Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car | Hacker News Reader

Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car

fullstackeconomics.com

491 pointsexolymph484 comments

I have a different conclusion. The article mentions that the car would have cost her 3 months of income. That doesn't sound too much and is roughly about the same what people pay for cars today, maybe even more.

The reason she thought about the car as a luxury and not a necessity is that then the society wasn't dependent on cars like we do today. They travelled less, worked closer to home, milkman brought milk to home and grocery shopping could be done closer to home as well.

That was my conclusion as well, everything was simply insanely cheap then compared to today. A car today cost much more than 3 months salary, and to rent such an apartment would be basically impossible.

The rent was 12% of his income only. Which means a bachelor with a middle class job could easily rent an apartment with 4 bedrooms and 2 sitting rooms. LOL

Everything was much much cheaper. Except exotic food groceries.

> A car today cost much more than 3 months salary

Depending on where you work, not that much more. But you don’t get to spend all of your gross salary on cars.

I wonder how finance worked. Today a car might cost 3 months of salary, but I can get a loan to pay it off over 6 years. If I had to buy a new car without a loan I couldn't afford it because I don't normally keep that much savings. (Ignoring retirement savings which technically I could tap into)

In Romania something like this happened with house prices. I bought my first flat just as credit was becoming available for the general population - it costed me 27k USD; at that time, it was customary that you'd pay in full for an apartment, people were actually looking suspicious at you for involving the bank!

One colleague of mine wanted to keep saving and pay for an apartment in full; he didn't manage to, even though he was more senior (read: earned more money; also he lived alone, could save more than I could). What happened was that prices increased faster than his savings rate - effectively by waiting he lost money, and eventually gave up and took a credit. Now... there were multiple factors for the increases in the housing market, credit being available was not the only one, but I do believe it was one of the main drivers.

Interesting, reminds me of the student loan debt bubble.

Most things were cheaper for the (then rather small) upper-middle-class, yes. For others, not so much. A lot more people had to choose between starving and freezing in 1919 London than in 2021 London.

They were well off.

Rent was 12% because rents generally were lower, but eg clothing for sure was way more expensive.

You can compare to the maid and see how she was doing.

How long did the maid have to work to be able to buy a shirt, vs how long do you have to work to buy a shirt?

She lived in central(ish) London, where today still a car isn't a necessity or particularly useful other than for travelling to the greater UK or specific jobs.

That's also true in many big cities (Singapore, New York). This article fails to consider this point of view that she really didn't need the car similarly to many people living in those places today.

The fact that she could afford a maid and nurse, maybe was because she was wealthier than majority of population. If she was in 1% of income bracket (that would be $421,926 per year in the US), then it is not unusual for those people to hire cleaners or baby sitters on regular basis even if they don't employ them full time.

Ah yes, I think I was agreeing with you than not everywhere is dependent on cars even today, and many of my London based friends neither own cars or have licenses.

I'm sure in her time if you lived outside the city a car would be higher up the list of desirables as it would have a material impact on your day to day life.

The article could probably do with a contrasting source comparable to Agatha's wealth but from the countryside (even the "home counties") as the spending patterns would be very different.

It was also much more unusual to be in long-term debt as that often would have ended in serfdom-like situations. The ease of getting huge loans and credits nowadays is very novel.

The downside to this is that mass homeownership wasn't a thing at all.

There was a huge class divide between the property owners who could accumulate wealth and those renting houses or tenement flats who were unlikely to ever be able to purchase their own property.

Sadly, the insane UK housing market is causing such a divide to return.

The UK railway network back then was very dense.

In the UK you are never very far away from a road called Station Road with no (longer) any station or railway, or from a path that used to be a railway line. Or a strange bit of road with only the backs of things on it that use to be a railway line.

> maybe even more

Average new car sale price at the end of 2021: $47,077

Average monthly household income at the end of 2021: $5,307

Even highly paid FAANG engineers are probably spending a few months income on a new car.

Many people, maybe even majority, buy used cars which cost less. They are probably more reliable than new cars in 1919. I was probably biased because I recently bought a used car without getting a loan which cost me about 3 months of income.

In any case, she actually had a nice income if should could have bought a new car with 3 month income only. She just didn't have a real need for it. The story should have been not so much about her but that most other people were much poorer than today and had to work as maids to survive.

Yes, that's true, but even cars are not the same as the model T or other cars available in 1919. Besides cars being relatively "new" to society at the time, they also lacked, well, everything on this list and then some:

* No heater * No air conditioning/cooling * No radio/CD/Bluetooth/Carplay/Android Auto * No speakers, let alone not 6 or 8 speakers that some cars have * No heated and cooled seats * No power mirrors * No power seats * No power steering * No power brakes (!!) * No ABS brakes or traction control * No self-driving capabilities, blind spot detection, automatic lane change, "smart" cruise control or any cruise control at all * No rear defrost * Not even a dome light! * No power windows * No power locks * No all-wheel drive. In fact, it was mostly single-wheel drive! * No in-screen dash or touchscreen controls * No massage seats * No "slow close" doors * No door sill illumination * No turn signals (until later, that is)! * No seatbelts (or if there were, they crude early versions) * No meaningful safety mechanisms, like collapsible steering columns and automatic airbags, side impact airbags, and proper crumple/structure design * No in-car entertainment options for movies, etc. * No in-car navigation systems * No OBD diagnostics to let you know when you are running low on oil or other critical fluids

We could keep going ... but on the one hand, cars might cost "similar" or even more in today's standards, but they also DO so much more. Even if you said, well let's build the same vehicles they had then today, you couldn't. Government regulations force things like safety mechanisms that will cost more to deliver a final product.

Average salary around that time was £70 for men and £30 for women [1]. So they [Cristie's husband] were making 10x-15x average per year.

I'd say someone that makes 10x current average (~$500K) doesn't have a problem buying a car with 1 months salary. Even with the currently inflated prices.

[1] https://www.abroadintheyard.com/todays-luxuries-beyond-avera...

Interesting that he compares everything that is hard to compare but ignores one thing that would be very easy - rental pricing. You had to pay it then and you have to pay it now.

"four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.” The rent was £90 for a year."

According to one CPI calculator (https://www.in2013dollars.com) "£90 in 1919 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £4,951.54 today" and "£700 in 1919 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £38,511.97 today".

Google search also reveals that average yearly wage in London in 1920 was £205 and average wage in London in 2021 was £53,700 so £700 income in 1919 was 3.5 times the average which in 2021 would be £187,950 (quite a bit more than "equivalent in purchasing power to about £38,511.97 today").

A quick web search for 4 bedroom apartment (not sure about sitting rooms) in London shows that rent is between £2,000 and £8,000 per month - let's say £5,000 for a nice one like what Christie's sounds like which is £60,000 per year. They paid £90/£700 = 13% of their (3.5 the average) annual income for rent and now the equivalent rent would be £60,000/£187,950 = 32% of the 3.5 the average annual income.

Even just comparing the plain average income, person in 1919 could rent the same apartment and still have £205 - £90 = £115 to live on for the year (which seems possible considering maid lived on £36 per year but in 2021 the average income leaves you £53,700 - £60,000 = £6,300 short on the rent alone.

So ignoring the tvs, computers, holidays, cars, healthcare and all the things that we cannot compare and comparing what we can, it is obvious that just to live in 2021 we need more money that what we are making and so it is easy to see how most people feel that the living standards have gone down.

That still doesn't seem like an "easy" comparison.

Rents tend to be tied to the infrastructure/facilities and earnings potential within a given radius of the property.

1919 London was dirty with terrible air quality (far worse than Beijing or Mumbai today, literally choked my great grandmother to death on a bad day) and with nowhere near the infrastructure or work opportunities it has today.

A fairer comparison to 1919 London would be a hypothetical working class town where the primary employers are steel mills and environmental standards are simply unenforced.

Sure, there are many ways that my simple (not easy) comparison is short changing current London but if you want to live there now and make the average wage then it may not matter to you so much that air quality is better or that streets are cleaner (because everywhere in the UK that is also true) when you cannot afford an apartment in the location that you would have been able to 100 years ago.

For sure. I was just trying to make the point that it's not such an easy comparison.

Comparing 1919 London to 2022 London really is like comparing a Model T to a Model S.

If we afford this nuance to a rising rent -- that its value depends on surrounding infrastructure -- why do economists treat rising wages as a "disease"? It seems to me that the average violinist has become more productive, because their audience will apply their improved well being to greater economic benefit than 100 years ago. They are providing a desired input to an improved infrastructure, just as an old apartment in a hot neighborhood.

> So ignoring the tvs, computers, holidays, cars, healthcare and all the things that we cannot compare and comparing what we can, it is obvious that just to live in 2021 we need more money that what we are making and so it is easy to see how most people feel that the living standards have gone down.

The thing is, you can live today without all of that and your living costs would be comparable to Christie's. A house without electricity, centralized heating, safety regulations of today will cost far less to rent, if you can find one that is. Today's housing comes batteries included with all of that so it will be more expensive. People might feel their standards of living going down but if they were to spend a week in a 1919 house they'd be much more grateful.

Indeed, this seemed to indicate that the rent has increased disproportionately. The article mentions that the rent would cost $500 in today's dollars. That's very cheap for 4 bedroom apartment everywhere in western world, especially in London.

Maybe that car was really rubbish by today's standards and technology-wise therefore it is expected that now the real costs have come down. But with apartments I don't think there is that much of an improvement that justify average increase from $500 to $5000.

What's more interesting, is that somehow very few new nice areas (towns, cities) have been built. Take almost any area in London with anything built after the 1950s, and in many cases the new buildings make the area far worse, not better. Kensington is still the size it was, and there are hardly any new Kensingtons available - and a lot less affordable for an average professional.

London is wealthy enough for there to be no 'bad areas'.

It looks like the flat she referred to still exists, Addison Park Mansions in Hammersmith. So we can make quite good comparison presuming one is rented out still. Though I wouldn't be suprised if they've been parted out into smaller flats, or rented as shared.

Funnily enough I'm sat in my flat about 10 minutes walk away. My building appears to have been built sometime in the late 1800s, and is somewhat falling apart. So the value for money might be even less now.

Yeah, and that calculation also only adjusts rent for inflation, and in reality rent has risen much much more than inflation.

The rent for that apartment today would be more than 100% of the average middle class income.

Interestingly enough, I'm typing this in Singapore, where in 2022 it's quite common to have a "maid" (helper/domestic worker, in the current local lingo), but no car.

Singapore imports domestic workers for poor neighbouring countries like the Philippines and Myanmar, which keeps wages very low, on the order of US$450/month, not too far off Christie's inflation-adjusted US$220/month. Even the fully loaded cost with government levies, insurance, food & board etc is on the order of $1000/month, considerably cheaper than most other childcare options, particularly if like most Singaporeans both parents work longer hours.

By comparison, Singapore strictly limits the number of cars on the road, auctioning permits called "Certificates of Entitlement" to the highest bidder and imposing around 100% taxes on the cars themselves. As a result, a plain vanilla Toyota Corolla costs US$120,000 all in. What's more, half of that is the COE cost, which is valid for only 10 years, meaning the value of the car depreciates by around $10,000 every year. Add in petrol, servicing, parking etc, and having a live-in helper to run errands and drop off kids etc starts to look quite affordable in comparison.

Do more expensive cars get taxed at 100% also?

No, they get taxed on a sliding scale of up to 180%. Expand "Car" on the page below for details.

https://onemotoring.lta.gov.sg/content/onemotoring/home/buyi...

Sure, the cost of a car is one factor, but the bigger factor is that Singapore is small and well-connected with public transport. It's quite normal for someone to live in one end of the city and take bus / train to the other end for work.

It's not just a factor, cars are straight up unaffordable for much of the population. One local politician was roundly criticized for a gaffe where he said that "everybody has a car, we have two".

The public transport system certainly does make live easier without a car though, as does the ubiquity and low cost of taxis and Uber-style rideshares.

I spent a month in singapore a few years back, about 5 miles from the office. I took uber everywhere though - bill was about £450 for the month when I put the expenses in.

Uber was about 15-20 minutes, public transport took over an hour. That’s 40 hours a month extra time, and my time is worth far more than £11 an hour when my company’s paying £3k for the apartment alone.

" The couple’s annual income was around around £700 ($50,000 in today’s dollars)—£500 ($36,000) from his salary and another £200 ($14,000) in passive income.

They rented a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in London with four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.” The rent was £90 for a year ($530 per month in today’s dollars). To keep it tidy, they hired a live-in maid for £36 ($2,600) per year, which Christie described as “an enormous sum in those days.”

The couple was expecting their first child, a girl, and they hired a nurse to look after her. Still, Christie didn’t consider herself wealthy. "

Ignoring the point and rest of the article but it's a strange and uncanny framing to start it, while simultaneously giving the true numbers, trying to suggest that Agatha Christie in this circumstance of having income 25x that of the working class might not be considered well-off.

They didn’t suggest that, it said:

> Still, Christie didn’t consider herself wealthy

Almost no one considers themselves wealthy. Even people that are very well-off typically consider themselves some variation of middle class, because they can so obviously and clearly see the next rung up the ladder, and how they are not on it. This point is made perfectly by her quote about how only the rich have cars.

The middle class is just very wide. Essentially anybody who doesn't starve when they're out of work for a couple of months is middle class. Upper class is distinguished from middle class whether you have to work at all. Very few people have enough passive income to afford a ~median lifestyle. Agatha Christie might not fit into middle class, but today a lot of people do.

I've seen an updated definition that kicks in at the time you can take one or more yearly vacations, so basically just doctors, highly paid laywers, highly paid SWEs, and executives.

They usually never take those yearly vacations since it would mean lost of practice and connections.

By this definition, the only people who are rich are young professionals in Western countries who actually take those vacations and go on year-long travel through South America, for example.

I think he meant "one or more vacations per year" not "one or more years long vacations" (it also confounded me when skimming)

That would mean that Russia is a country of very rich people, since even the blue collar workers here can afford a family vacation per year, going to e.g. Turkey or Egypt - these tours come pre-packaged therefore really cheap. Middle-class youth routinely have 2-3 of these, going to more exclusive destinations. A lot of these will never buy a car, especially a new one, since a new car costs 10 years worth of vacations.

I agree with you, I think it is a very US centric point of view.

BTW I think they where referring to middle class: you are middle class if you can go on vacation. (IMHO it doesn't make sense to be considered rich if you can go on vacation)

In Europe we are used to having a lot of vacation time, it (almost) doesn't matter which is your job, in the US it is not like this.

Maybe this is my naive European view, but taking a yearly vacation doesn't seem like a "rich person" thing here. You don't need to be earning vast amounts to afford a weeks package holiday in Spain.

It sounds strange to me, too. I grew up pretty poor in the US, and we always took at least one family vacation per year. Often, it was a camping trip or the like. Sometimes, it was a visit to a city or national park. My parents were very, very frugal. We almost never had new clothes. I guess it was just a matter of what they prioritized. Looking back on it all, I’d say they got just about everything right.

That's extremely US-centric. Nearly everyone in Europe gets 20+ paid days a year, including minimum wage workers and it's common to use at least two of those weeks to go somewhere that's not in the region that you live in.

Since she was English, I suspect Christie would have considered herself middle-class on the basis of her parents, and not believed that her wealth had much to do with what class she fit into. Equating income levels with class levels is more of a US thing, AIUI. (Though wikipedia suggests her family was definitely pretty wealthy: she said her father "was a gentleman of substance, and never did a handsturn in his life", and the family could afford to send her to a boarding school in Paris. So definitely the upper reaches of upper-middle-class.)

Yes, wasn't it Bloomberg (a billionaire) who said he didn't consider himself wealthy. It turns out there are ten people in his apartment building who are wealthier than him.

I remember the first time I got a chipotle burrito with double-meat and guac. I'd just gotten my first big paycheck. I turned to my friend and went "dude I'm so f***g rich now." He kinda chuckled, and when he realized I wasn't really joking, looked uncomfortable; he made more than me.

