Jeremy Grantham: evaluation

Transcript context

…Was Margaret Thatcher a successful prime minister? Yes, I think you have to say that she was amazingly successful because England was in one of its several periods of economic malaise and social malaise, in a way. We were really stuck in the class system — one of the reasons I left England — and Thatcher did an unbelievable job on that. She would grab Brits who’d been 30 years in America at McKinsey and stick them to run the steel company. She picked people entirely on merit. It was a kind of shocking introduction of meritocracy into the old establishment based on class and land and so on. At the end of her era, it was a different Britain, much more competitive. London felt like New York, and things happened a lot faster and better. Now, you grew up near where? South England — is that correct?…

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