> It made me intensely uncomfortable to have someone hanging around just to attend to my needs, and tell them to do menial chores for me.
>And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me.
In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of societal and legal inequality. That isn’t the case when ‘being served’ by waitstaff or a barista, who can both walk across the street and afford the same level of service you got from them at a different establishment.
> In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of societal and legal inequality.
If the master has 10x the income of their servant, that means they are spending only 10% of their income on the servant. I.e., that's a manageable proportion to spend for the significant time-savings that having a servant represents.
The US (and many other countries) have income inequalities that far exceed a factor of 10. Honestly if the divide between the lowest and highest income was a mere 10x, I would not be worried about inequality at all.
And I can't agree with "driven by high levels of societal and legal inequality" either. While high societal and legal inequality certainly exist (and probably help somewhat), the concentration of capital is, I think, mainly caused by more fundamental market forces. Synergy, anti-competitive practices, barriers to entry, economies of scale, mergers, and so on. Lobbying for laws that entrench existing corporations is one of the factors, that could fall under "societal and legal inequality", but I think capital would concentrate even without that, albeit slightly slower.
Interestingly, 90th vs. 10th percentile consumption is about 3x [0]. Income is >10x as you mention, but this mostly reflects the growth of investment accounts, not a difference in how people actually live.
> who can both walk across the street and afford the same level of service
The people (often of color) who work in the back of the nice restaurants everyone with means loves to eat at can't afford to eat there, much less live near their work.
The nannies who take care of the children of high earners (enabling them to be high earners and avoid the stress of a big chunk of parenting) can't afford to have nannies for their own kids. In fact, they often end up having less time with their own children than they do with their "masters" kids.
I could go on and on.
Your cherry picking the waitstaff (usually white people, who get high tips) and baristas makes your argument better; though I'm sure most baristas will disagree with you. Making coffee in a rather social setting is a rather nice job where you interact with customers, and can be fun (I've done it). What about the janitors, who usually work at night, alone, cleaning our toilets (I've done that too)? It is very alienating. If you did that for a year, the stuff Marx wrote about stops being some intellectual hocus pocus and actually starts to ring very very true.
What about the farm workers that pick your strawberries and blueberries for that $14 plate of pancakes?
Having maid is pretty common in bay area. They come in once or twice a week to clean your house, and do laundry. There are many people I know had someone come and cook meals for them on weekdays.
I moved from bay area to Ohio for a business. I bought a used Jeep from a dealership out of town. The salesman that sold me the car lives where my hotel is. He would pick up/drop off my car from my business for oil change/regular maintenance. After a couple of times, I told him I will do myself as I started feel different.
Instead of a personal cook, now you use doordash to get food from restaurant. The cook at the restaurant or person delivering food can use the same service. Similarly when we had servants in India, we would eat the same food, and work in the same farms. Living situation were more segregated just like able to afford in Palo Alto vs East Palo Alto.
One of the problems with live-in servants is this is likely to create an employer/employee relationship between you and your servant which creates a massive tax, liability and paperwork headache. That's why it's far less common in the U.S.
The Singapore/Hong Kong/Taiwan style arrangement is for the maid to live in with you. Conditions are often pretty harsh, ie passports are with-held, phones are confiscated, and they have one day off a week. Not really comparable to a once or twice a week visit from the maid.
Not all inequity is social and legal. A lot of inequity arises from inequity of output. An engineer for La Marzocco can make improvements to an expresso machine that improves the productivity/quality output of every barista using a La Marzocco machine such that they can pour a better latte and get more tips. Since there are hundreds of thousands of baristas that benefit from the changes of that engineer (or team of engineers), it is reasonable for there to be extreme inequity between baristas and the engineer that improved the productivity of many many baristas.
I honestly don't see why people are so uncomfortable with inequity. A worthwhile thought experiment is to imagine a world with perfect equity across everyone in society. Once you consider the consequences of perfect equity, especially second and third order effects, it gets pretty dystopian pretty fast.
For example, most of those with the most talent to offer to improve the lives of everyone else cease to pursue vocations where they provide the most value to the world. Instead they pursue vocations they enjoy or find easy if they pursue a vocation at all. If there is perfect equity, why work. The pace of improvements in quality of life across all society would slow to a crawl, if not stop or possibly even reverse.
Seeing as all humans, regardless of where you are in society today, are all basically on a hedonic treadmill and are most content when they see improvements in their circumstances over the course of their life, perfect equity would be a disaster. The only exception to this would be maybe someone who has reached a Daoist/Buddhist level of contentment in all aspects of how they experience and interact with the world.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that extreme inequity is good either.
Instead what I'm saying is that inequity can be benign or even beneficial and that the ideal outcome for the most people is achieved when the power law distribution of inequity isn't extreme. e.g. a distribution of -10/x is preferable to a distribution of -1/(10x). The more smoothly sloped the power law distribution of inequity (less extreme tails), the more room there is for individuals to experience gradual improvements in one's circumstances and the more clearly does a individual experience a positive relationship between effort and reward. Experiencing an improvement in one's condition and have stewardship over that improvement both contribute to being content wherever you are on that distribution.