It is weird how uncomfortable rich people are acknowledging how rich they are.

Reminds me of the Chicago law professor who made $250,000 and didn't think he was rich but he lives in a super nice neighborhood and sends 3 kids to private school https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/todd-henderson-we-are...

To know if he's rich or not we would need to know his net worth, not his income (or how nice his stuff is).

I disagree.

In an extreme example, Tim Cook made ~$100 Million in 2021 [1]. Regardless of his net worth, I would consider him rich.

[1] https://news.yahoo.com/apple-tim-cook-compensation-other-tec....

Well, at that point it's borderline impossible to spend (on consumables, not assets) your yearly earning, so even if he's poor now, he almost certainly won't be by the end of the year (unless he has a massive amount of debt).

In contrast if you make $250k it's quite easy to spend the whole amount or close to it (again on consumables, not assets), hence your net worth stays the same in a year. You have to limit your spending to slowly build up your net worth.

Your example only works because it's so extreme, it's enough income for a dozen people to become rich instantly, even if they all start from 0.

By contrast, a house in a "super nice" neighborhood along with multiple private school tuitions can easily eat up the entirety of the $250k/yr income, leaving that guy actually broke in the end.

That's because being a maid wasn't even seen as an equal to the idea of a "working class job" as we see it now. Someone who had to support a family at that time would have been presumed to have an income from a man's job. Someone working as a maid was presumed to not have their own household to support and had their housing provided.

I think this is a fair point. Also a live in maid is not comparable because it probably includes full room/board.

I doubt a live-in maid has a husband.

That is what I mean by “presumed not to have their own household”

Income well above average, but that's a flow, not a stock. She probably didn't consider herself wealthy because she didn't have a lot of wealth, like wealthy people have.

Wealth, especially pre-World Wars, in the UK as elsewhere in Europe meant owning land and collecting rents. You didn't get wealthy by having a high income. You had a high income because you were wealthy.

The £200 of passive income presumably came from a stock of wealth. And the passive income by itself was still 6 times the salary of the live-in maid. The stock of wealth should therefore have been valued similarly to six healthy female slaves. (Give or take some adjustments, but broadly similar.)

> The £200 of passive income presumably came from a stock of wealth

Given we're talking about Agatha Christie here, I imagine the £200 of passive income came from book sales.

No, this was before she became a successful author. About half of it was an inheritance on her side. The other half came from his side.

ok, but it even says they had a passive income (aka wealth) leading to 1/3 of that 25x maid's earnings.

Many factual points in the introduction, with the modest apartment, income in today's value, and her own regard of wealth frame it as if she's relatable middle-class.

Something conveniently ignored is that the maid probably had the room, food and basic necessities included in the deal (and possibly the nurse?). It's absolutely not the same paying X for all expenses vs paying X PLUS all expenses.

We like to demonize the past, and sure it was rough but let's not try to make it look even worse than it was.

having income 25x that of the working class

A live-in maid would have their accommodation, food and bills provided, which would be reflected in a lower wage. The UK average wage at the time was closer to £100 a year for a woman (£200 for a man).

The equivalent today would be like someone earning 7 * the UK minimum wage, which would be about £120,000 a year (US$160,000).

According to this[1] you'd have ordinary workers earning 22 shillings p/w (£57.2p/y) and highest skilled labourers (firemen) sometimes earning £300, but yes the average wage seemed to be around 150[2]. (I think most people googling the average 1920s wage are getting the Australian-Victoria data accidentally, which is a bit higher, but it's still in the same ballpark) I think the Christie's equivalent today to US household income would then be 67000*700/150 = 313,000

[1] https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1... [2]https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nominal-wages-consumer-pr...

"Back in the 1960s, the economist William Baumol observed that it took exactly as much labor to play a string quartet in 1965 as it did in 1865—in economics jargon, violinists hadn’t gotten any more productive. Yet the wages of a professional violinist in 1965 were a lot higher than in 1865."

This is actually brilliant and deep. We may argue a lot that music education became more expensive, violins themselves cost more, musicians should pay their rent, which is also increased century over century, but the fact stands still: it took exactly as much labor.

Talking about the rent: housing prices are driven by the average income (because the balanced market will extract maximum wealth from its participants). So the Baumol's cost disease can be one of the key inflation factors.

Didn't read the full article, but couldn't you argue that with audio recording and distribution 1 hour of string quartet playing labor can yield many more person-hours of string quartet listening in 1965 than 1865?

Studio recording is a different type of labor, to produce a one hour record musicians should put at least 6-8 working hours. This is for quartet, bigger orchestras will tend to take even longer to properly record. We also need to factor in a work of recording and acoustic engineers, equipment and sound stage cost.

But to be precise, one full take of one hour recording will still take exactly the same amount of labor from musicians)

The whole idea of record distribution is actually a different type of economy. Live broadcast would be an interesting twist in this path of reason, but it was not a thing in 1960s.

Even for orchestras that don't publish albums, the musicians earn more.

> housing prices are driven by the average income

They are driven by the average income of the wealthiest $number_of_homes renters. If there are not enough homes in a single city then a lot of people will pay very significant part of their salary to have a place to live.

This is a very valid addition that I've skipped for clarity. But rental prices are very location-bound, and we can build only that much houses in a given location.

You can build up a lot, far more than is typical in much of London.

There are 3.6 million dwellings [0] in the 157,000 hectares of London [1]. There's 14,000 Hectares of Park and Open Space [2].

If you quadrupled the amount of park and open space to 56,000 hectares, leaving 100,000 for housing, and built as dense as Islington or Kensington+Chelsea (not particularly known for skyrise apartments), at 70 per hectare, that would be 7 million dwellings, about twice as many as now, even with far more public open space

[0] https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/number-and-density-of-dwe...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parks_and_open_spaces_in_Londo...

157 000 hectares is a lot (pun intended). This is not one place, price of similar flat in the center and in the outskirt would be 2-3 times different just because of the location. You cannot consider those hypothetical dwellings similar.

Allow me to be an armchair social scientist for a second, I think this proof that work and labor participation in the economy is firwt above all a social contract. So we did not deem musicians useless in this time and forced to change careers, we have to make them part of society still. Same reason we have bullshit jobs.

The invention of recorded music had made that modern string quartet much more productive. Millions could now hear that music that maybe tens to hundreds heard in the previous century.

Yes, but it is totally different economy. You need producers, PR researchers, you need sound technicians, you need studios with equipment, you need cover designers, print materials, replication lines, packing lines, music shops, logistics, shop clerks, cashiers. You need playback equipment: turntables, amplifies and speakers.

This was 1960s. Today you still need half of these plus all the internet infrastructure, which is not a small deal, online advertising, rights management, social media marketing, music aggregators, phones and computers and smart speakers.

"Even if someone managed to invent a robot nanny that kept kids safe as well as a human being, I wouldn’t want it to take care of my baby. I bet you wouldn’t either."

This glosses over the purpose of child care -- it's more than safety, it's socialization, learning, etc. In a world where some level of automation (or offshoring) is possible for these services, I could definitely see some adoption. Think "Diamond Age."

I always feltin Diamond Age they were basically describing the iPad. We have that now but it's still not quite there. Maybe it's not personalized enough or comprehensive enough?

Well, it's describing the iPad... with off-shored real-time tutoring providing most of the value. Even for the niche that can afford that (which should be larger than the niche that can afford in-person tutoring), I'm not aware of any services.

> with off-shored real-time tutoring providing most of the value

Yes, a critical part of the Illustrated Primer was that it was paired with real-time tutoring by a remote human, and turned out to be most effective when the remote human was regularly the same person who cared for the child on the other end.

But, returning to the subject of the article, this is interesting.

Among my peers in the U.S. right now (upper middle class, tech heavy), live-in nannies and full time tutors are unheard of, as the article says. But friends who have families in lower labor cost areas (Mexico, Thailand) often do still have live-in help. Even though they're no higher on the relative income ladder in their countries than I am, the floor cost of labor is so much lower that this is still a reasonable -- and quite common -- option.

Meanwhile, early education is (to my extremely limited knowledge) not an area where one-on-one off-shoring facilitated by technology has really been explored. Seems like an interesting space.

Full time tutors would have been an interesting solution to schooling, in the pandemic. Totally and utterly unscalable of course, but still kind of interesting.

> it was paired with real-time tutoring by a remote human

That is not really true. The remote human only provided the voice. Miranda the character who ended up reading up the lines for Nell most definietly had no input into the direction the fictional story she read up had, nor she had the sophistication or the situational awerness to be considered the tutor.

The fictional technology has this strange twist that the AI in question can do the hard job of individualised training and emotional support, but can’t do local voice synthesis.

Just an example of what I mean to those who didn’t read the book: The fictional AI tutoring technology was manufactured for the educated grand-daughter of the CEO of a tech company. A copy of this AI gets to a poor, illiterate young girl who is physically abused by his step father. The AI manages to deduce this situation on its own and adapts to the changed circumstances (a situation which is lightyears away from the one it was developed for). It starts to teach the girl to read while also teaching her elementary martial art and survival skills. The AI on its own also decides when it is time for the girl to run and escape from the troubled home, knows how to evade security drones and etc. These are all conveyed through story beats in the fictional story read up to the girl by a remote actress true, but the remote actress (Miranda) is just a passive voice. In fact she suspects through the lines she has to read up that there is a girl somewhere out there who is in trouble, but she doesn’t know anything about her or how to even find her.

So no, in short this is nothing like “remote tutoring” as one would understand that.

Well, to nitpick, that aspect of the primer was to demonstrate that there are some things, specifically human voices, that were hard to automate. The "tutor" made absolutely no teaching decisions whatsoever was instructed what to say. They only provided a voice. This was a crucial point in the story. So I'd say the educational aspect was entirely automated. Most of the value was provided by the primer itself. If a machine could've provided the voice, all aspects of the relationship with the book would have been directly with it.

> Most of the value was provided by the primer itself.

That's not what I took away from it. Of the three girls initially tutored by the Primer, for one the reading was done by many different actresses while for the other it was done by her father in a dreamlike mid-coital state. Neither of these two turned out the queen of all they surveyed the way Nell did. My take away was that what mattered was the human connection, that there had to be an adult who cared what happened even if she didn't have much ability to help, that gave the protagonist the strength to do what she did in the end.

The only part that was off-shored was the voice, because apparently a computer couldn’t simulate one well enough. The voice actors just read from the provided script and didn’t change anything.

Parents have been using televisions to raise their children for several generations already.

Given the amount of discussion during the pandemic of "open the schools so the parents can go back to work, even if that means transmitting the virus between families", I think the demand for automated childcare would be huge.

It would be a status symbol to not have it, of course - real organically raised human children! - but the struggling middle class would pick up robonanny-as-a-service immediately if it was cheaper than other childcare.

Right, that was my point: the nanny does more than just keep the kid safe.

Agatha Christie's quote is well-known but the exact same situation still holds today in many countries. Here in Viet Nam it is extremely common for middle income families to have a maid or nanny (or both) but not a car. The cars themselves are quite expensive. A Honda Civic is $33,000 by itself whereas a nanny (6-days a week, 10 hours a day) is $400-500/month and a maid who works 9 hours a week, i.e. 3 days a week, 3 hours each time) is $90-100/month.

So a single car not very expensive car costs the same as 5 years of a full-time nanny and part-time maid.

And that's without figuring in all the extra costs of a car, especially parking. There's not really free parking most places here. So you'll be paying for parking literally everywhere you go.

Even worse, most houses (unless they are luxury houses >$500,000 built in the last 5ish years) aren't built with a garage for a car, so you're looking at buying land, smashing down the existing structure, and then rebuilding something with a garage. And the space for a garage isn't cheap either. If you're a middle income family you're probably living in one of the capital cities and most people would probably be shocked at how expensive land is in the capital cities nowadays.

[1]: https://www.honda.com.vn/o-to/san-pham/honda-civic/index.htm...

Plus, I imagine if you can find a maid at that price, you can certainly find a driver.

Depends on training, licensing, and liability costs. Which vary wildly between countries.

You'll still need to give them a car to drive.

Exactly. Everyone I know here with a driver owns the car themselves and hires the driver separately. I don't know driver salaries since I don't have one but I'm guessing they are similar to nanny salaries since they are usually full-time 8am-8pm, 6-days a week kind of jobs. The only people without their own car tend to be foreign executives who are only going to be here on a 2-3 year contract.

Driver salaries would likely have been much higher because the position wouldn't also cover room & board. Also the gender differences in pay would influence things as well. Last is that household cleaning etc. would have been considered lower skilled labor.

This document indicates that somewhere around $20-$30 per week may have been the wage, around page 128. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bl...

Is there one single most common way of getting around where you are or is it a mix? I assume a lot of motorbikes. What about e-bikes?

Overwhelmingly combustion-engine motorbikes. Something like 7.5-8 million of them on the roads of Ho Chi Minh City.

There are e-bikes around but they aren't very common, at least in the south. Like, I see a few every day so they're not super rare. But...I see one or two a day compared to the thousands of regular ones.

There's also a bit of toxic masculinity around them; I'd say 99% of the people riding them are women. Most often high school or university age.

They are hampered by concerns about theft (it is relatively easy to steal the battery), range, and charging.

A newish brand tried to offer a premium e-bike[1] a few years back and you see them around but not very often.

Interestingly, I was in Hue on holiday a few years ago -- a city in the north -- and, at least in the city center where we were, it felt like it was 30% electric bikes. I don't know if there was a local government policy encouraging them or what.

Honestly, it was pretty amazing. You never realise how much noise combustion engines make until you've seen a huge fraction of them taken off the road like that. It was very pleasant.

[1]: http://xemayvinfast.vn/xe/vinfast-klara/

I live in Hanoi. One of the best purchases I made last year was noise cancelling headphones. It's the productivity boost I never knew I needed so much.

> There's also a bit of toxic masculinity around them; I'd say 99% of the people riding them are women. Most often high school or university age.

I disagree, I saw a great many male students driving electric bikes back in 2020 (Hanoi, Da Nang, HCMC). I would say of the particular model of e-bike that I tended to notice (the often black or black&red ones with large footrest area), easily 20%-50% drivers were male. I think the reason it isn't more common yet is probably because of range.

http://image.vietnamnews.vn//uploadvnnews/Article/2016/7/4/0... https://xedapdien.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/xe_may_dien...

The overwelming majority is motorbikes / scooters:

* E-bikes are popular among teens / people under 18-21. They are cheaper, and the law prohibits them from riding motorbikes with above 50cc engines (which the majority are, unless you're riding a Cub 50 or so)

* As you go up the age ladder, ICE motorbikes dominates. I also have a feeling that traffic congestion is getting worst, thanks to more people having access to cars.

I had a fellow American friend who lived in Bali for a year in the mid-70s. When he arrived, he shopped for his own food and cooked it. But he found that, since the merchants charged people by their social class, he could hire a housekeeper and have them buy and cook his food for the same price as buying his own found. And people expect him to do this.

Philippines as well. If you don't speak the language you are paying a premium for food, travel, communications, and potentially rent.

My experience in SEA in general and Bali specifically (as a Malaysian), prices are not simply a matter of speaking the language. Vendors often charge based literally on your social class/status.

In other words: your skin color.

Vendors in Bangladesh, where I grew up and where my family is from and where I look like I was born, try to rip me off the second they get the slightest inkling I'm American.

Very little to do with skin color, it's just most often the biggest giveaway that the buyer is a foreigner.

That's a factor, but given the kaleidoscope of ethnicity in most of SE Asia, it's nowhere near that straightforward. People can and do pick up on social class based on dress, the way you speak, the way you address others etc, just as they do in the US.

No... please don't put words in my mouth. Social class is somewhat related to color in SEA, but not to that extent.

