Very good points. While there is some merit to the author’s prescriptions, the basic premise here is that if you’re rich it’s because you deserve it, and if you’re poor it’s nobody’s fault but your own. The perfect counter-example to this trope is Donald Trump, who is at once extremely wealthy and grossly incompetent. Being born into privilege is a buffer against errors in judgment, and being born without privilege means your mistakes will cost you dearly. A recent study came out that found that a poor person would in most cases have to do everything right with no set backs for 20 years to claw out of poverty. In every state in the union, you would need two or more full time jobs at the minimum wage just to be able to afford an apartment at the local going rates. Who has time to read or discretionary income to invest under these realities?
Now you might call these excuses, and there certainly are individuals who by sheer luck and/or extreme chutzpah find a way to beat these odds, but the exceptions do not disprove the rule, which is that economic mobility is currently at an all-time low in America — in no small part due to privileged white people thinking that wealth=merit and therefore see instituting strong social welfare programs like free college education as unnecessary, and an unjust theft of their “earned" wealth.
So let’s just please be real about all this. The prescriptions here are good for people with a certain amount of privilege to leverage that privilege into more privilege, but if you’re at the bottom of the barrel, this is all just a bunch of self-satisfied finger wagging.