Friendly reminder that Horatio Alger, who wrote rags-to-riches American youth fiction in a capital-first Gilded Age like the one we seem to be entering, gets caricatured as pushing an “up by your bootstraps” self-made ethic but his actual work and “luck and pluck” philosophy explicitly emphasizes the necessity of elite patronage and largely advises self-improvement as a way to, with luck, impress bourgeois who are always in search of reliable quality men to run their enterprises