I disagree. Much of rhetoric is about framing--choosing what to present, and how. An essay can be wrong because of what it omits or wrongly emphasizes. Every

I disagree. Much of rhetoric is about framing--choosing what to present, and how. An essay can be wrong because of what it omits or wrongly emphasizes. Everyone is quoting pg's passage "So you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and still have great economic inequality." That's true, in the abstract--but it's so far from the reality of US society today that it makes the whole essay tone deaf: "let them eat cake." pg could have written an essay saying "poverty and poor social mobility are the real scourges, here's how we could fix them." Instead he wrote a defense of inequality, and wonders why there's blowback. pg has a bit of a blind spot about this "quote a specific passage" business. idlewords wrote a brutal evisceration of "Hackers and Painters" called "Dabblers and Blowhards": http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm And here is pg, 8 years ago, demanding someone point out which specific passage was refuted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238325