Social class is very related to skin color, at least in Bali. Balinese cover themselves up extensively to avoid getting any darker, cosmetic products are specifically advertised as having bleaching properties to make you whiter, etc – all because historically darker skin was associated with the lower/lowest caste (peasants) and lighter with the upper.

Most cultures in East/South/Southeast Asia have a similar reaction to skin colour for the dominant local ethnicity. For example, when in Tamil Nadu, (sadly) local people with darker skin are considered lower class. (Positive note: This is less and less true when you talk to young, highly-educated Indians!) As a counterpoint, of course, this would not matter if a group of wealthy South Indian-descent Malaysians walked into a business/shop/restaurant in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. (For less knowledgeable readers: South Indian-descent Malaysians are a comparative minority in Malaysia -- Wiki says only 6.6%!)

This is strictly personal, but where I grew up with mostly light skinned people... showing up after winter holidays with a dark tan made you look so hot and so rich! Did anyone else feel the same? It carries into my life as an adult. :)

Holy crap yes! There are loads of very wealthy, dark skin South Indians in Malaysia! I can tell when they roll-up in a fancy car, good clothes, and private school accents!

Nah, that's mostly a western preoccupation.

As someone who lives in Bali: you are very wrong.

If you mean them hating expats and entitled nomads, everybody does. That's not racism.

Definitely not what I'm talking about.

No, your manners. Plus little details like a nice watch, clean shirt, how you arrive, perfume, hair style, etc.

It's basically the same as if you go to a trade show in the US. All the salespeople are trying to figure out which visitors are CEOs and, hence, worth their time, and which ones are just curious amateurs.

Maybe Google "Thuan Pham" - the Vietnamese Uber ex-CTO. He's doing it so well that even for us westerners it's easy to see that he's in a position of power. He isn't going to be charged tourist pricing due to his skin color (which is normal for Vietnamese). He's going to be charged tourist pricing because of his behavior which indicates that he's mind-boggingly rich and powerful.

He doesn’t seem particularly mind bogglingly rich to me? Maybe his behavior?

I thought he got $80 mio in Uber shares some years ago. In Ho Chi Minh City - the capital of his home country - you can buy a good freshly cooked lunch like Com Suon Op La (steak with egg, rice and fresh vegetables) for $0.50

So for everyday living, $80mio in Vietnam is going to feel like $8bio in the US (because steak in a restaurant is $50 instead of $0.5 for a 100x multiplier in living costs).

Parent was saying that if you saw this guy on the street, you wouldn't think he's a deca-millionaire just by the looks, which is what you implied. In most pictures he projects a middle manager look.

Thank you to share so directly! Can you share some specific experiences?

In Thailand I can say this isn't the case

Many attractions in Thailand have dual pricing, with foreigner pricing in Arabic numerals (100 baht) and local pricing in Thai numerals (๒๐ บาท). The price differential is often 5x or more.

I was visiting some temples in Bangkok recently and was amused to find there was no dual pricing; rather, there was an admission charge for foreigners and no charge for Thais.

(I don’t mind this system actually, but if I were paying taxes in Thailand and still had to pay foreigner entry fees everywhere it might bug me.)

The train between Machu Picchu (Aguas Calientes) and Cusco had three classes, the lowest of which was restricted to Peruvian citizens and residents. To be clear, Peruvians were free to use the second and first classes if they were willing to pay, too, but only they were allowed to use the very cheap third class. If I recall correctly, the second class one-way was about US$35. It struck me as being a bit fancier (and unnecessarily so) than second class in a DB (Germany) Intercity Express.

My aunt and uncle took the first class as part of their far more expensive Peru tour, and were not exposed to the direct cost, but judging by the pictures, it was luxurious.

It was more like $90 per person for one-way, 1.5 hour ride, of course it's fancy for that kind of cash. I guess all Machu Picchu prices were subject to 10% YoY growth pre-COVID since, you know, they don't make them anymore.

I knew I was being milked everywhere in Peru. It didn't bother me because extortionate prices in Peru are still cheaper than prices in my home country.

The only exception was where people insisted on being paid in American dollars. I'm not American so it never occurred to me to buy and bring American dollars to any country outside of the USA. We treat American tourists with a certain amount of eyerolling when they try to use their money in my country, but I have learned my lesson that it is a good idea to have an emergency stash of the currency of dishonesty when travelling abroad.

Correct, I'm Canadian but when travelling anywhere out of the western world, stashing a few USD bills will be helpful in many ways.

> good idea to have an emergency stash of the currency of dishonesty when travelling abroad

I recommend that you do some research about the economics of any country you visit. As you've already somewhat discovered, many places in Central America and South America will actually prefer payment in US dollars because the official government exchange rates from their local currency to dollars is extortionately unfair and not accurate to ForEx markets, this combined with high rates of inflation for the local currency and regular currency "resets" mean that people don't want to have their savings denominated in the local currency.

I don't know why you consider dollars to be the "currency of dishonesty", but all throughout the Americas, dollars are generally the highest valued currency because the US dominates economics and trade relations in the region. I imagine the same may be true in other parts of the world but they might preference other currencies rather than dollars (Ex: I found in some parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia that Euros were accepted in preference over local currency).

Any time you travel to a new country, do your research in advance.

> I don't know why you consider dollars to be the "currency of dishonesty"

I was not trying to imply Americans are dishonest. I was trying to imply that insisting on the use of foreign currency like USD as the sole medium of exchange, or any other black market activity if it comes to that, is a dishonest way to make a living.

And sure, I understand why the black market exists from a socioeconomic point of view. I have learned my lesson about travelling in less advantaged countries. I witnessed stuff in Peru that would make suburban Karen's head explode with apoplexy, and it was just considered normal and expected stuff there.

> I witnessed stuff in Peru that would make suburban Karen's head explode with apoplexy, and it was just considered normal and expected stuff there.

Agreed on that wholeheartedly. Visiting Peru was an interesting experience for me as well, and one that was deeply sad in many ways. There's such a visibily stark wealth inequality in Lima that's immediately obvious as soon as you deplane that is usually hidden away in other parts of the world. Lima is an amazing world-class food city, but most of that is found within Miraflores district which is a far cry from the conditions of most of the rest of the city or in the pueblo jovenes on the outskirts of town in the hills. The same is found in other parts of Peru as well, and in a way I am very happy for it because it made obvious to me things I had been able to avoid or put out of my mind in my travels elsewhere and made me more aware of how different societies exploit people and the role of the West in creating and enabling those conditions, my own role as a traveler included.

Same was for Taj Mahal some... 13 years ago. Foreigner price (apart from few neighboring countries) was at least 10-20x the price of local one. Still, well worth seeing that marvel

Zero trolling: If locals pay 1 EUR and you and me paid 10 or 20 EU, is it so bad? I am can accept when the UNESCO world heritage site is top notch. Yes, 20 EUR is expensive, but so is the entrance fee for the Vatican Museum or Le Louvre (Paris). Real Question: Does Italy or France have a programme to allow low income students to enter these world class museums cheaply? It would be great if someone can comment about it!

Of course they have it, whole western (or more probably whole) Europe has significant discount for students and I think elderly too, for any kind of tourist attraction. But not 10 or 20x, more like 20-50% of full ticket.

In Java, Indonesia, it is similar for Borobudur (massive Buddhist temple) and Prambanam (massive Hindu temple). Since they are both UNESCO heritage sites that have a small army of well-paid local and foreign experts constantly improving the sites, I do not mind to pay 10x or 20x compared to locals. The same was similar for temples in Siem Reap, Cambodia (Ankor Wat and friends). I have heard about some "elite level" Indian religious sites than do similar, but will offer local rates for people who carry an OCI card (Overseas Citizen of India card).

they are very up-front about that, though, and my thai friends told me it's because their taxes support the attractions, which seemed perfectly fair to me.

Last time I was in one of the large, free museums in London (British Museum, Natural History Museum, Science Musem etc), a tourist asked me to read out / read simpler the words shown above the donation box. He then put £30 in.

I was surprised, as I'd never thought to donate to these museums. He pointed out that he didn't pay tax in Britain, and entry tickets to a similar museum at home would be around £30.

They have different prices for foreigner and locals in Thailand and Indonesia.

Plenty of places in the USA have the same. Disneyland is discounts for Southern California residents

https://disneyland.disney.go.com/offers-discounts/southern-c...

In Hawaii many business have discounts for locals

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discounts_and_allowances#Speci...

The same in EU - e.g. in Italy, if you want to see a church from the inside, tourists pay a lot while the locals don't.

I can't speak for Rome because I have not been in churches there but for the rest of Italy, 99% of churches are Free Entry and the few very famous touristic attractions have a single fee no matter who you are.

Maybe you are confusing paying for a guide as tourist with paying to visit the church.

Free entry - but for those going for the religious service. That's not me. At least that's how it was all around northern Italy few years ago when I visited.

Your examples are more like colleges charging more tuition on out-of-state student, or tourist attractions charge lower price to locals, which are made public information. The context under this thread is talking about dual price that is deliberately taking advantage of information asymmetry, differentiation, or even discrimination based on social class and skin color.

In Thailand I can tell you this isn't the case at 99% of places

My experience in S. Korea is different, if you are a resident of a certain province (I don't know what is that in Korean) you get a discount on the local tourist spots even if you are a foreigner or a S. Korean. So if you're S. Korean and live in a different province you pay a higher price.

It was certainly the case when I lived in Thailand, as I could read (the numbers aren't difficult and you get a lot of practice) and often anything with a published price up front would be different read in English than in Thai.

In Thailand there isn't dual pricing for food. But there is for entry to many venues. It is institutionalized by the government - for example, the entry fee to national parks for non-Thais is 10x the Thai price.

This is also true in many parts of the US (for tax-payer funded places like parks). The distinction is usually based on state (or town) of residence.

This is true, I just paid 50 baht at a temple yesterday and my gf didn't have to pay. And of course taxis might try to charge you more too.

But I meant for food the street vendors are incredibly honest. On several occasions I've given them money expecting no change (based on a price on the sign) but for whatever reason the price was different and they called me to give me change as I was walking away

It is - many restaurants have two menus, one for locals in thai and one for tourists. Prices in the first one are sometimes twice as cheap. (I've lived on Koh Samui for 3.5 years)

This isn't even that uncommon in Western countries. For example Cardiff Castle has free entry for residents, but non-residents need to pay for entry (at least, that was the case when I was there a few years ago). The museum in my city in the Netherlands is €6 for residents of the city, and €13 for non-residents.

In Egypt, that's true unless you haggle. You can always haggle to get close to Egyptian prices, but if I didn't have my friend with me to show me how to do that, I would have paid American prices the whole trip. I'm sure a lot of places work similarly. At the end of the day, they want to make a sale, doesn't matter who you are just what they think you'll pay.

Funny, I found shop vendors from some Arabic cultures would almost become offended if you _didn't_ barter with them -- at least if they knew you weren't just a tourist. For the (American) tourists wandering through they'd suck it up and just charge them 10x the price. ;)

"This bloke won't haggle!"

Very true in India too. You stick out as backpacker very clearly, the prices are set accordingly. I found it extremely hard to haggle with my european mentality, and ended up agreeing on still too high prices. It took some time to get better.

Then you come back to western world (or anywhere else for that matter) after 6 months of such training and you find out you haggle harder than any locals, sometimes to the point of offense.

The most important point in haggling is to not show too much interest. It helps to have an idea about real local prices of items, otherwise its just shots in the dark.

That was my least favorite thing about traveling/living overseas as a stereotypical looking American. I hate haggling. I hate it more than anything. It's needlessly antagonistic and completely unnecessary. I understand it's a cultural thing, but I hate it more than birds.

It was exhausting to buy anything, the entire time. It never got better, even when the shops learned who I was after an extended period of time. Food, water, everything was an argument. I just wanted to exist and check out what was going on around me, not argue with some random shop that my groceries shouldn't be so expensive.

When I have traveled to India, I just wear jeans and t-shirt... and yeah, a backpack. :) Obviously, I am a non-native, but I have not experienced outrageous "foreigners-only" prices ever. This experience includes incredibly remote villages in South India as well as urban centre of Mumbai. That said, I understand that many people have difficult experiences with bartering when they travel in South Asia.

Also funny, I visited Jordan 2 years ago, right before the pandemic. I was expecting to have to haggle prices like in other places but it just didn't happen, didn't feel I was paying tourist prices at all. Street sellers didn't push us to buy stuff. A street restaurant in Amman that didn't have a menu charged us around €4 for the meal, which was dirt cheap for what we had. All in all it was a very nice experience.

Seconded. Jordan is a pretty great place as far as I experienced it too. Though I was not alone myself, but watching interactions with others it was all very decent.

Is there any difference in the expectations of haggling if it is a man or woman doing it (on the tourist side)? just curious.

You wrote: <<some Arabic cultures would almost become offended if you _didn't_ barter with them>>

I have also heard the same, but I have zero native-level understanding of any Middle Eastern cultures. Could anyone who lives in the Middle East / North Africa / Horn of Africa comment? I would appreciate any first hand accounts about this stereotype. It's OK if you teach us that it's all "travel guide bullshit"!

In Egypt, it also helps to be able to read the arabic numerals — eastern arabic [0] that is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals#Comparison_of_...

Eastern Arabic ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩ ١٠

Yeah, those street markets where there is a "small" deviation between western and eastern numerals if prices happen to be shown.

For some reason I didn't expect you to list them from right to left.

It's "automatic", see https://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup... and https://unicode.org/reports/tr9/

However that algorithm has a couple of flaws in mixed left and right ordered text, and a couple of control characters have been introduced to solve the issue: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-bidi-unicode-c...

Could play a bit in https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelPad.html to see how things work.

Ah is that what it was. Mixing ltr and rtl text always trips me up. To make matters even weirder it seems that sequences of nummerals, such as ١٠ are ltr again. That has some very unintuitive consequences when you try to edit that sentence.

In countries like that I just don't buy anything. Life is too short for haggling.

Haggling is fun. I’m convinced the modern aversion to haggling in first world countries is because people grow up avoiding all direct confrontation. They think it’s somehow how rude to disagree with someone about the price of the article at hand. The next level of it is when they justify this “politeness” by claiming that haggling is inefficient or a waste of time.

in the west buying stuff usually requires no human interaction at all, even the cashiers are getting replaced by automatic checkout. But, on the other hand, you do need negotiation skills, be it in career, private live, or elsewhere. So maybe we all just need to do a year of backpacking and learn how to haggle

> in the west buying stuff usually requires no human interaction at all

And then you step foot in a car dealership, and you might as well be in a souk

yup, stuff like cars, or, god forbid, houses, are not only expensive AF, but the buying requires skills most people never had a chance to practice. fuck it, I'm cycling to save the planet and my nerves

When all sellers and customers haggle it creates a zero-sum game where nothing useful is achieved and everybody is wasting their time.

Fun when you do it once, not so fun when is expected every day.

A similar zero-sum game is advertising. Yet, some cultures look down on haggling and embrace advertising with open arms...

If you look at dollar and time amounts, all financial interactions are pretty much zero-sum.

The transaction itself is not zero sum. The existence of the transaction itself is proof that both parties value what they received more than what they gave away (otherwise they would not have transacted).

The waste of time is having to haggle to arrive at the price, when the price could have been published. It benefits nobody, because that's the price the transaction would have happened at anyway. But we have to do a whole song and dance beforehand anyway, every single time.

I mean, why do coupons exist? They mail you stuff and you bring it to a store and the price is cheaper? Extra effort all around?

But price discrimination improves cashflow. And these merchants can do the same thing as haggling with less paper waste and on the spot.

> It benefits nobody, because that's the price the transaction would have happened at anyway.

But this is not true. Haggling is price discovery. Either way, I think this is mostly a cultural thing that's lost on a lot of westerners.

> Haggling is price discovery

Yes, the issue is that the price does not need to be discovered. The seller knows the "real" price, and is just hopping to screw over the buyer.

