Excerpt (preview): Era vs effort—how compounding advantage gets rebranded as virtue. Intergenerational conflict is one of the system’s favorite distractions. If families fight each other, they don’t unite against the mechanism. If advantage can be called “character,” then structural critique becomes taboo and the young learn to blame themselves for math they didn’t create. This book is the era-vs-effort lens. The central claim When the ladder gets pulled up, the people below