Regulators versus Builders. By Wessie du Toit at UnHerd.

Businessman James Dyson, famed for his bagless vacuum cleaners, … has long argued that Britain’s problems are tied to the character of its elites, who esteem knowledge work and cultural literacy above the hands-on business of technology, invention, entrepreneurship and trade.

In 2004, he even stormed out of his post as chairman of London’s Design Museum, complaining that it had become a “style showcase” chasing visitor numbers with frivolous exhibitions about flower-arranging and designer shoes, rather than a place to promote serious engineering.

In many Western countries, there is now a prominent dividing line between, broadly, managerial cultures and entrepreneurial ones.

• The former are those employees in institutional settings — corporations, the public sector, NGOs, and what Dyson calls an “Oxford-Westminster bubble” — who value credentials, are fond of rules, and assume that the world is shaped by ideas and narratives.
• By contrast, those of an entrepreneurial persuasion are interested in the material facts of how things actually work, while chafing against rules and prizing innovation and individual ambition.

Consider the coalition that voted for Donald Trump in 2024. It included people who work in traditional industries involving cars, machinery or oil and gas, as well as those who do business outside of corporate structures, such as family-owned enterprises and venture capitalists. These groups were united in their resentment of a professional managerial class, stereotypically inhabiting a world of yoga studios and DEI policies, which stifled them with regulations and liberal mores.

The revolt of Britain’s entrepreneurs indicates that a similar tension has emerged here. Terms of opprobrium such as “lanyard class” and “the Blob” try to capture a middle-class, managerial ethos that now runs through the country’s institutions like a stick of rock. Its priority is not how the economic and material underpinnings of modern life operate, but ensuring that they conform to the appropriate standards mandated by equalities law, environmental regulations and progressive cultural etiquette. …

It is fundamentally a question of attitudes and social environment, and can therefore provide the basis of a much wider division. Less privileged staff at managerial institutions are likely to absorb the dominant assumptions of those settings, while people of widely differing means and backgrounds can identify with a message of self-reliance, ambition and scorn for meddling bureaucrats.

Too many people telling others what to do and taking a cut, too few building and making. No wonder productivity is down everywhere.

Everywhere it seems the issue is parasites versus doers. Our current system has allowed too many parasites too accumulate.