Not "income inequality", but inequality in the marginal disutility of labor. Someone who works many hours per week in high-effort jobs will be eager to outsource even trivial tasks to a "gig economy" worker who is in a sharply different position. That worker may have f!!k-you money of their own and be working at an "easy" job to make some extra change, for all we know - the exchange works all the same, and leaves both better off.
> That worker may have f!!k-you money of their own and be working at an "easy" job to make some extra change, for all we know
I would bet that is incredibly uncommon compared to the obvious alternative, which is someone working to make ends meet at the best job they can find because of who knows what constraints.
Without data, it seems disingenuous to suggest otherwise, although I'm sure it's the kind of thing Uber employees tell themselves.
Funny, a personal servant makes us uneasy, but a personal/executive assistant does not. What’s the difference? They’re both employees and both are being paid to do tasks that need to get done but aren’t worth their boss’s time.
Is it the extra indirection of the salary coming from company instead of personal coffers that does it? What if the person hiring the assistant has 100% ownership of the company like in the case of a small business?
When I had a corporate job, the administrative assistant to the big boss in my department had real power as de facto gatekeeper and seemed to be quite well compensated.
It's a role that would have been called secretary at one time. The title change was intended to show more respect and try ditch some historical social baggage for such jobs.
Which is an example of the the euphemism treadmill. Secretary means secret-keeper and has built into it connotations at least of trust and often of power. Which is why top officials of many great ministries ion are called secretaries.
Yeah, that had occured to me. It just didn't really seem pertinent to this particular discussion. It struck me as a tangent, so I opted to not get into it.
The U.S., Great Britain, and France also have a historical legacies of African slavery that factor into this perception. In the U.S., the effective enslavement of African American women as domestic workers with $8/day wages lasted well into the 1960s. A major advance during the 1970s was the ability of African American domestic workers to unionize and push for humane working conditions. During the New Deal era (1930s/40s), social security and other services did not extend to Black domestic workers — which at the time constituted a significant portion of Black women in the workforce. Given this legacy, it is no surprise that people in the U.S. view domestic work with some concern. So for many of us, the concern is not so much around the work (you do what you have to do to put food on the table, etc, no shame in that), but it is the fact that people doing this work have been subject to unchecked sexual abuse, extreme wage discrimination, and a host of other horrendously inhuman working conditions.
The text “When Affirmative Acrion was White” by Katznelson is one source among many.
Generally the executive assistant is paid for by the company and he or she works for the company, just like the executive does. In fact there are lots of management types who don’t make significantly more that their assistants do.
In part it might be where the salary is coming from, but even when someone personally hires a personal assistant, it doesn't have the same connotation as personal servant.
I think the main implication is that a personal assistant is a qualified, educated person who is well positioned to find another job, while a personal servant evokes images of someone less well off and more at the mercy of the employer. There is a second implication as well: you hire a personal assistant to help you with your job, to be more productive and get more done, but you hire a personal servant to help you with your personal life, so you can get more leisure time and be more lazy.
In some ways, there might not be much practical difference between a personal assistant and a personal servant, but the words have different connotations. There are some questions that I think are relevant to ask oneself: Do you have the same reaction to the word "personal servant" and the words "butler," "housekeeper," "majordomo," etc? When you think of the word "personal servant," is the first image that comes to your mind that of a maid, a footman, a housekeeper or a butler, or something else?
Also, I'm not American so I can't comment on this point, but it may also be that the word "servant" is uncomfortably close to the word "slave".
Income inequality within a country isn’t necessary for people to be able to afford a maid —however, it comes with s proviso, that the served and the server come from different economies. So you can have maids in Singapore or Hong Kong, but predominantly these maids are from lesser economies like The Philippines or Indonesia. And before someone says that is income inequality then you have to consider all of globalization (née international trade) “income inequality” which would be absurd because then everything is income inequality and it defines nothing in particular.
I mostly agree with this description of the current western institutions, but I don't agree with the conclusion he came to as to why we accept these institutions.
The same way he points out that a human master can disregard their incentives in the interest of their subordinates, they can just as well disregard the interests of their subordinates and even their own incentives for some kind of personal enjoyment.
I don't think we picked the greater or the lesser of two evils, I think we picked the more consistent of two evils. If it were possible to plot "good" and "evil" on an axis, and if we were to plot to plot "human masters" and "uncaring system" on this axis, we'd see two bell curves. Maybe the mean of the "uncaring system" is farther towards the "evil" end of the axis, but the curve would have a very sharp peak, while the "human masters" bell curve would be a lot shallower, with a lot of variance.
I think we chose the systems we have now, or more correctly, the systems we have now are the way they are (nobody consciously chose them) because we as a society prefer things predictably kinda bad, rather than having the possibility of things being really bad or really good, this is made even worse when the outcome is decided by the whims of a person and not pure chance. At least when the system is predictable, we can plan around the bad parts, and introduce a system of checks and balances in an attempt to shift the mean more towards the "good" side. A benevolent dictator might be better than the best democracy, but a malevolent dictator is way worse than the worst democracy, for the majority of the people at least.