> The seller knows the "real" price…

The seller knows the customary price, and the lowest price they would be willing to accept. The "real" price is whatever the buyer and seller agree on for a particular trade. Price discovery is an ongoing process which isn't finished just because you've determined an average price for past trades. The buyer isn't losing out unless there's actual fraud involved, even if they could have potentially negotiated a better price. And really, we're mostly talking about trades between individuals and small businesses (who may also be individuals)—why should all the surplus value represented by the difference between the highest and lowest prices acceptable to both parties go to the buyer, and not the seller?

> Haggling is price discovery

True, but the discovery is made necessary by artificial opacity.

It does not benefit society as a whole and that's why shops are legally required to have transparent pricing in most countries.

...furthermore, it's heavily discriminatory.

This of course is under the assumption that time is expensive relative to the accuracy of the market clearing price of the goods being sold. In many cultures this isn't true, people have lots of free time, but each person buying the good might assign different value to it, so by spending a bit more time the people who need the lower price can still access it, whereas the shopkeeper can still make the money to keep the shop running from those who can afford it.

Honestly, thinking that there should be fixed prices for everything, if you're a rich westerner going in, means you're trying to externalize the effort of setting a market clearing rate, and trying to piggy-back off of the locals. If it's at some multinational chain, then sure, don't have people haggle with you over the price of some McNuggets, but at a family owned business, if they can get an additional 20% of the price of the goods they might be doubling their profit margin, so why wouldn't they haggle?

It enables differential pricing, which is not zero sum.

Even if haggling is fun for you, it is still a big expenditure of time and effort that accomplishes nothing. There's simply no reason for it to exist.

Builds relationships, can arrive at an optimal price, involves human contact.

It doesn't take that long either. There are positives even to things you deem useless.

I can't imagine how someone trying to overcharge me would help build a relationship between me and the seller.

>Builds relationships

I don't get this one.

Through the conversation, you learn the idiosyncrasies of the other person. In a culture where haggling is normal, their “style” gives you insight into their personality and how they might act in other scenarios. And it identifies you as an insider or outsider to the culture. At the very least, you’ve learned their name and face.

I also hate haggling, and since I’m not from a culture where it’s a norm I can’t use it to read deeper into a person. (Or them into me.) But it’s not too hard to imagine how it helps to build relationships.

Negotiating price is extremely common in corporate environments. If I had to guess what it accomplishes, I’d say building a relationship with your trading partner.

Many / most corporate negotiations are legitimately necessary because every contract being negotiated is unique. Negotiations allow both parties to set terms and come to an agreeable price when there is no preset price.

A market vendor who knows an apple should cost $2 but charges $5 in the hopes of screwing over a tourist is just an asshole. I can't imagine how that builds relationships.

How exactly would that "should" work if there just isn't a standard set price?

There is a standard price, or at least there could be. It would be trivial for the apple seller to calculate the average price he ends up negotiating, and setting that as the published, firm price.

That is what's frustrating about negotiating for commodities like food. The seller is taking advantage of information asymmetry. They know what the standard price is, and they hope that you don't. It's scummy.

It is different when there isn't a set price, i.e. if you are trying to buy a one of a kind item. In that case even in the Western world some negotiation would be acceptable, (buying an original painting from an artist, for example). But this does not justify having to haggle for everything you want to buy, every time.

> That is what's frustrating about negotiating for commodities like food.

While I generally agree with you, if you're buying fresh food at a market, such as the apples in your example, it isn't necessarily a commodity. Quality and size will vary from one item to the next; why must they all be the same price? Places where goods tend to be more standardized seem to rely less on haggling and more on sorting: you don't haggle over the price of an apple out of a mixed lot, you pay a set price for a certain grade of apple which has been separated out in advance.

You’re biased against the seller and even your example of “fair” price is arrived at after negotiations! Where would that come from if there is no haggling?

Even a published price is nothing more than a free option for buyers. It’s a ceiling. There’s nothing that prevents the seller from offering a lower unpublished price.

100% agree with you, and I don't want anything resembling confrontation when I'm buying souvenirs on vacation.

Couldn't care less if its rude or polite or whatever.

Go ahead and haggle if its fun for you.

Just pay the initial asking price then?

When I lived in Morocco, the prices went down the longer I shopped with particular market vendors. The first time I bought oranges, for example, they were eye-wateringly expensive. As I became a regular buyer, the price gradually dropped until they were a fraction of the original cost. (It would probably have been cheaper to begin with if I'd haggled, but I am not great at that sort of interaction).

Does the housekeeper pay less when s/he buys for her/himself ? Or does the seller asks the same price ? Wouldn't be in the housekeeper's interest to say he/she's buying for someone else, to cash in a bit extra ? Wouldn't it fit the seller ?

The way I understood your parent comment:

- The vendor charges every customer according to the customer's social class. A white guy pays through the nose. A servant-class local pays a modest amount. It doesn't matter who the food is supposed to be for.

- Thus, it is cheaper for the white guy to hire a housekeeper than to buy and prepare his own food. The white guy's food, if he has a housekeeper, will only cost as much as the housekeeper has to pay for food, because the housekeeper is responsible for buying it. And the savings relative to the white-guy price cover the housekeeper's wages.

The poster got the OP’s point but you didn’t get his. Presumably the expat is giving the housekeeper a grocery allowance, she’s not spending her own money. The merchant could certainly make a deal with the housekeeper to charge expat prices and the two could split the difference.

That not being the case is the system that got the housekeeper her job though. It's probable that she knows that "not paying the foreigner tax on food" is part of the value she brings, and that overly messing with that system could put her out a job.

That only works if the foreigner has no friends and doesn't talk to anybody about how much they pay their housekeeper and the grocery budget. And if the foreigner just pays t housekeeper a lump sum, rather than a wage + cost of supplies, then that also won't work.

> But he found that, since the merchants charged people by their social class,

The same thing happens in developed countries like the US too. It's just done a different way: We have high end grocery stores and low end grocery stores, and ones in the middle, each catering more or less to different social classes.

If you are really low on the totem pole, you may have no grocery store.

Although they differ in the quality of food they offer, there is significant overlap also, which is priced differently.

I get what you're going for, but this simply isn't comparable. I pretty much can't walk into the same store and purchase the same item but be quoted a different price than anyone else.

There are rich areas and poor areas, touristy areas and off-the-beaten-path areas. But in US retail you won't find sellers discriminate based solely on the look of the customer in 99% of cases.

> I pretty much can't walk into the same store and purchase the same item but be quoted a different price than anyone else.

The USA only does this for trivial unnecessary frivolities like medical care.

Depends on the goods; in normal retail, surely, but if you walk into a used car store, a pawn shop, or try to get insurance, YMMV.

When I was in the USA a few years ago with an hispanic looking friend, he was often offered a steep discount at the various shops and restaurants. Often enough that we would ask him to do all the shopping.

This happened to us in multiple cities (NY/Miami/SF)

I live in Miami and when going out with Cuban friends, have never seen this.

But I also don't go out often, and if I do, it's just to eat usually.

I've been all over the US and lived in two of the cities you mentioned. Dated and been friends with many different hispanic people and I've never seen this happen.

That's true of my friends and romantic partners of all races by the way. I can't think of a single time I've seen someone be given a racial discount here.

There were a few times at restaurants and grocery stores where they had access to items I wouldn't have, but that almost always came from speaking the right language and knowing what to ask for. I'm sure those places would have been equally happy to accommodate me if I know what to say.

I do have stories of those friends and romantic partners being discriminated against a few times.

Well we found it all the more surprising because our hispanic looking friend didn't even speak Spanish. But that's what happened. Maybe they mistook him for an illegal migrant ? In a similar vein, We also noticed that when our white looking friend was not with us, people started to offer us drugs in the streets, which we found hilarious.

All I said is that class based pricing exists in the US, but it works via physical separation rather than directly based on how the customer looks.

That physical separation is maintained by the actual physical class separation along policed municipal boundaries that exists in the US.

Developing societies instead use walls with barbed wire and hired security for that function.

That said, there are pretty strong correlations between the tier of the grocery store and the appearance of their average customer.

And yes, there are wealthier but frugal people who shop at cheaper stores, but they are an exception.

> If you are really low on the totem pole, you may have no grocery store.

The lowest would be the dollar stores, but then you have food stamps, and food banks which are like free supermarkets in a sense. If you can’t get to them then there’s soup kitchens and quite a few charities that will bring food to you. We can definitely fill in more cracks but there are a lot of available food sources in America.

I'm assuming you've never tried to maintain a nutritious diet through dollar stores and food banks before. It's very difficult. Additionally, when you take into account special packaging made for dollar stores, some of the trash food is actually more expensive than healthy items available at the "rich" store.

Hospitals in Belgium charge you by your income level. We know this because my wife had to be briefly hospitalized in Brussels during the nearly 8 years we lived there, and the hospital made it very clear to us that we were being charged in this way.

Ironically, we still paid less out of pocket for that week-long hospital stay without insurance than we would have paid for a single day hospital stay here in the US with insurance.

So, overall, we were pretty happy about the amount we were paying.

> Ironically, we still paid less out of pocket for that week-long hospital stay without insurance than we would have paid for a single day hospital stay here in the US with insurance.

I'm curious about this one. I've been to the hospital one time in my adult life. Stayed overnight, got multiple tests including an Xray and an MRI. Got medication, etc.

Having heard the horror stories I was ready for a big bill.

It was like $140.

It was cheaper than a hotel room would have been.

I can't tell if I just have exceptionally good insurance or if people who make a big deal about the US healthcare system are leaving out critical details.

I am confused by this seriously down-voted post. Are you based in the US visiting a local hospital saying that you received (very!) fair pricing for an MRI and X-ray? If not, can you please explain?

I am, I'm a US citizen and my one major interaction with the US healthcare system seemed like I received great treatment for a completely fair price.

Google search tells me that in 2020 the median deductible (out of pocket pay before health insurance takes over costs) was between $1,418 and $2,295 depending largely on the company size, with "platinum" plans median of only $95 and "bronze" plans median of $6,992[1].

The cost of an MRI (starting at $400, going way up depending on what was MRI'ed)[2], xray (starting at $100)[3] and an overnight stay (around $2600 non-ICU [4]) would be at least $3100 alone if you had to pay everything out of pocket, not accounting for any additional costs (the unspecified "additional tests" you mentioned, for example, or things you haven't explicitly mentioned but may still used like an ambulance ride, etc).

Of course, this is recent prices, and the prices may have varied when you actually were in hospital, and it is my understanding that prices both for health care services and procedures, and health insurance can vary widely depending on the region and the providers involved in the US.

But my google-fu let's me conclude that you indeed extremely likely had a health insurance plan at "platinum" level, far better than what most of your fellow citizens in the US enjoy.

Somebody with a plan near the "median deductible" would have paid that median deductible of more than $1400 in full, or around 10x what you had to pay, somebody unlucky enough to be on a "bronze" plan might have had to pay the full amount (or at least around 7 grand), and there are about 31 million people in the US without health insurance[5] who would have had to pay in full.

(Please note that I, as somebody who never experienced the US health care system, can thus only provide an outside view based on what I heard from people I know and in the media, and googled)

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-does-health-insurance-...

[2] https://www.itnonline.com/content/mri-costs

[3] https://health.costhelper.com/x-rays.html

[4] https://www.debt.org/medical/hospital-surgery-costs/

[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/200955/americans-without...

A person without insurance would have payed many thousands. This is why you absolutely need good insurance in the USA.

I love the concept! Eh good old days.

>people expect him to do this.

Right, it's part of how society works. In some places, having a housekeeper is a critical part of the economy and its incredibly impolite not to have one, if you are part of the expat class.

I'm surprised to hear that it is impolite to not have a housekeeper if you are an expat. To which places are you referring?

That's a fairly common attitude in poorer countries - there is an expectation that if you are wealthy, you have (at the very least) an obligation to provide employment.

But expat doesn't automatically mean wealthy.

Wealth is a relative term. It's pretty unlikely for an expat to be living in the third world, on third world wages with third world opportunities...

It does, otherwise they're called immigrants.

Or "backpackers" - which seems to be secret code for: stay away, these people (usually guys) cause more trouble than they are worth.

No, backpackers in SE Asia are still mostly on the expat side. Even if they are broken students on a sabbatical year, they mostly have families home that can back them up in case of need. (Exceptions apply, YMMV etc etc.)

I agree with you that most westerners who travel to SE Asia will still be considered as "expats" by the locals.

What I meant to say is that those people who the locals consider not "expat" anymore, but "backpacker" instead, must really have fallen low.

That is not how it was taught to me. Expat is when your job moves you to a new country, as in "you're an expatriate employee". Immigrant is when you move for your own reasons. Expats are expected to come back to their original country, or move to a third one at some time. Immigrants are establishing themselves in the new country.

I have always understood it to be an example of English irregular language: “I am an expat, you are an immigrant, they are economic migrants.” —https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation

Expats usually don’t have immigrant visas. They also receive packages from their companies for their temporary assignments. If you go to the country on your own to fund a job, you usually won’t be referred to as an expat by those with packages who refer to themselves as expats. But you won’t be referred to as a migrant worker either unless you are poor and doing construction or farm work. We used the term half-pats to describe ourselves, but mostly it was just foreigners.

The USA is exceptional because almost every visa that allows for work is considered an immigration visa (eg H1 leads to a greencard, eventually). But in other countries that is most definitely not true.

H1 does not lead to a green card. Infact H1 approval receipt will show Temporary Non Immigrant Worker visa. You have to apply to get a green card, entirely separate.

My interpretation has always been that an expat is abroad temporarily, while an immigrant intends to stay permanently.

I came to the US as an expat, but became an immigrant.

If you tend to see racism behind every raised eyebrow, you can of course also see this terminology as racist.

From Hilaire Belloc, of pre-war (1911) Britain:

  Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
  Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
  It is the business of the wealthy man
  To give employment to the artisan.

I think this has a lot of truth. My brother was based in the Philippines for a while for work and was expected to have at least a housekeeper and a chauffeur. I think having a driver was a very reasonable safety measure given the traffic there too. At the time it seemed very ostentatious to us at home, but it was totally the norm.

Car ownership, especially in Manila, is also not the norm there. There's over 110 million people on a handful of small islands. Also, public transit is way more efficient there than anywhere in North America.

True - it was better to hire a chauffeur who had his own car than to buy a car (also traffic was crazy). He is from the UK - Public transport is pretty good in the UK and across much of Europe. As I recall, there were issues with terrorist bombing shopping centres and public transport in Manila at the time, so I think he avoided both.

Anecdata :

My wife's parents worked in Kenya for a few years in the 70s and they where advised that having a maid and a nanny was expected.

(we are Swedish)

I have heard of the same in Ethiopia around the 90's. For white worker it was expected to:

- rent a house

- hire a house guardian

- hire at last one maid

- hire a chauffeur if you own a car

It was also recommended than they come form the local neighborhood.

It was a social norm, and if you do not do it you can expect the local policemen to "fine you" every time you take the car, the food cost to be x5 the price (or more), and many other additional costs and life inconvenience than just made more easy and cheaper to just hire the people.

That said the work was real. A good chauffeur, will negotiate prices and bribes for you, and recommend you the good places. The house guardian was also your speaker with the neighborhood committee (with was in fact a government organization). (I will avoid the more complicated subject of the maid...)

This was OK if you where a man, a couple or a family. If you where a young woman... good luck with this.

There was a way to avoid all this: living in a flat in the city center and use taxis.

(For Addis Ababa this may not be true anymore because the city was changed a lot from the big shantytown it was then)

> (I will avoid the more complicated subject of the maid...)

I'm really curious now. Why is the maid a more complicated subject?

Given our history, I was assuming there was some expectation that duties might also include requests of a sexual nature.

I really hope that's not the case. But we (rich white people) don't exactly have a good track record in these types of situation. :(

No need to racially charge it - sexually exploiting servants is a universal.

Curiously, you said “rich white people” forgoing the one prejudice that actually does predict sexual exploitation - men!

