Not entirely unexpected from an author who got a JD from Yale and then moved to Silicon Valley though.

Through bittersweet reminiscence and heart-wrenching anecdote, Vance’s bestseller, which has been praised in The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, ultimately diagnoses culture and pathology—the same culture and pathology that liberals often rightly eschew when applied to poor communities of color—as the principal explanatory forces for the poverty and drug abuse he witnessed as a youth. The author, a conservative and a venture capitalist, skirts historical and sociological explanations for the drug-addledness and material destitution of his home region, arguing that neither public policy nor corporate exploitation are to blame.

Vance instead attributes his subjects’ condition to a mono-causal “bad behavior”—an explanation that shares a common genealogy with the racism and classism of social Darwinism and nineteenth-century civilization theory. He paints a portrait of laziness, welfare fraud, and a “hillbilly” culture in decline, as though there was ever a time in which the metropolitan gaze didn’t homogenize or demonize Appalachia, or blame its residents for their own social ills. At last, Hillbilly Elegy regurgitates the age-old suggestion that poverty stems from individual failing and that anyone can transcend unproductive culture if only they possess a sufficient “work ethic” and steer toward a white middle-class definition of “morality.”