The basic argument here is that lower-class people are less intelligent than the middle-class and, so, less motivated to succeed; hence, their relative failure. However, this argument is based purely on IQ tests that also - apparently - prove that Blacks are less intelligent than Whites.
Despite the author’s championing of motivation as being very important to one’s life chances, he does not factor this into the results of IQ tests, purely in order to make it appear that success in life is entirely genetic. Somehow he believes that motivation - or lack of thereof - has no effect on IQ test scores and that such scores prove the correlation that the higher the social class one is born into the higher the IQ. This is like saying that Blacks score less than Whites in IQ tests because they are Black and that White supremacism – specifically designed to be a demotivator - has nothing to do with it. Or that lie detector tests reveal truth no matter the mental state of the person questioned.
This pseudo-science desperately tries to turn a soft science like sociology into a hard one. This acultural and acontextual drivel is just the sort of stuff designed to create social policy that fossilises culture to such an extent that help for the poor to succeed is never given - since the poor can do nothing about their allegedly-inherited birth circumstances. It is a brazen attempt by the middle-class to retain the unearned cultural privileges that centuries of social snobbery have given them.
The problem with any attempt to divorce statistics from human nature is that sociology then loses sight of the very humanity it tries to describe and explain. It is not statistics that can be made to tell lies, it is statisticians who can lie.
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