Don’t be so hard on rich people who appear stupid! All of us are made less able, less imaginative and less mentally effective in more unequal, affluent societies. And it is only in very unequal affluent societies that the rich can be very rich. George W Bush attended both Yale and Harvard Universities. Former and current Prime Ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron and a small army of previous prime ministers (and even more wanna-be-prime-ministers) studied in just a few élite Oxford colleges.
All these men were made what they became largely by their circumstances, by growing up with structural inequalities so great that they could not easily understand the lives, motivations and unlimited potential of others because their own lives were so different, literally cloistered from late teenage years onwards.
