Compare, for instance, the backgrounds of two elite class premiers: George W. Bush and David Cameron. Bush’s patrilineal great-grandfather Samuel P. Bush establ

Compare, for instance, the backgrounds of two elite class premiers: George W. Bush and David Cameron. Bush’s patrilineal great-grandfather Samuel P. Bush established the family’s political dominance through technical education and the management of a firm that manufactured steel railway parts. In contrast, Cameron’s father, paternal grandfather, and great-grandfather were all Oxford-educated partners in the stockbroker’s firm Panmure Gordon & Co, while another Sir Ewen Cameron was chairman of HSBC. That's just one president. I can scarcely think of any presidents of the US at all who have a familial connection to industrial manufacturing. Similarly, British Prime Ministers in the past 50 years have no connection to gentry besides Boris Johnson and David Cameron. Harold Wilson's father was a chemist and maybe that could be counted as a familial connection to manufacturing. In effect, Britain didn’t have an incentive to chase development for survival, because it was the dominant power of early industrialization. The industrial revolution started in the UK and a number of people who made a fortune were ennobled or given a knighthood, etc. The land holding noble is actually not very accurate. Most titles were given post 1800 even post 1850 when land holding was no longer the most profitable business. The avenue into power for this synthetic class had for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries been the Oxford literae humaniores course in classical Greek and Latin, often supplemented by study for civil service exams focused on British constitutional history. These exams, both old and new, have produced a generalist administrative class with institutional and humanistic knowledge but little technical skill. This is pretty typical for politicians to have humanities degrees. The degrees have changed over time but political sciences and law are common for politicians. It's maybe worth noting that Margaret Thatcher had a 2nd class degree in chemistry so not every prime minister was someone with a classics background. I don't know what the thesis of this article is exactly. I think it might be that the old, aristocratic, elite, leaders is to blame for the decline of Great Britain because it didn't value industry enough to be able to compete with France, Germany, and the USA. I don't think that's accurate though and is a cliched scapegoating.