> No need to racially charge it - sexually exploiting servants is a universal.

The topic of race was already raised in the grandparent post, I quote (emphasis mine):

> I have heard of the same in Ethiopia around the 90's. For white worker it was expected to:

While I'm sure exploitation happens in most cultures I'm mostly familiar with it happening in white culture and given that context was already specified and my education being based on that context I decided to keep my reply specific to that context which I already knew.

Sorry if I offended anyone -- I just figured being a white male myself it was more offensive to drag other cultures into the discussion when they were previously outside the scope.

> Curiously, you said “rich white people” forgoing the one prejudice that actually does predict sexual exploitation - men!

I didn't need to specify men because that context was already defined in the post I was responding to. To quote the GP again:

> This was OK if you where a man, a couple or a family. If you where a young woman... good luck with this.

Frankly though, moaning about other cultures doing it too feels a little like trying to pull others down so we don't look so bad instead of acknowledging our own failings. Maybe that's an uncomfortable opinion for people to hear but as the saying goes "people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones".

Yes, it is sadly common in Hongkong and Saudia Arabia with domestic helpers. I have heard numerous first-hands accounts about it.

"But we (rich white people) don't exactly have a good track record in these types of situation"

I do not think that behavior is or was restricted to skin color.

>>But we (rich white people) don't exactly have a good track record in these types of situation

Wow, nice generalization - do you get all your 'facts' from the movies?

I don't watch movies.

Bare in mind I'm not suggesting an entire race is frequently abusing their maids to this day. What I'm saying is there is recorded history of it happening. You only have to dig through some of the abuses that happened during the slave trade to see evidence of this fact. So we do indeed have a bad track record in this regard. It might be an uncomfortable truth for some of us to hear but it doesn't make it any less true.

> But we (rich white people)

I hate to break it to you but rich white people are generally far less likely to be a sexual predation risk in these situations because they often have more to lose, have easier access to consenting parties, and come from countries that stigmatize that type of behavior to a much greater degree.

I'm not going to comment whether it's more or less likely than in other cultures. My point wasn't to start a race war, I was just commenting that we have a history on such topics (eg https://www.ukessays.com/essays/history/rape-in-american-sla...)

But mentioning it as if white people are known for it or did it lots or have a specific history of it is quite racist. Bad things are committed by all races and slavery is certainly one of them. It's whitewashing the world's dirty secrets and then pinning them on the evil white man.

As I've said elsewhere, the context was already about white men employing people from black communities -- go re-read the GP's post, I wasn't the one that bought race into it. I just made an uncomfortable truth that some people apparently feel the need to defend by proxy with the usual arguments of "other people were just as bad", as if that somehow reconciles the atrocities that we committed (hint: it doesn't).

Honestly the "other cultures are just as bad" argument here strikes me just as poor as the "all lives matter" protest comment against the BLM movement:

> There is a difference between something being true and something being relevant.

source: eg https://relevantmagazine.com/current/the-problem-with-saying...

everyone has a history of it, and many non-western societies still have a barely concealed if not government sanctioned industry of it.

Because they are sex workers.

Not all of them are free, some of them are kidnapped by traffickers from the country side.

https://www.economist.com/baobab/2012/04/24/maid-in-ethiopia

At least in Japan, some maid services are more like cosplaying escorts.

https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/100650

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/11/10/national/u-n-of...

Not at all. There are cosplay cafe' where employees cosplay whatever role or character and there are real housekeeping services.

Japanese people can tell the difference between reality and cosplay.

> Japanese people can tell the difference between reality and cosplay.

That quote would look good in a meme.

Some comment have given a somewhat correct reply:

Some of the maid where indeed expected to also do "night duties" if asked. It was not a racial power stuff. It's was more a problem with a sort of "cultural prostitution" witch was everywhere in Ethiopia. The maids where still primary maids and not prostitute, and to be fair, the same problem also did exist in Europe at the time of Agatha Christie (How many European maid had become pregnant and then fired ?).

I thinks than it's now worst than in the 90's because Ethiopia had sadly become a tourist sex place since then. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Ethiopia

50 years ago, Germany also still had a popular saying "Eigentum verpflichtet" which I would translate as "ownership creates a duty". In short, people who owned companies, large plots of land, or other infrastructure were expected to spread their wealth by creating jobs.

Nowadays, the spirit still lives on somewhat in the fact that we have free public scenic hiking trails through what looks like very expensive private property. When the land was privatized, the government made it a condition that the hiking trail would remain for the general public to enjoy, and so it did.

I believe Vietnam still has a similar system, too, in that the government will calculate how much jobs a foreign company needs to create, based on their annual revenue. It's one of the reasons why Korean milk tea shops tend to be crammed full with 10-20 schoolgirl employees.

"private property is subordinate to the common good" is even in our "Constitution" (grundgesetz, literally foundational law), although it has been neutered by precedent and other laws.

The right of way is a concept which is still strong in a bunch of countries, including England and famously Norway where "Allemansretten" allows "all men" the right to camp in public spaces.

I personally find these habitual rights an interesting expression of positive freedom, laws and customs limiting the power of those that have a lot of it (i.e., property owners) to monopolise and exploit, thus creating a public good. I think we should have more of it, especially in the physical but also the digital realm.

Particularly, the concept of adversarial interoperability https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera... is connected, it would be a different world of Google, Facebook and any other platform were obligated to make their internal APIs and documentation available at cost+a legislated profit margin do anyone can be compatible with them.

> The right of way is a concept which is still strong in a bunch of countries, including England and famously Norway where "Allemansretten" allows "all men" the right to camp in public spaces.

This is like saying France and the US both have freedom of speech. Technically true but the difference in how strong the laws are between Nordic countries and England is enormous.

This is a great post. When I moved away from the United States, and started to learn -- in earnest -- about other countries, I was surprised to learn about "freedom of speech" in other highly-developed, liberal democracies. Two specific things come to mind: slander/defamation/blasphemy and pro-Nazi (German National Socialist) material. Initially, I was aghast -- "Why isn't 'everything' allowed?". Over time, I began to understand that each nation and society needs to define their own version of "freedom of speech" -- and what it means to be a liberal democracy. As a good example: Read the Wiki page for Geert Wilders. He is a hateful person who says many dreadful, discriminatory things. More than once, he has lost court trials in Nederlands over hate speech. I recall once that he was fined zero euros. Complex! And, there are some nations where it feels like they voluntarily use "freedom of speech" less than Europe/US/CAN/AU/NZ/SouthAmerica -- like East Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea) and Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia -- don't get me started about Singapore!) And South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, etc.) are so culturally diverse and complex that I cannot begin to generalise.

You wrote: <<Technically true but the difference in how strong the laws are between Nordic countries and England is enormous.>>

I am sure you were thinking of a specific example when you wrote this post! Can you share it? It would be nice to learn.

It's surreal as an American watching a couple of UK photographers on YouTube just stroll through random gates and cross land without any locks or "No Trespassing" signs. Meanwhile, I got a shotgun shoved in my face for walking too close for the comfort of the owner of a house on the other side of a highway's shoulder. I'm pretty sure brandishing is a crime in Georgia, but I was a teen and wasn't about to argue with someone who could end me with a twitch.

you would like Geowizard's crossing a country in a straight line series on youtube

I once read this is actually tied to the degree of agriculture vs animal raising.

Because animals are easily stolen, cultures around animals as food, tend to consider weapon ownership essential, and tend to think highly of self defense and whatnot.

These same cultures also tend to believe strongly in "hospitality", in the sense that if you have guests you need to take care of them and whatnot, because you might need to be someone guest too.

Meanwhile plant-based cultures tend instead to favor things like schedules, calendars, seasons, festivals and so on, because this is what essential to their food instead, meanwhile it doesn't matter if someone is strolling in your land when it is not harvest season, the person won't steal your food.

Scotland is a much better example of "right to roam" than England.

Very generally, England allows a right to cross property on foot. But, that doesn't include camping, cycling, etc. The list of allowances is relatively short and exceptions relatively long.

Scotland allows all a lot more freedom to roam, including cycling and camping. I don't recall exactly how it's codified, but it's approximately a default right to access, with limited exceptions (close proximity to homes, farms with active lambing, estates during hunting season, stuff like that).

In low population density areas you can generally walk around freely in nature, and the denser population get, the more restricted things are.

This is not because Norwegians are civic minded altruists and Singaporeans selfish jerks. It mostly reflects what is practical.

> 50 years ago, Germany also still had a popular saying "Eigentum verpflichtet"

This isn't just a saying, but a part of the constitution (Article 14, http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.ht... )

I guess this is the reason in Germany it is very common to run your own business when you are employed while countries like India most of companies add very brutal moonlighting clause in job agreement.

> 50 years ago, Germany also still had a popular saying "Eigentum verpflichtet" which I would translate as "ownership creates a duty". In short, people who owned companies, large plots of land, or other infrastructure were expected to spread their wealth by creating jobs.

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light

Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!

It is the business of the wealthy man

To give employment to the artisan.

-- Hilaire Belloc

> When the land was privatized, the government made it a condition that the hiking trail would remain for the general public to enjoy

Here in Massachusetts, our trespassing laws only apply to "improved" land. So you are free to transit any wilderness areas, even if they are privately owned, and even if "no trespassing" signs are posted. Of course, nobody knows this or follows it. People regularly call the police, who are just as ignorant on the law, because people are on their land.

I can't speak to the social expectations to have a housekeeper or cook as a domestic employee, but in many developing nation environments with high income disparities between the working class and those who hire domestic staff, there's another thing to consider.

In some places that don't have supermarkets the process of buying groceries for a whole family is much more time consuming and labor intensive. For example, you get vegetables from one market, you go to another place if you want chicken and wait while they literally kill it in front of you, chop it up and put it in a plastic bag.

Everything comes from its own decentralized market and requires a lot more time/effort to buy on an ongoing basis.

Shopping and the process of buying all the supplies for a household is not nearly as convenient as going to Costco or similar in north america.

Often the role of cook is combined with general duties of procuring household supplies, handling things like the local electrical bill, hiring laborers for household repair and maintenance, etc.

Your post is spot on. I'm an immigrant (to the US) from one of these countries. It's easier to get domestic help because people are desperate for money and there is no social safety net. A lot of the domestic help typically has no/little education (maybe only elementary school), so they are trapped in that situation.

Grocery shopping is a huge effort compared to the US. Also, with smaller homes, kitchens, and smaller fridges, you have to go grocery shopping multiple times a week.

Cars and Gasoline are also heavily taxed. Even "rich" families will typically only have one basic car, so you need a driver to drop someone off at work, come home to take somebody to the various grocery stores, etc.

Over the last 10-15 years as job and educational opportunities have improved, more and and more of the people I know complain that it's harder to find "good" domestic help. Lots of people who would typically go into basic construction jobs or domestic help jobs are finding other opportunities. Basically, what is going on in the US right now.

Very true currently in Kenya, if you integrate at all. People don't usually live in isolation, they are part of a local community and it's natural and expected that they share opportunities and risks with their community. If you can afford to, you are expected to hire other people to do things that save you time and energy, distributing your wealth in the local economy. Having a housekeeper, one or more people responsible for childcare, a gardener (if you have a garden), etc, are all very normal and it lifts everyone up.

That's genuinely interesting. Here in my part of the states, you're expected to do it all yourself, and in my area (exceedingly rural and exceedingly low income) having anyone do some of those things would be seen as being stuck-up or snobbish or something to that effect. For example, I still catch grief for being a "rich bitch" from my neighbors because I hired someone to put a roof on my covered porch on the back of my house 6 or 7 years ago.

This may sound naive, but I had legitimately never considered that it's a valid and useful way to spread my opportunities through the community.

> This may sound naive, but I had legitimately never considered that it's a valid and useful way to spread my opportunities through the community.

Because the better way to spread opportunity is to use that money to pay for poorer people to get an education so they do not have to do menial tasks for richer people.

> Because the better way to spread opportunity is to use that money to pay for poorer people to get an education so they do not have to do menial tasks for richer people.

...and then a data scientist with an advanced degree spends the day hand-crafting SQL to root-cause a customer complaint after Bezos sends a one-byte email, "?"...

(EDIT: I may have focused on one aspect of the parent's point at the expense of the other, clarified below).

How is that relevant?

Is there any question that a housekeeper is better off if they were able to spend their time studying or training for something that offers a higher probability of earning higher incomes?

Or should society continue to perpetuate the relative socioeconomic class you are born into by having you spend your time washing other people’s clothes and homes?

Because you've combined two concerns, the amount of money people make, and what level of stratification is involved in making it. You can study, train, and improve your economic security considerably, but still end up essentially doing menial tasks for rich people, just for more money.

(EDIT: That said, upward economic mobility is always desirable and education is essential to achieving it. It's an escape from poverty, but it's not a foolproof escape from hierarchy).

> Because you've combined two concerns, the amount of money people make, and what level of stratification is involved in making it.

The two concerns are linked. You only see widespread personal drivers and housekeepers and gardeners in less developed countries with many very poor people. Reducing the stratification by redistributing wealth via taxes and an education system is preferable mechanism of spreading opportunity.

The societies telesilla and Blahah are referring to are not ones where a housekeeper works 40 hour weeks Mon to Fri and gets PTO and has time to get a law degree in the evenings.

These places have housekeepers and drivers because they are not fortunate to be born in a society with enough of a public education system that allows them to escape that fate, even if it is just being an accountant for a rich person, at least they get vacations and decent work hours and schedules.

> The societies telesilla and Blahah are referring to are not ones where a housekeeper works 40 hour weeks Mon to Fri and gets PTO

Nor is the "high-growth" tech sector, which is notorious for long hours and de-facto little time off. The money might be good, but the lifestyle can be miserable.

You're working for billionaires instead of millionaires, but you're still in a situation where a "?" from the top means you've got to hustle.

I do not even know how to respond to a comparison of the quality of life for an employee in the tech sector to a housekeeper or driver in a developing country.

One has weekends and holidays, can send their kids to fancy schools, go on international vacations, choose to retire by 40, has access to great healthcare, choose to work a different profession or their hobby or whatever they want.

>One has weekends and holidays, can send their kids to fancy schools, go on international vacations, choose to retire by 40, has access to great healthcare, choose to work a different profession or their hobby or whatever they want.

The poster you replied to was very clearly limiting the scope of their comparison to the "so they do not have to do menial tasks for richer people" standard you gave originally. Listing any number of other differences is orthogonal to the point they are making.

You must be playing the provocateur?

"Step 1: Everyone gets a Ph.D.

Step 2: Meals cook themselves!"

(I suppose we could all live on MREs?)

Knowledge isn't zero-sum, but credentials are. Educating everyone doesn't make "menial" jobs go away. Better, really, to recognize some of those jobs as more important, and be willing to pay for them.

Also, there are gains from trade, and economies of scale. The time to cook two meals is less than double the time to cook one. And the person who specializes in it is probably better at it than the person who specializes in some other thing. When things are working correctly, these gains are then distributed across society by exchange.

I wrote education, not credentials. That includes learning how to farm, be an electrician, a crane operator, a researcher, learning how to cook, it could be anything.

It is obvious that a society with widespread use of personal drivers/housekeepers/nannies is simply one with a wider income/wealth gap.

One option is to spend multiple generations slowing bringing the housekeepers kids up the ladder with the housekeeper’s meager savings, and then their kids, and so on. Or we can cut the crap, and redistribute wealth more quickly and directly via a public education/training system.

Ditches still have to be dug.

What I wrote does not preclude ditches being dug, or being a ditch digger. What it does is prevent ditch digging from being one of the few options for many people which result in ditch digging labor prices to be very low.

You give people opportunities to do many more things than menial labor, then that allows the price for menial labor to rise so that it is not done by the “lower” socioeconomic rungs.

This is a good argument, IMO. The main dangers I see are of status-signaling "non-skills" dominating education, and of overall malinvestment in skills that aren't needed.

