GENE MARKS'S blog post on Forbes.com, ostentatiously headlined "If I Was a Poor Black Kid", didn't actually offend me as much as it did many of the plethora of bloggers who've pilloried it over the past few days. As Forbes's Kashmir Hill later posted, most of the vitriol seemed to be responding to the title. The post itself went out of its way to be polite, understanding, and non-partisan, and was mainly guilty of tone-deafness and of an unauthorised attempt by an unqualified ethnic-majority person at racial empathy with an imaginary ethnic-minority person, a gesture which is just extremely risky and basically shouldn't be ventured. (Notably, responses by Karl Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who actually know what it's like to grow up as poor black kids, were more even-tempered in their rebuttals than most.)

What mainly struck me about the post was that it was off-topic. And it was off-topic in a characteristic way. The post was supposed to be a response to Barack Obama's speech in Kansas last week about the erosion of the American middle-class dream and the growth of radical inequality in American society. Mr Marks responded with a post offering advice for a member of the economic underclass on how to become more employable: study hard, stay out of trouble, take advantage of existing educational and training opportunities, get a job. This had nothing to do with what Mr Obama was talking about. Mr Marks's advice would have been equally valuable (or worthless) if offered to a hypothetical "poor black kid" in Philadelphia 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago. What Mr Obama was talking about was an entirely different issue: assuming that poor black kid did manage to make it to median income today, he would be more economically insecure than he would have been had he performed the same feat in 1971. He would more likely be indebted and without health insurance, employer's pension or long-term job security, and he would actually be making a lower hourly wage in inflation-adjusted terms. In fact, what Mr Obama was saying had no more to do with poor black kids in Philadelphia than with working-class white kids in Philadelphia.

To some extent Mr Marks's instinct to turn a discussion about economic hardship into one about "poor black kids" is a legacy of an earlier, less unequal era in American life, the 1950s-80s, when discussions of poverty tended to focus on poor urban blacks because they were the people who were clearly on the wrong side of a major gap in prosperity. We are no longer having that discussion. It is not just poor urban blacks left out of growing prosperity these days; it's the entire bottom and middle of the income scale. Mr Obama's point, the familiar point made by everyone focusing on growing inequality in American society, is that the income curve has become vastly steeper over the past 30 years, and while the top end keeps shooting up, the bottom and middle parts of the curve are stuck and sometimes falling behind. To respond to this statistical argument with a motivational story about how to get yourself out of the lower end of the curve and try to climb that ever-steeper slope is to miss the point entirely. But it is also entirely characteristic of the conservative side of the American political spectrum to make this move.

One thing I find paradoxical is that highly numerate people, people in the engineering, business and technical fields (Mr Marks writes about the tech industry), are often most reluctant to consider social problems from a statistical point of view, and prefer to consider them as individual moral or motivational stories. We have a curve composed of 150m dots that is becoming steeper and more parabolic. Go down to Occupy Wall Street, and you'll find a lot of cultural-studies majors working for environmentalist nonprofits who support changing systemic rules to flatten the slope. Go into the financial-institution office buildings that surround them, and you'll find a lot of math majors devising computer models for risk-weighting assets who think the dots on the bottom end should try harder to get into the top end. It's weird.