Leafing through The Economist, I came across an advertisement for The Peninsula Hotels, a luxury chain in "Hong Kong, New York, Chicago, Beverley Hills, Tokyo, Bangkok, Beijing, Manila and, from next year, Shanghai".

The ad was one in a series, entitled "Portraits of Peninsula". The almost full-page photograph was of an older woman and a younger man, both in uniform, smiling broadly. Beneath the photo were the words: "A sense of family. Senior Laundry Attendant Yang Ming Chow introduced her son, Baggage & Transportation Manager Billy Choy, to the Peninsula".

A torrent of thoughts hit me. The first and strongest was this: can you imagine a Bermudian mother being proud to have "introduced" her son to working in a hotel in 2008? No matter how important you think tourism might be to the Bermuda economy - I agree with Dr. Brown that its reinvigoration is critical - many younger Bermudians have no interest in a career of service.

Like Americans, Bermudians believe in upward mobility, both for themselves and from one generation to the next. The Peninsula ad implies that such progress is possible in the Far East - after all, stripped of the fancy job titles, Mom works in the laundry and her son is a manager.

I do not know enough about the Far East to know what people there believe. But I do know a little about the Peninsula. I have visited, but not stayed at, the hotel described in the ad as being in Hong Kong, which I think is the original. It is not actually in Hong Kong; it is in Kowloon, which is near Hong Kong. It is a sensationally plush place. Guests are ferried to and from the airport by hotel chauffeurs in Rolls Royces.

Thinking about upward mobility, I was reminded of why I had left Britain back in 1975 and came to Bermuda. I believed, then as now, in the power of change.

When I qualified as a chartered accountant at the age of 22, my manager called me in. I was told that, if I played my cards right, I too could be a manager, when I hit 35. And if I continued to perform flawlessly, at 45 I could be named a partner in the firm.

"What if I'm good enough to be a manager by the time I'm 30?" I asked.

"Weren't you listening?" the manager said. "Manager at 35, partner at 45. No exceptions."

I left the accounting profession the following week and Britain not long after. My American corporate employer named me a manager at the age of 27. I became the corporate equivalent of a partner at 33. I had three things going for me: a fancy British accent, a can-do attitude and, best of all, an education.

Closing the "me" file, I next thought once again of Bermuda. My dim memory of public affairs seemed to recall that Dr. Brown stayed at a Peninsula hotel in the past few weeks, for which his wife paid.

Dr. Brown believes, rightly, that black Bermudians, especially males, should receive a fairer share in the Island's insurance industry. He has publicly threatened the industry with sanctions if change in that regard does not take place, and soon. That may or may not be the right approach to the problem; I do not know.

But I do know that some Bermudians who would like to run insurance companies lack some of the characteristics that made me successful: a fancy accent, which matters little or not at all these days; a can-do attitude, bred out of some Bermudians by the entitlement culture in which they are raised; and, most importantly of all, an education. The public education system in Bermuda is broken, which makes hoping for change for those who are fed through it something of a pipe dream.

Two pages before the ad was The Economist's lead story, on race in the US. About half way through was a paragraph - and remember I am only the messenger here, contributing to the Great Debate - entitled "Cool to be dumb".

The paragraph spoke of Roland Fryer, a black gang member turned economics professor at Harvard. "His most striking contribution to the debate so far has been to show that black students (in the US) who study hard are accused of 'acting white' and are ostracised by their peers," the article said.

It continued: "Teachers have known this for years, at least anecdotally. Mr. Fryer found a way to measure it. He looked at a large sample of public-school children who were asked to name their friends. To correct for kids exaggerating their own popularity, he counted a friendship as real only if both parties named each other. He found that for white pupils, the higher their grades, the more popular they were. But blacks with good grades had fewer black friends than their mediocre peers. In other words, studiousness is stigmatised among black schoolchildren. It would be hard to imagine a more crippling cultural norm."

I know that the same holds good among some working-class children in Britain, where education is considered a "toff's game". Is the same true in Bermuda? I do not know. If you know, tell me, please, at crombie@northrock.bm This column publishes the relevant sections of all correspondence.

In closing, I should say that, having fought my way to the middle in business, I found it too demanding for the satisfactions it brought. While I love to write about business, I could not bear to be in it. Wouldn't it be ironic if Dr. Brown were to succeed in effecting change, only for the beneficiaries to discover that they did not enjoy working in the dry confines of international business? Without a solid education, they would be as trapped inside the world of business as Dr. Brown believes them to be outside that milieu.