Socialist maths:
Outcome = outcome

Capitalist maths:
Opportunity x monopoly = outcome.

Real world:
Opportunity x personal effort x support system x intelligence = outcome.

Regarding opportunity:
"The mechanics of the alienation of the working class forms a central thread of the book’s second half. Piketty traces the rise of an elite consensus between what he terms the “Brahmin Left” and the “Merchant Right.” By the Merchant Right, he means a financial and business elite that has typically supported the deregulation of markets, the slashing of public budgets, and the disempowerment of organized labor. By the Brahmin Left, he means the highly educated professionals who have come to form the voting base of mainstream left political parties across major developed economies, forsaking the earlier affiliation of the left with the poorly educated working class."

"Piketty calls the ideology of the Brahmin Left distinctively “meritocratic,” founded on the idea that higher education determines social worth. Capital and Ideology takes pains to historicize and denaturalize this notion, distinguishing it from the guiding ideology of earlier societies. “In previous inequality regimes,” he writes, “the poor were not blamed for their own poverty, or at any rate not to the same extent.” Instead earlier narratives of social organization “stressed instead the functional complementarity of different social groups.” And the meritocratic emphasis on the importance of education had real effects. Many countries, including the United States, expanded higher education on a seemingly egalitarian basis in the mid-twentieth century. The United States started to do so at more or less the same time that secondary education became universal, in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education and the postwar economic boom—the high water mark of the social democratic era as Piketty conceptualizes it. The California Master Plan—like its equivalents in other states, culminating in the federal Higher Education Act of 1965—was enacted as a public good on the theory that higher education was the “next” universal benefit that affluent societies should provide.

After the civil rights backlash of the late 1960s and 1970s, however, institutional funding gave way to individual-level financing and the ideology of “human capital.” Because higher education provided individual students with increased lifetime earnings, the reasoning went, it could be financed individually through subsidized loans to pay tuition. That reasoning led to the dramatic expansion of higher education we have seen since the 1970s, and other developed countries have done likewise. But, as Piketty notes, in Britain, France, and the United States, spending on students in the lower reaches of the higher education system significantly trailed the resources available at the richest and most elite institutions—those with admissions policies intended to keep out all but a tiny, largely hereditary few.

This story of higher education crystallizes Piketty’s interpretation of the failure of postwar social democracy. If access to the best higher education is the sole determinant of social status, and if it is available only to a tiny elite, then our ideology of meritocracy is even more politically dangerous than it would be in a traditional aristocracy, where entitlement by birth is openly acknowledged rather than obscured under layers of pretense. Political elites believe their status has been “validated” by the higher education they have obtained—in turn fueling the resentment of those at the bottom, who have been excluded from economic security and political influence thanks to having failed to attend the right institutions. “Nearly everywhere a gaping chasm divides the official meritocratic discourse,” Piketty stridently sums up, “from the reality of access to education and wealth for society’s least favored classes. The discourse of meritocracy and entrepreneurship often seems to serve primarily as a way for the winners in today’s economy to justify any level of inequality whatsoever while peremptorily blaming the losers for lacking talent, virtue, and diligence.”"