pp. 271-272 
Beeghley here reminds us that this is a sociology book and not just a treatise on his opinions about inequality. Thus, he points out why he relied on the hypothesis testing method of presenting information. While many might criticize all science as biased (it certainly is), we do well at reducing bias by at least making explicit our empirical claims and hypothesis so that we and others can test and retest them. This is a very different kind of "knowing" and "claiming" than what you see in the media.

pp. 272-276 
Beeghley makes a good point about the necessity to keep our eye on structural causes of poverty and inequality. He claims that we lost the war on poverty (a federal campaign to help the poor in the 1960s) because of our American predilection with emphasizing the individual person (and hence only relying on surveys to make sense of things.) But he points out, and then illustrates in Table 12-1, that the kinds of causes ("explanatory factors") that he emphasizes are structural. They can account for rates of change (see p. 275), for massive shifts, for new trends - and they do so in a more convincing way than to rely on arguments about how individuals have collectively created this new pattern. He is highlighting a kind of critique of sociology as a discipline - arguing that we emphasize statistics so much that we sometimes fail to take seriously singular qualitative changes that have happened (recall the distinction between quantitative and qualitative research early in this course.)

p. 277 
See if you can articulate in a sentence or two what is the paradox he describes. Make clear what is paradoxical.