The more educated people, the more educated people doing menial tasks for other people. Menial tasks have to get done.

And they end up getting done by people themselves, in much of the developed world.

No, they end up getting done by armies of gig workers.

The vast, vast majority of Americans are doing their own laundry, house cleaning, gardening, and driving.

I know quite a few households in the $200k+ income, and no one has a driver, everyone does their own laundry, and only a few have a house cleaner come by every couple weeks.

The way of the American suburb is so different from cities in most of the world that the rest of the cultural differences seem natural. In places with this social bonding arrangements, you have contacts across social strata that fit people and jobs: Your friend's housekeeper is often a great contact for more good housekeeping. They might have friends and family members that need work in other occupations too, and thus entire social groups of people of different social classes bond together. You typically hire the people directly, not through a company, and personal reputation hits ripple through the social network. There might be people in-th-know, which act as brokers for the top opportunities without charging a cent.

I compare that to the American suburban experience, where most people who do manual work are considered too flakey to deal with directly, most tasks are nowhere near enough to count as a full time job, and everything is handled via companies led by people who code-switch. If I need a roofer or a landscaper, I will find few companies led by a mexican, or even someone with mexican ancestry, but their workers are almost assured to be: There's layers of isolation on top of layers of isolation, so you aren't building a relationship with your roofer, your handyman, or your housekeeper. The intermediaries make all of that work exchange have a very different nature.

On top of that, barring a small number of neighborhoods, there's a good chance you'll never see one of those workers outside of the contract, because the housing they can afford, and the housing they can afford, are so far apart you have few reasons to frequent the same establishments. So while places where more people live together might make it easier to see how different social classes are, in the US we might have a larger social distance, but completely hidden by housing. It's not just that the rich American can take their kids to a private school: It's that the way things are set up, the public schools for many a rich American will have few families who aren't rich in the first place, just via suburban zoning.

It's as if different social classes were happy to coexist in many other places, but in the US, they loathe each other, and can only interact via intermediaries.

>It's as if different social classes were happy to coexist in many other places, but in the US, they loathe each other, and can only interact via intermediaries.

Is it possible that the US is big enough and rich enough that it allows different social classes to not have to co exist, whereas in many other places, they have no choice but to co exist due to lack of land and other wealth?

it's a thing in left litterature. this role is called "comprador" and it has very negative connotation (for obvious reasons if you think about it from the native perspective)

I’ve noticed that in India, it’s cheaper for a foreigner to book an Uber car than hail an auto rickshaw, because the former can’t discriminate

Surely Uber can very much discriminate? Tourist prices for tourists. And Uber definitely knows you're a visitor.

Uber, an American company with heavy presence in Western countries, is not going to do that. It would be suicidal.

Same is true in India. Those who do not have servants are charged higher prices when you go to buy grocery and pantry items.

If I find out a shopkeeper charges me different prices based on who I am, I never spend money there again. I'd much rather give my money to a corporation that's agnostic wrt customer identity.

It seems that part of the problem in the US (at least the part I live in) is that it can be very difficult to find a maid, nanny, even a gardener who takes pride in their work. I'm sure they are out there and their customers value them and try not to lose them. I've found that using a service like Handy for cleaning never works because the workers tend to clearly really resent doing that kind of work and seem to not care if you give them a bad rating. Of course, a big part of the problem is the wage for this kind of work is not even close to a living wage in a lot of areas.

Same in India. For a lot of people Car is more of a status symbol and in some crowded cities it is much easier to take a 2 wheeler.

India is building a lot of public transit now. I will be interested in seeing how that changes the culture of such cities. This is long term - transit needs to go close to where you are and where you want to be before people will use it, so a large part of the change depends on if/when they build more lines after the current ones open.

It pretty much comes down to labor costs. I spent some time in VN and anything that requires unskilled labor is incredibly inexpensive.

Delivery? Sure, someone will bring it across the city, in the next hour for 35,000 Dong ($1.50USD).

Want to buy shoes? Msg a store, they’ll send pictures, choose a few and they send a store employee over to your house to try them on.

That is changing though. Covid completely messed up the labor market and rather than get locked down, losing your job and still having to pay rent and food, people just went back to the countryside with family and are staying there for now.

As a result labor shortages, even nannies, and wages are going up. I think it’s a good thing, it’s the bottom moving up.

I expect you’ll see a similar transition as the UK eventually. Maids and nannies becomes something exclusive to the rich. Unless of course they continue to import them from lower income countries - a la Singapore.

Also the extra usefulness of a car is much lower. In SEA you can transport the whole family on a scooter.

Hahaha this was my family of 4, 20 years ago. I still remember it vividly for some reason, thanks for the reminder.

When it starts raining though, you'd wish you're taking shelter in a car instead of riding scooters while wearing a raincoat.

You can transport your family on a motorcycle or scooter in the US too. You'll just be on a first name basis with all the cops everywhere you go regularly because even if the cops themselves dgaf there will be no shortage of people calling them on you.

So not a realistic option, isnt it?

That's my point. We're more or less forced to spend resources doing things to a higher standard.

I wonder about speeds. The only places I've seen a lot of people on motorcycles is in heavy traffic where the speed is only slightly faster than you could ride on a bicycle. In the US most traffic is at higher speeds on residential roads, and you are expected to jump over to the freeway with very high speeds to get around. As such the practice is much more dangerous if you drive like you are in the US (not that it is ever safe)

It's not a surprise - today's Vietnam per capita GDP is same as U.S. (and probably UK since the countries were close in their economic development) in 1919 (13-14% of today's U.S. level).

Interestingly, in societies with several "tiers" made up of people of different origin (many of them full-on citizens anyway, it's not about legal rights but about race/class which is perceived to be same thing), it can work even on a much higher level of economic development.

Cyprus where i live is at around 60% of U.S. level, and average family can have a full-time maid, as long as she's from Philippines. I was surprised to know that many of these Philippines maids have better immigration status than myself and this is certainly not because they are "forced to work for pennies or risk being kicking out of the country". It's just a perception of how much a Philippine maid is worth.

I think its common in Singapore too from what I've seen.

Here in Austria we still have building codes from the Nazis that dictate a parking space for every new unit built. This is absolutely ridiculous in cities where car ownership is going down but underground parking is built. A sad result is that many of those expensive underground parking spaces are empty because house owners are not forced to rent out units and parking spaces separately while at the same time the overground parking (for 50 Euros a year in Linz' Blue parking zone) are overcrowded.

Sounds like they are just leaving money on the table ? (So there must be other reasons ?)

They probably are leaving money on the table, but the hassle of renting out your unused parking spot isn't really worth the money you could make. There is also the convenience on when a guest arrives with a car you can give them your parking spot (this would typically happen only a few times a year)

The landlord could make a lot of money by collecting all the unused parking spots, but that is probably either illegal (those are for the residents and can't be separated from the units) or technically legal but they fear it would be made illegal if they tried.

The real money left on the table is secondary effects: residents pay for parking they don't need/use; and that parking takes up space that could be used for something else thus making the area more dense and public transit because of the additional people in dense area can afford to be more useful.

I don't think it's reasonable to quote the price of a new car (which is in tens of thousands) when determining whether someone can afford a car.

I sold my last car for €500 and it wasn't in the worst shape.

Where mechanics' labor is cheap, used cars cost nearly as much as new cars. This surprised me too when I first observed it.

Most middle class families who can afford a car in developing nations rarely buy used cars/motorcycles. Giving the scenario in India. Vehicles are treated as a luxury here which are bought much later in a person’s life. Most families don’t even buy a car in India. It’s takes a lot of money to maintain it and it is very costly to drive one. The vehicle which you’ll find in every household here is a motorcycle and that too in mostly between 150cc-200cc engine range. The reason for that too is because lesser the cc, cheaper the bike, more the mileage.

I'm in a moderately ok country, and I still see buying a new car as a luxury. It's something you do much later in life/career, when you can't be bother to take care of the extra management a used car comes with. And definitely not for everybody - there's quite a few people I know that are middle age with kids and don't even think about a new car. They just have chose other tradeoffs

I mean, given the depreciation on most new cars, it doesn't make sense to buy a new car in a lot of cases. But it depends on various factors like how much do you drive, does your employer compensate you for driving, how much maintenance does a used vs a new car need, etc.

Note that this is a very eurocentric viewpoint coming from someone who only has a car for shopping and family visits.

In my previous job I had a lease car from my employer, that made a bit more sense then given how much I had to drive.

> Even worse, most houses (unless they are luxury houses >$500,000 built in the last 5ish years) aren't built with a garage for a car, so you're looking at buying land, smashing down the existing structure, and then rebuilding something with a garage.

I don't know if this is meant to be serious, but you could just park your car outdoors, like city dwellers do?

There's not enough space for everyone to do this. It's also often not free, you have to pay the city for using up the street space etc. New housing in Europe is planned with underground garage space exactly for this reason. SEA cities are even more densely populated.

But aren't we talking about single family houses here, with a garden? If you have room for a garage in your garden, surely you have room for a car without a garage?

The other poster mentioned Vietnam, I would expect cities there to be quite dense with townhouses or a tiny "garden" that's more like the smallest gap between houses that you can get away with while not breaking the construction code.

Hey, I'm with you. In Vancouver, BC, Canada

I heard in Hong Kong it was cheaper to have a chauffeur drive the car around the city than to buy a parking space.

So instead of parking the car, it would just be driven around the block again and again.

Interesting that he brings up "a robot to automatically brew Starbucks-caliber coffee".

Here in Australia, you can get a really high-quality coffee from just about any petrol station for $1 (in AUD; around 70c in USD). Yet in spite of this, we have a thriving cafe scene where people will gladly pay $4-$5 for a take-away latte.

What's equally "irrational" is that Starbucks, despite the high amount of effort put into each drink, is generally considered to be worse than the $1 coffee from 7-11 or Coles Express.

I'm not 100% sure what the takeaway point is, but it was just so jarring to read that Americans view Starbucks as a luxury rather than some kind of bizarro-world meme.

As a coffee enthusiast I wonder what the definition of "really high quality" is here. For me the coffee bean needs to be well roasted (most/all big brands roast too hot to save time and burn the bean. Starbucks too, they cover it with milk and lots of sugar), freshly grinded before brewing and made with a portafilter. No full automatic coffee machine I used produced high quality coffee, at best acceptable coffee, usually nearly undrinkable office caffeine shots.

While Starbucks coffee isn't top quality coffee, it still beats your usual office space full automatic poison by a long shot and is readily available everywhere. That's why it's considered good coffee by many.

I'm curious, how do you find Starbucks and McDonald's coffee compare? I find McDonald's coffee superior, though I prefer the ambience of Starbucks.

I'm not the parent, but McDonald's coffee in the US is far superior to Starbucks for typical drip coffee. The flip side is that Starbucks has more options than McDonalds for coffee drinks.

> Here in Australia, you can get a really high-quality coffee from just about any petrol station for $1

7-11 or Coles Express coffee do not have high quality coffee. Everyone I know who drinks it does so just because it's convenient.

(OK, fair. It's of course not "really high-quality" compared to the top-grade stuff where they roast the beans in-house and all. It is surprisingly good, though, and comparable in quality to many smaller cafes.)

I remember when Starbucks first arrived in Australia there were several articles talking about exactly this topic. Because cheap espresso coffee is ubiquitous in Australia, Starbucks doesn't provide the same value-add that it did in the US where most coffee was weak drip coffee to begin with. I think it took years of careful marketing till Starbucks was able to "train" Australians to pay double for their mixed drinks than what they used to pay for regular espresso coffees. I suspect nowadays people don't really see Starbucks as a coffee, but as its own exclusive flavored hot drink that operates more as a status symbol.

To be fair, this is largely how Starbucks operates in the US too. I used to drink garbage drip coffee all the time, but when I went to Starbucks it was a "skim flat white with cinnamon, please."

It's not a coffee shop, it's fast food for rich folk.

I just looked up a couple of articles myself. Apparently they entered the market in 2000, expanded rapidly but closed a whole lot of stores in 2008. As of 2022 they're still yet to turn a profit.

I don't think it's a case of them requiring years of marketing to convince the general Australian public to pay more (you go past the store at Melbourne Central and it's 50-50 Asian tourists and hipster Zoomers with Macbooks that want to pretend they're in New York; either way, they just view the brand as some quirky novelty), nor is it the competition from cheap espresso (7-11 didn't launch their dollar coffees until 2013, and Coles Express was maybe a year after that) - it's the fact we already had an established coffee culture and Starbucks' product fundamentally fails to conform to what our idea of a "real" coffee is.

They could sell their drinks for $1 at 7-11 and people would still buy the standard lattes.

There are petrol station machines in France and Italy that make better coffee than Starbucks too.

I stopped reading this about four paragraphs in and did a bunch of web searches to try to find the phenomenon it reminded me of.

Once I had successfully found it with my second search ([economics name for effect raises orchestra]) I came back and found Baumol in the very next subhead. Whoops. All a great read though!

In retrospect every year at the student newspaper when we ran the "here is how much tuition is going up and here is how much financial aid is going up" article we probably should have invited an administrator or professor to comment on Baumol's cost disease.

The price of college in particular is commented on in the article - prestige matters and prestige is zero sum, so supply is constrained and demand is highly inelastic. Add on to that vastly increased purchasing power made possible by subsidized student loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcy and you have a recipe for out of control prices. Limited supply of a highly inelastic good combined with massive demand way above what people normally could pay yields prices going to the moon.

There's not an easy fix for this. If you have the government pay for college then the race to get into college gets all the money that would have been spent on tuition. On top of that, it's not inherently clear what amount private universities should be paid or if they should be allowed to charge on top of what public money pays for. I went to a public school and I'd trade my crappy experience (caused by budget shortfalls and bureaucratic overhead characteristic of government-run institutions) for a more expensive private school any day of the week. You really don't want overfilled classes, extreme competition for research positions (even basic things like being an experiment monkey are competitive), and a system that in general only pays attention to you if you have above a 3.8.

If you kill government subsidized loans you fix the market for less prestigious schools, but the top 20 or so are still going to have substantial pricing power. Private market loans and ISAs still have the potential to jack up purchasing power.

> bureaucratic overhead characteristic of government-run institutions

Whenever I read something like that, I wonder if the speaker ever worked in private industry. IME, government gets all their bad organizational ideas from us.

Yes, but private industry companies can go bankrupt if they're too incompetent. Governments can too of course, but they typically take a lot longer to do so.

You will notice that this is not an issue everywhere (or at least not as dramatically so as in the USA).

I guess a bit like housing prices have disproportionately risen in London compared to other places since Agatha Christie's time ?

Isn't this just another way of saying that original assumptions about how to define the market and potential participants were wrong?

Or at least that definitions need to include info about competing markets?

In 1919, one did not need a car to live, especially in London (true even in 2021). It was a luxury item. The lifestyle improvement of owning a car in London in 1919 was probably marginal except for social status. On the other hand, having a maid and nanny would dramatically improve your life, especially before inventions of washing machines.

It is analogous to living in places like Singapore or Hong Kong, where owning a car is less common than having a domestic worker.

The car was probably more akin to a private jet. It would require a professional driver, for starters.

Quip from a friend from a (relatively) poor country: “Before I moved to the US, it would have seemed bizarre to me that someone could be rich enough to afford a car but not be able to afford a driver”.

Reminds me of another discussion where some of us were confused about someone retrofitting child seats in a Ferrari: how would you be rich enough to afford a Ferrari as a toy/show-off car, but not also have a normal, functional car for when you need to drive the child around (or a chauffer)?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24762683

I was in that situation. My only car was a two-seat convertible lovely car but at some point when I got good at surfing I needed a way to transport my board from my house to the beach (about 5km). I decided to sell my car and buy a larger luxury one that could carry my board and still be enjoyable to be in. Obviously I could afford to get a second, cheap, car to do that but the hassle of having two cars just wasn't worth the trouble for me.

