Also, my "ilk" have always had a lot of respect for inventors and entrepreneurs, who are the productive engine of our economy. My parents were thrilled when I told them I was joining a startup. We just don't like "business" scumbags-- politically-skilled corporate bureaucrats who masquerade as entrepreneurs-- who move money around but don't contribute intellectually to society, and real estate is especially disreputable because of that industry's exploitation of status-driven and simian emotions.
Then sales of art, clothing, jewelry, and pleasure vehicles must be beyond mention.
Thanks for the interesting perspective. As a peasant, I've always blamed the political class for the sins of "politically-skilled corporate bureaucrats".
Then again, I think that construction of a factory, house, or hotel is a higher calling than construction of a church.
Because Ghod knows that folks who build buildings are the lowest of the low.
> I'm surprised that upper-middle-class UK families don't have an even stronger blue-blooded prejudice against "working on the exchange". Growing up, I always understood being an intellectual (academics at the pinnacle) as the epitome of preftige, and investment banking as the thing you did when your family lost its money/standing and you needed to buy it back by sacrificing ten years of your life to something unpreftigious but lucrative.
In other words, the blue-bloods and the wannabees are essentially parasites and that's a good thing.
Napoleon was defeated by the "nation of shop-keepers", not the professional poets. The blue-bloods marched working men into machine gun fire, kicking soccer balls and talking about their halcyon days at Eton. The mechanics and engineers invented tanks.