I'm lucky enough to be one of the ignorant people who has never heard of either Friedman or Piketty, so I enjoyed the article without being disturbed by that paragraph. Went right over my head. I just ignored it as being irrelevant fluff to pad out the length of the article. The introduction sections of articles typically contain nothing important, save the author trying to show how important/intelligent they are. Those sections are there just because good writing style dictates that you have an introduction. And a conclusion.

I typically read the conclusion first, because that gives me a good idea if reading the earlier sections of the article is worthwhile. The conclusion of this article, labeled "Final Thoughts", was extremely weak. Those last paragraphs would have gotten a D- if I had been grading them. "F" would have meant you forgot the conclusion, D- means you had one, but it was useless. It almost made me not read other parts of the article. But I skimmed them anyway, because others here reported that it was a pretty good article.