It's the same for your example I suspect: if you can do it in a single car, that's often the option with the least amount of hassle.

Being able to afford a full time housekeeper is really dependent on the local economy - in any major city in Pakistan if you were to convert 330 USD a month to rupees that would be a very competitive market rate salary for such a position.

To the extent that I met a number of people who had 2 or 3 full time domestic staff but if they had decided to emigrate to the UK or USA would not be able to afford any, and based on their career/education/experience would likely be living in a 650 square foot apartment.

Heck 330 USD is also probably on the higher end. In India (which is considered the "expensive" country in South Asia) it is pretty easy to find full time household help for $200/mo even in large, expensive cities. Stuff like iPhones and imported cars, however, cost double their price in the states.

Seems there is a huge business opportunity just mailing things like Apple products from Oregon, where you don't pay sales tax, straight to india to be sold far below their market rates for that same product.

You just described the smuggling industry, and it does already exist

You know, India and Pakistan do have excise/tariffs beyond a personal exemption

That's called contraband. Protectionist tariffs are there to deter exactly this.

The point is how much money does it take today to have the equivalent wealth status in society as Christie.

It is almost certainly far more than $50,000, which is a tradesman's salary these days.

So, irrespective of what that money now buys, the true inflation figure (how much does it cost to live at a certain level in society) is far greater than the official figure.

Inflation is defined based on utility, not a certain level of society. The second would be something like GDP growth, much higher than inflation, and definitionally a zero-sum game.

Inflation says that you would rather prefer to live it today's society at say $60,000/year (with smart phones, cars, Internet TV), than yesterday's society at say $50,000/year (with two maids, but none of the technology). Introspecting, I would say the above decision is true for me.

'Hedonic' inflation can't really be measured objectively, and is somewhat useless for financial calculations, since people need to live in society.

If Christie enjoyed an 'upper-middle-class' lifestyle on an official inflation-adjusted $50k salary, then it's clear that the offical inflation figures do not actually measure the 'cost of living', but something much more diffuse and subjective like the 'quality of living'.

There's a direct relationship between other people making similar wages to you, and your inability to get someone to do a good job on anything at a price you can afford.

If the cost of living hadn't "increased", then the middle class would still be tiny, and we wouldn't be in it. The whole thing would be moot.

> Introspecting, I would say the above decision is true for me.

An alternate perspective (not contrary, just different)…

My uncle and late aunt were linguists in Central and South America. They were funded modestly with American funds.

When abroad, they did not have a car, but they did have a housekeeper (cooking and cleaning) and one or two nannies (two when their 3rd kid was young). They got around by scooter, or taxis if necessary.

When they came to the US to raise funds, my aunt always complained about how hard it was to manage everything even though they were frequently given loaner cars and a lot of free food. Apparently the extra labor around the house made a huge difference for household management, and apparently that house help was worth way more than a car for them.

When I lived abroad in a lower CoL country, I rarely cooked just because I could eat out very cheaply and relatively healthily.

That's because the real currency in life is time. Household help actively safes time. A car just allows cities to spread out further until the initial time savings experienced while cars were new are eaten up.

Don't forget about healthcare. Few people would prefer the comforts of the past if it comes with infant mortality rate of the past.

Looking at the maid's and nanny's income, I think 2020's incomes are _definitely_ preferable to 1920's for many.

It is hard to compare because Agatha Christie didn't have an internet bill to pay, but also didn't have access to a huge chunk of the world's knowledge at her fingertips. This goes for a lot of things. Her healthcare would have been much less expensive than modern care, even adjusting for inflation, but she would also be more likely to die of disease or injury.

I wonder how much she paid for an RTX 3090.

I find it funny how people compare an RTX 3090 to a top of the line gpu from 10 years ago and act as if they should be the same price just because they're both the best. You just can't compare prices between decades when the things being compared improved many folds.

Well, we're also in a period where at least some mid/high range cards from a few years ago cost 4-5 times more than they did on release...

The hedonic inflation argument is that you are now many times better off with your RTX3080 compared to a GTX 480 or whatever, and so your 'cost of living' has effectively gone down, because to buy a GTX 480 equivalent now is many times cheaper than it was.

The reality of course is that you have the 'latest greatest' graphic card in each case, and that is what should be measured.

It's just not realistic to live like Christie (no antibiotics, no highways, air travel, internet, tv, etc, etc) in 2022, and so inflation calculations based on like-for-like products and services are essentially meaningless.

'Cost of living' measures should reflect how much it costs to live like a factory worker, a shop assistant, a doctor, lawyer, manager, CEO, etc. Inflation currently measures 'Quality of living' more than 'cost of living', if anything at all.

You could totally live your entire life playing only games with late 2000's graphics. Barely anyone "needs" even a discrete gpu even.

If the greatest car in 1900 was a Ford T and the greatest car now is a $1,000,000 Rolls Royce, it doesn't mean it makes sense to compare their price. One is a utility and the other one is the top of the top luxury. It doesn't mean cars got more expensive, it just means there's a new bigger luxury market for that type of object.

Baumol's cost disease has been discussed on HN a bunch in the past, but I really liked how the author reframed it as "Baumol's bonus", i.e. nannies are certainly not lamenting that they're getting paid more.

I've just read about it now and it reminds me of Universal Basic Income

The most obvious thing that this fails to address is literally the largest expense that the vast majority of people have, and the need for it has not changed: housing.

The idea the Christie’s multi bedroom apartment would be as cheap as stated is laughable and demonstrably false.

The unwillingness of governments to include cost of housing in inflation calculations is more reflective of their pressure to make the landed happy than any attempt to reflect reality.

While you're right, bear in mind, the worldwide population was 1/8th what it is now 100 years ago. That would mean, on average, worldwide, using naive metrics, housing cost would be 1/8th what it is today, even adjusting for inflation. One thing to keep in mind, the population in the UK at that time was very high, the population replenished back to pre WW2 levels only in 2017 and that includes immigration that didn't exist back then, so it wouldn't have been 1/8th for her, only slightly less. But all in all, housing costs worldwide would've been significantly less back then.

you are also making an assumption that the homebuilding rate globally for the past 100 years has been zero

No, I'm assuming that the available land has not increased. Historically until very recently (the past ~50 years) the vast majority of human beings built their own housing, available land would be the limiting factor and therefore most of the cost factor.

As an aside, I doubt the example of a musician not getting more productive is correct. The invention of cheap recording media and especially radio and TV has made musicians massively more productive if you measure it by number of listeners. Also fast travel makes them more productive, if you can play 5 major cities a week you make much more money than with 5 shows in the same city, hence musicians going on tours.

But not (or much less so) in 1965, which is when Baumol made his observation.

Fast travel and recording media lead to gains for the very best or most popular musicians who are now able to sell their music much more widely and play large venues in many cities more easily. It doesn't make the equivalent of the talented bar cover band any better off, in fact it socially demotes them to being something called a "cover band" when before these technologies that would have been almost any band.

> “The full treatment, including surgery and chemotherapy, can reach between $8,000 and $10,000 for a dog or cat.”

Meanwhile, full cancer treatment for a human can easily cost 100x that, because care for pets is a free market and care for humans is very far from it.

Also because many people are willing to let their pets pass rather than pay over $10k for treatments. The same cannot be said for people.

Even the idea of spending $10K sounds bizzare to me. Probably because pet insurance wasn't really a thing the last time my family owned a pet.

Television's "The Brady Bunch" depicted an upper-middle-class household with a live-in maid and a nice house in an LA suburb that did not otherwise live extravagantly by the standards of a decade or two later, when basically no one in the US except maybe the out-of-sight-rich had live-in help any more.

They were using very fast and loose definitions of both economics and physics on that show. That house only has 3 bedrooms in reality and no basement, pretty typical for LA home specs unless you are looking at the old money neighborhoods like Hancock Park where some of the homes look a lot more like the rich people's homes out east (albeit on much smaller lots).

Yeah, television, so a big grain of salt. The point is they were depicted as having a live-in maid, which was going away in the US at the time but still not nearly as remarkable in 1969 as it would be by 1980 or 1990. Or today.

The house was depicted as nice and up-to-date but not extravagant - the kids shared rooms, right? I was implying that another thing that's changed is that that house would cost a much larger multiple of income today than in 1969.

Otherwise they weren't depicted as living as extravagantly as a lot of comfortable people do today. No luxury cars, fancy vacations, etc. Marcia and Greg weren't flying to Africa or the Caribbean to do charity work for their college applications like plainly middle-class kids will do today. Mrs. Brady doesn't chew Alice out for buying tomatoes from Safeway instead of organic heirloom tomatoes at Whole Foods. All that would have been absurd in 1969.

Housing cost being not too far from 100 years back seems suspect even inflation/per capita wealth adjusted.

Increasing urbanization in cites and sheer population growth would have increased housing costs whichever way it is measured (ownership /rental/median /average) over 50-100 year period.

Construction methods and materials have significantly reduced the amount of required labor and the cost of materials over that time period.

And commuting/ communications is easier which increases supply of land/space, and reduces relative demand within cities.

Building to code today is lot more expensive than building 100 years back.

Labour was a lot cheaper at that time, which was the point of the post ? She could afford two servants but not other things .

Commuting was not a problem then most people lived and worked in rural parts of the country.

Both the car and the nanny have a TCO that is vastly higher than the purchase price/salary: the car needs maintenance/service, parking, repairs, fuel, taxes and insurance, and the nanny needs a place to stay, food, and he/she consumes water and electricity.

People tend not to calculate TCO or even be aware of it, they just look at their monthly incoming and outgoing money and check if their cashflow doesn't hits 0.

The rent seems insanely low, it's hard to find a single-room apartment for that price in a medium-size city. By 1919 you have most of the utilities we expect to have in an apartment, so that doesnt seem to be a factor. Is there some factor not mentioned in the article, or have rents just gone up more than other things?

Lower demand perhaps - e.g. the maid is living with you so they don't need their own place to live.

It's a four-bedroom apartment for one childless couple, so this particular case doesn't support the idea that there was less demand. And the population of London is within 20% of what it was.

I don't follow your point.

The less demand is that the maid lives in the place they work, so do not need their own property to live in. The article seemed to suggest that having live-in staff was common compared to car ownership etc, so I would imagine there were a lot of adults living in their places of work, thus not needing to rent their own apartments etc so reducing demand.

Do you mean water, electricity etc? Because in 1919 those were not universal (not sure about how 'common' they were in London, but in much of Western Europe they weren't even that), and heating would have been done through coal too, I presume. No double glazing or any other insulation really, wooden stairs and wooden beams between floors, no hot water taps, ...

'Living' (as in, living in a house) back then was vastly worse than it is now. Just over the last 10 years, the required (as in, required by building codes) comfort levels of houses (in Western Europe) have gone up so much that they add at least 20% to the cost of building, not counting inflation. (source: am a part time real estate developer).

Ok, that does help. Yes, I had been thinking of London as having the best available at the time, the most up-do-date. I didn't consider the impact building codes have.

Live in maid is fairly common in other countries still including Hong Kong where you can hire one for less than $1k / month with allowance, other expenses included. It's not just for the riches. Many dual income families have them even if they're little above middle class.

My girlfriend is Qatari and it is almost universal there to have a live-in maid.

Maybe a dumb question: How could it be universal. I’m assuming the maid doesn’t have a maid, right?

Based on what I've heard from people of the area, the maid is usually an immigrant. And "universal" tends to mean "universal amongst proper citizens".

Relatedly, I was surprised to learn that some women who "universally" wear a hijab before men feel no need to do so before a male immigrant.

Even if the immigrant is Muslim?

More about social standing than religion as I understand it. The rule of thumb as I was told is basically: "is there any slight chance in I marry this person? If yes, hijab. If no, doesn't matter." Religion plays a role in such analysis, but considering a Muslim immigrant laborer versus some arbitrary Abrahamic doctor (for instance), the doctor would be more likely to see the hijab. (For married women, the husband decides)

Qatari is something like 10% citizens 90% migrant labor from Africa, so universal for citizens would be correct.

Sorry, to be clearer, it is universal for Qatari citizens.

"In early 2017, Qatar's total population was 2.6 million: 313,000 Qatari citizens and 2.3 million expatriates."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar

Or be a live-in maid. It seems unlikely more than half the people have a live-n maid.

The vast majority of people in Qatar (and in every Arab monarchy, and a significant portion of every Arab country) are not citizens, they're guest workers. Most of these guest workers are domestic labor.

Sorry, to be clearer, it is universal for Qatari citizens.

"In early 2017, Qatar's total population was 2.6 million: 313,000 Qatari citizens and 2.3 million expatriates."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar

It seems like it will be a popular option in any country that has abject poor you can hire for a pittance but also a middle class.

live in maid service has been tightly regulated by HK gov't for decades. There's minimum wage. Requirement for stipends. Proof of income and assets. etc. Workers are usually from southeast Asia from lower cost of living.

I lived in HK in the 80s and while we didn't have a maid, our 3BR apt had a separate maid room by the kitchen w/ own bathroom. It wasn't uncommon to see that.

This article puts its finger on some interesting questions.

Circa 1930, when Agatha's domestic servant was an affordable basic but a car was not, JM Keynes famously predicted a 15 hr workweek. His productivity and GDP growth projections that this prediction were right. But, the workweek didn't change much. "Work hours" changed, but it wasn't productivity that caused changes. Wars, women's' liberation, college, child labour norms and such caused changes. Increased productivity did not.

Why? The most common economics-ey answer is "the hedonic treadmill." As wages increased, so did our demands. We want smartphones, fancy cars, expensive medical care and such. Essentially, this argument implies that we choose to work a lot to consume more.

I think hedonic treadmills are this is part of the answer, but grossly insufficient. A better answer. Economics should be providing better, more curios treatment of the question.

This article mentions “Baumol's cost disease,” but like the hedonic treadmill, I don't think it's a sufficient answer.

Economics is cursed by "post fact storytelling" issues. I think it needs to be balanced by post fact question-asking.

Did GDP-per-capita "really" grow 5X-10X during this period. What does that mean exactly, considering that an average person can afford more of some things and less of others? A 15 hr workweek pays less than a month's rent.

Car prices themselves are also an interesting case. Until about 1930, auto manufacturing (US) experienced its proverbial "hockey stick growth." Each year processes improved, prices went down and the number of units went up. By about 1930, the US market was saturated. Cars continued to evolve and improve, but prices stopped decreasing as production volume leveled. From this point on, productivity/GDP trends are means faster or nicer cars... it stops meaning more affordable cars.

In short, I think there are some serious discrepancies in the meaning of GDP when considered over short periods and long periods of time.

TIL that Starbucks is a luxury experience (I'm not a coffee drinker and there's no Starbucks in my town). I thought it was the McDonald's of coffee, I mean if it's luxury why are they using Styrofoam cups instead of glass?!

If you are in city with lots of 'premium' coffee shops, Starbucks is generally considered the worst of the 'premium' brands. However, every other shop in large city is a Starbucks, so for many convenience of locale wins over.

If Starbucks is a premium shop, what is the lower quality, non-premium one?

McDonald's, 7-Eleven, ...

Are those thought as a coffee shops in the US?

Because people buy Starbucks coffee to go. Glasses are heavier.

McDonalds coffee is better. Dunkin’ and Chick-fil-A are better. (None of those is great, mind you; just better than Starbucks.) Starbucks is utter swill. Their coffee is always burnt, and if you’ve had anything citrus-like beforehand, their coffee tastes moldy. I have never had a good coffee there, and have never understood the appeal.

‘they hired a live-in maid for £36 ($2,600) per year’

It should be noted that in those days low-wage workers might spend half their income on food.* Presumably as a live-in maid her room and board were provided, so her compensation was not as low as her salary alone might imply.

*cf https://ahundredyearsago.com/2019/05/30/percentage-of-u-s-to...

Still, it's pretty much impossible to have a family (or provide for any other human being, e.g. sick relatives) on such an allowance alone. Marriage, and maybe even partnership, was often out of the question for two people who both held such jobs.

