions. There has to be more to the story than that.
Right, so the American Dream is a perfect meritocracy AND that doesn't just mean wealth caused by merit, but it means wealth is supposed to be directly proportional to merit (e.g. contains no winner-take-all dynamics).
It's a long article and I'm not going to address everything it contained, but the facts it cites weren't new or surprising and the analysis wasn't insightful.
And that merit is assumed to be normally distributed. They also seem to make some fairly strong independence assumptions:
If poverty were exclusively due to individual differences, we would expect rates of poverty to be randomly distributed throughout the county.
This of course makes the implicit assumption that individual differences are neither correlated with location, nor do individuals of high merit change their location. The latter is certainly false...
That I agree with. More interesting was the recent Pew study of what US citizens perceive as wealth distribution versus what it is in reality: http://baselinescenario.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/screen-s...
It's increasingly depressing the extent to which this isn't news any more. But the truth is, it's not at all clear what, given the global economy, can or should be done about it. We could offer free education and health care to everyone, and that still wouldn't bring factory and construction jobs back.