Things that were luxuries in the past could at the same time be necessities today. That’s not counter-intuitive.

Maybe you need to have a cell phone for work. Clearly that was optional in the year 1900.

> They rented a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in London with four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.”

Did people who lived in London back then require a car? Maybe some people would prefer to be able to rent a place in London without owning a car rather then to commute to London for work with a car.

Still the case in cities like Hong Kong or Singapore. A parking spot here costs a lot more to rent than hiring a full time live-in nanny ("helper"). Sad but true.

> Today economists call this phenomenon “Baumol's cost disease,”

I love that economist call rising wages a disease; I hope they never catch it.

Not sure if it was a bad thing or not. If you look at the things of which the prices have increased, they are all essential things. The things of which the prices have decreased are mostly luxury (and bad for the environment). And cars, but with good enough public transport you really shouldn't need a car.

We don't pay the real price for those things bc companies externalized any cost as much as possible. And we took a huge environmental debt borrowing from our future (works out great for boomer who will die before it affects them too much )

Another way to look at it is that maybe it's because of economic development per se? Inflation adjusted incomes look fine but real per capita incomes has grown since 1919 by about 7x. So the social-ranking equivalent of their salary wasn't $50K but about $350K, they were in ~top 5%, and maid's salary "social" equivalent was about on the level of today's minimum wage. It is quite fitting that top 5% of families can afford maids earning a minimum wage.

In particular case of UK, nominal GDP per capita was 119.05 pounds in 1919 so maid was making 36 pounds = 0.3x of it. Now nominal GDP per capita in US is $70K and it's completely OK if the maid makes $21K, that's even well above minimum wage. Surely one can be hired for the amount.

The near flat graph of housing costs since 1993 [1] seems really suspect.

It's from the BLS so maybe housing costs have been much more stable in the USA, because in the UK they have soared since the early 90's - so much so that Millennials are often called "Generation Rent" due to the declining rate of home ownership.

[1] https://fullstackeconomics.com/content/images/size/w1600/202...

Huh. I remember awhile ago someone did an attempt to analyze inflation and purchasing power over the millenniums, using the cost of light. Looks like you could probably do the same thing with, say, miles-per-day?

The basic flaw in the article is that they used the Bank of England calculator, actually explicitily saying how it wasn't suitable, to then make the conclusion:

>What we can say, however, is that there are far more people who make $50,000 in today’s America than earned £700 in 1919 Britain. Agatha Christie claimed she wasn’t rich, but her income was far above average in 1919. In contrast, most American households earn more than $50,000.

It is more likely that the "real" correspondence is to current 100,000-150,000 US$ today (after taxes).

I would assume that chart is for the US or Western/Developed world. Maybe a more easier explanation for the phenomenon is: everything that can be oursourced/built in lower cost regions are getting cheaper (not many toys, cloths or to a certain degree, cars, are still built in the US), while services, by nature, are not able to be out-sourced. With limited supply and more demand, cost of services would definitely go up.

I can easily afford a car, but don't want to. The hidden cost of ownership, driving, all that stuff take a lot of attention. Not to mention that cars in a big city do more damage to your quality of life. Please, stop using cars as a proxy for prosperity. I hope one day personal cars become luxury again so only rich will be able to afford one, the rest would use public transport including self-driving car-sharing

That is being said, she managed to buy one soon after, when cars were still an exotic luxury.

“I will confess here and now that of the two things that have excited me most in my life, the first was my car: my grey bottle-nosed Morris Cowley. The second was dining with the Queen at Buckingham Palace about forty years later.”

Agatha Christie in her autobiography

Everytime I see a reference to Starbucks on some kind of luxury experience it takes we a moment to work out what the hell they are on about. Around here it is literally the McDonalds of coffee, somewhere that nobody I know would ever even consider going to. A place for confused tourists and international students as far as I know.

It’s consumerism and society being shaped for profit. It doesn’t actually cost much money for everyone to have a place to live and food to eat, but our economy (in the US) is considered healthy when people are shopping a lot and spending money on relative luxuries. Paying big mortgages on houses built by real estate developers to maximize profit. It should be a lot easier to live on not much money than it is. We exalted the “middle class” and their spending. That seems like part of it, at least.

I can’t believe people still repeat the old “productivity” canard from economists. There was this idea that technology makes workers more productive, raising wages, which hasn’t been true since the 1970s, because it’s just wrong. Technology makes companies more productive, and the workers make the same. Economists hold their wrong theory above reality and act like this gap is some kind of mysterious “dark matter” that defies the known laws of the universe. As I always say, when a company upgrades their copy machine to one that is twice as fast, they don’t pay the person who makes the copies twice as much. Also, without unions, and with an abundance of people to do the unskilled work needed, there is no force pushing wages up.

Really good Planet Money on this here:

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/04/767095401/the-baumol-effect-a...

My boss in London could afford a live-in nanny from the Philippines. From what I know she was paid 500 pounds as 'pocket money' plus all expenses covered (food+lodging). So maids are definitely still a thing in the 21st century among certain upper middle-class families.

On the Baumol effect, I recall that the renowned composer Philip Glass worked many jobs apart from composing, even after he became well known:

“While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.” [1]

He also says "I was careful to take a job that couldn't have any possible meaning for me." [2]

In contrast, people stick at Bullship Jobs, which are unsatisfying and unproductive, because they come with self-referential status [3].

I might argue that is we eliminated a lot of bullshit jobs then labour would be cheaper.

[1] https://improvisedlife.com/2014/06/11/phillip-glass-world-re... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/interviews/... [3] https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-jo...

The best of both worlds is to have dual citizenship/green card with one country where you can earn a lot of money in one and live like a king in the other.

I’m fortunate to be in such position. I hope to amass enough riches to help the other poorer country.

This is why I consider the shift in spending from services to goods somewhat of a good thing.

Low productive services have at least a few shades of exploitation, inherently. The less the richest person can afford of the poorest's time, the better!

> But Starbucks would never adopt such a robot, because they know customers wouldn’t like it.

Incorrect - I would much prefer getting top-quality coffee from a robot than some barista all other things being equal.

Starbucks is conspicous spending, a flex as much as convenient coffe. If you are an utilitarian like this of course you are not their target demographic.

Surprised the author didn't make any attempt to estimate the cost of renting an equivalent apartment today. 4 bedroom flat with extra living room in London today? Whee.

that chart shows the price of TVs as basically approaching free over time, but that doesn't include cable or internet, which in earlier times were not necessary to have a functioning TV

Well OTA broadcasts still exists today, as for cost - with ad revenue we might see TVs given away for free

Look at fire sticks / tablets

You can still get a lot of TV free with an antenna. It's a small fraction of what's available, but in absolute terms it's a lot.

This might also be a small town to major city thing, but I have about as many channels OTA now as we had with pre-satellite basic cable twenty plus years ago.

My TV works fine without either of those, and I get at least 10x more channels than someone would have just 50 years ago.

Are you watching more TV though? Probably not. I had "modern" cable maybe 4 years ago. 500 channels or however many in the package, not really sure, but it was pretty much the works. It looked really impressive on the bill seeing all those channels, but in reality you are only using like the same few dozen or so major channels you've been coming to since the 90s and you just scroll on past the remaining 470 channels of pure junk garbage like QVC and clones, local news in varying states of HD, gem shows, highschool sports, etc.

A lot of the channels are definitely not useful for me. Probably 1/3 of them are in languages I don't speak, and then there's the junk you mentioned like QVC.

I mostly use it for sports and local news. The quality is actually pretty good. Even though I can stream through the ESPN app, I'll watch a football game on ABC when I can because the picture quality is significantly better.

just the other day i was walking through an appliances market and was astonished how you could get huge TVs for less than what i spent on my phone. of course they probably all come with some sort of advertising that you can't turn off, but still...

Take a look at the used market. 50” 1080P dumb TVs go for $50. Nobody wants the ones without the advertising/built-in apps.

>of course they probably all come with some sort of advertising that you can't turn off, but still...

refuses to connect to wifi

problem solved.

unfortunately not. at least our tv has an ad in the boot sequence. the content is benign, about more products from the same manufacturer, but it comes with an obnoxiously loud jingle that i always have to rush to turn down the volume before my ears bleed

off topic but in many stories of Agatha Christie why husband and wife never slept in same room?

Is that how English people in the old day live, sleep in separate room even after marriage?

It was pretty common, yes - sleeping together may have been considered lower-class.

I read this is surprisingly common especially with older couples. People like to have their own space and when you get older comfort is more important because your body isn't what it used to be. Snoring, keeping separate hours, stealing blankets, freezing feet, etc. It all adds up. People don't need to sleep all night together to be a couple or to have sex. If anything, its kinda weird we are expected to share a bed and a room with someone else.

I'll be honest, if I had this setup, I think my previous relationship would have lasted longer. Its not for every personality and attachment type, but I think its for many.

What's the better relationship? The one where they each have their own personal space and aren't resentful over being kept up with snoring? Or the couple that toughs it out because they're supposed to?

I also think the long-tail economics of capitalism is about shrinking worker entitlements to enrich capital holders. Not too long ago you'd have a house with a spare bedroom or two or three. Now you're huddling in a condo or apartment that's 1bd or two, if you have kids. So we romanticize having less because its easier than challenging the system.

> I also think the long-tail economics of capitalism is about shrinking worker entitlements to enrich capital holders. Not too long ago you'd have a house with a spare bedroom or two or three. Now you're huddling in a condo or apartment that's 1bd or two, if you have kids. So we romanticize having less because its easier than challenging the system.

This is way too sweeping a statement on the very complicated housing market that's constructing a strawman (capitalism is a system, it doesn't have long-term goals like a person does.) In the past, most women would not work, so the demand for jobs was nearly half of what it became once women started entering the workforce. As automation became more effective and manufacturing jobs became less necessary, regional centers of production became unnecessary (when you don't need to ship your output you don't need to have a center of hard goods in different physical locations) and jobs began to be concentrated in cities and metros with lots of highly educated labor. In America in particular, new housing construction plummeted after the early '70s and so housing around job centers became very expensive. That and several other macro trends contributed to making job centers in the US expensive to live in. There's plenty of cheap land/housing in the US still if a job is not a factor.

While apartments have gotten smaller over the past decade (and I can't find anything on apartment sizes in decades past), only about 20% of Americans live in apartments, and houses are way bigger than they used to be.

> In 1950, the year Time magazine estimated that Levitt and Sons built one out of every eight houses in the United States, the average size of a newly built single-family home was 983 square feet — slightly smaller than a decade prior, when it was 1,177 square feet.

That's tiny!

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-...

I bought a house from the 1950s and it was barely bigger than that average of 983 square feet you cite. It's not tiny; it's adequate for a couple and a kid.

Crazy, my house in the UK is 93sq/m. I think this is a pretty 'average' size house in the UK :)

Edit: Wow, the average is much lower than that!

This is unambiguously wrong. Average living space per person has roughly doubled in the last 40 years:

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/todays-new-homes-are-1000-squ...

"Not too long ago you'd have a house with a spare bedroom or two or three. "

Uh, not too long ago it was absolutely normal for a family of 10 or 14 to share 3 or 4 bedrooms.

It’s crazy to me that the Democrats haven’t made increased immigration a plan for helping mitigate inflation. More immigrants means more construction workers to build housing, more nannies, more nurses, more truck drivers, more meat factory workers, etc.

I guess they haven’t done that as labor groups also don’t like immigration. The whole position of the left with regards to immigration is about race anyway, not about economic opportunity for the people we’re letting in and the economic benefits the country gets from immigrants.

Isn't immigration reform basically one of the biggest legislative vaporwave projects?

I think when there is a prevailing narrative about a shortage of labor is a really good time to push a narrative about the benefits of importing labor.

> immigration is about race anyway

it's not about race, it's about winning elections.

The is true, but tight labor markets are also virtuous, and something for their core constituencies

Decades of slack on the labor markets has made many Americans see immigrants as scabs, and one bout of inflation is not enough to fix that.

Is technology and software a deflationary factor? Aren't there so many parts of the economy that get mach cheaper over time?

"we don’t have a substantial labor force willing to work for a few thousand dollars a year"

Few thousand dollars, room and food, to be precise.

"Every leap of civilization was built on the back of a disposable workforce." Blade Runner 2049

Such a horrifyingly true statement.

Baumoll’s cost disease doesn’t explain though why some things like healthcare or education rise more in price than wages.

Three months wages to buy a car? Ok. Isn't that about the name now, at least for a new car?

Nowadays they call it an au-pair and often the pay is 0.

I remember reading Hobsbawn's The Age of Extremes, where he mentioned his realization that the world really had changed as a communist unionist told him after a visit to some factory in northern England "would you believe it, Comrades there have cars!"

You mean the thing we can automate and mass produce is cheaper than the thing that needs 18 years to produce and requires a whole ton of maintenance cost? Really?

Still true for so many living in India

Manufactured items SHOULD always be getting cheaper, that's part of capitalism & progress. Humans & buildings don't follow that same curve. So to attempt to compare those with items is folly. Also notice how cell phones & cell phone bills are not present in his items curve? That's a modern item that doesn't fit his desired outcome.

Lots of fascinating commentary; But I've not seen mention of these core concepts:

Social mobility Equality of opportunity Labour arbitrage

I suppose the first two are worth pursuing vigorously. The last is core to capitalism, and some other complex systems, like cells. But it can be abused and thr former two are indicators of whether society is healthy.

Foolstackecnomics!! Dude, economics is not a jQuery plugin!!

I call into question $xxx in today's dollars because inflation is not uniform . They are explaining labor vs goods costs when both grew at different rates.

Even among goods and assets there's variation

Things got cheaper because they are being made where wages are cheaper. At the end of the day, everything that is a expense to me is a source of income to somebody else. Only robots don't get paid.

> Only robots don't get paid.

Their owners do, though. (And their makers.)

Is it impossible to believe that someone harvesting corn with a combine would be able to sell it for cheaper than if they had harvested it by hand?

The article is good, but the comparison to cars might not be exactly apt.

You might ask why can J.K.Rowling afford a maid and a nanny but not a Falcon X rocket today. Perhaps her great grand children will.

Nobody is selling "Falcon X rockets". Space X sells rocket launches, because that is what other people want to buy. And JK Rowling could most definitely afford a couple rocket launches if she were so inclined.

> Nobody is selling "Falcon X rockets". Space X sells rocket launches, because that is what other people want to buy.

You don't need to be so nitpicky.

> And JK Rowling could most definitely afford a couple rocket launches if she were so inclined.

Yes, that was the point of the comment. Agatha Christie could have had a car if she wanted. Only 3 months of income, even!

The Model T was released over a decade prior to the point mentioned in the article. Sure cars weren't the staple of American life they are today, but they were definitely accessible to the well-off people of the time.

They also weren’t as common - and so not as necessary.

Those who wanted to could get one but it wasn’t considered a necessity when there were so many other options - including sending a servant to the market for your servants, so no need to drive yourself.

The article mentioned that the Christies lived in a 4th-floor walkup in London.

When I first moved to the big city, I quickly discovered that the cost of parking and insuring my car was more than the cost of the car. This scenario was most likely worse back in those days as the infrastructure was designed to “store” horses, not cars.

JK Rowling has hundreds of millions of dollars if you want to talk about comparisons that might not be exactly apt.

The difficulty of comparison is discussed in the article, but Agatha Christie and her husband likely had an income that is reasonably comparable to many people today; the maid and nanny were dirt poor...

> You’ll sometimes see pundits declare that American workers haven’t seen their standards of living improve since the 1960s. Economists can and do debate the methodology underlying such claims

It's an interesting article but I'm not sure I believe his arguments in the last few paragraphs. It's absurd to compare health care, child care, and education to things like cars, television, and manufactured goods. I do believe that quality of life has gotten better but I don't think it's because of cars or things like smartphones which many could argue have actually made life worse.

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