> I don't think we picked the greater or the lesser of two evils, I think we picked the more consistent of two evils. ... A benevolent dictator might be better than the best democracy, but a malevolent dictator is way worse than the worst democracy, for the majority of the people at least.
Yup. With all due respect for reactionary philosophies, this is why we still vote for our leaders, instead of going with the Confucian way and asking the gods for a king to rule us.
I feel like this is seriously under-appreciated. I never figured to frame this into servant/master terms, but the depersonalization of human relations in the West (especially USA) is something that bothers me for a long time now. And it's not only not seeing a human behind a servant/master role, it is deliberate tendency to replace humans with institutions, up to the point of refusing to recognize personal qualities behind a institutional label, even in cases where the quality in question is obviously personal. I mean, it's considered normal to refuse to see, say, judge, as a person with personal qualities and human flaws, who personally makes a decision about another human's life. American society is educated to treat judge as a judge, period. And contrary to what one may think, this is not something special to judges due to their "special" role in society, but a general tendency to de-personalize and outsource to a institution anything of consequence in society. You should not do anything outside of your profession, please hire a specialist. You should not try and fix your kitchen sink, a plumber will do it better. You should not try to protect yourself, there is the police to take care of you. You should not try to decide if anything is right or wrong, there's a judge to do that. You should not have an opinion, there are journalists or maybe politicians to do it for you, you just chose your side and mind your business.
The faceless interaction with a Starbucks worker is associated with their freedom to switch between different worksites. In a culture where you have to have a personal relationship with your servants, they have less power to engage in the market. Yes, they're interchangeable to you and to Starbucks, but Starbucks and you are interchangeable to them.
Anyone who works in the service industry can tell you that their customers are terrible. Could you imagine how bad it would be if the proverbial lady demanding to speak to the manager was the manager?
It's also associated with the freedom to specialize in an industry, and not just in relationship-specific capital. A Starbucks barista is far more comfortable and effective at making coffee than a jack-of-all-trades personal servant would be, and can also avail herself of expensive machinery to that purpose - so "depersonalization" (which is literally unavoidable - a barista cannot possibly know her customers socially the way we expect of a servant!) comes with very real benefits.
I definitely understand the desire to be served by people you don't have any kind of a personal relationship with, but I don't think it's inherently terrible. I like to keep my business/transactional and personal relationships separate as much as possible.
Purely transactional relationships have clearly defined rules - I pick my food on DoorDash's app, someone delivers it, I pay and tip. Done. Once the relationship becomes personal, any request becomes more complicated than just a transaction. This definitely applies at work - it's weird that I have to build up and use social capital within an organization in order to get things done. It's an inefficient system of distributing resources (charming/friendly people get what they need, instead of everyone optimizing for what's best for the business), and if I don't have the social capital, it can be uncomfortable to ask for the things I need to do my job.
I think there's something to be said for a hard separation of the personal and professional/transactional, though obviously that total separation isn't possible in real life.
It’s not obvious, then, why “inverse Confucianism” has taken hold.
Probably at least in part because humans tend to actively reinforce pecking order. Institutions will let you escape it.
Humans will actively seek to put you back in your "place" and maintain the status quo where they are socially superior to you.
If you graduate college and get a better job, the college is okay with that. So is society, so long as you pay your student loans.
But mentors, masters, etc want to remain above you, even if they have to tear you down to keep their superior position. And it's really poisonous, insidious stuff to deal with.
The reason hierarchical relationships always seem to exist in the context of an organization, is that that's why civilization invented organizations in the first place. To mediate and de-personalize power.
To get large-scale things done in the world, some people need to make plans and other people need to carry them out. And the last 5000 years of civilization has been an exercise in defining exactly how people are expected to do that.
In a fully developed civilization (which we are, at least, approaching) power dynamics between people are always contained in an institutional framework with explicit limits and rights. Otherwise, power tends to get abused.
I was born in Indonesia. In here most (if not all) of middle class in big cities have live in servants. The servants came from rural areas of the country where opportunity to work is low. Some of their families in rural areas might have a small land, but still not enough to be used as a farm.
There are some horror stories on masters abusing their servants, but my family treated our live in servants well though we are not by any means rich. Most of the work for the servants are light such as cooking, washing clothes, watering plants, helping moms taking care of the babies, etc, and they can do whatever they want, watch TV in their own room or in our lounge, etc.
Inequality? Sure. That is one thing that I can't fix. But one thing for sure that I know. Most of our servants like working with us, and actually do not want to choose other jobs or work for other families despite higher pay. Average tenure of our servants were about 4 - 5 years. Our longest servant has been with us before before I was born (I am 32).
How anybody can think that some form of servitude under a human master is more "likely to be human-friendly" is just beyond me... If this guy wants to be somebody's property, and given a "flogging for good measure" then by all means, but stay the hell away from me.
'What individualism has bought us is not the end of servitude, but merely the cloaking of masters.'
A really provocative and intriguing article. I'm not sure if I agree with all of it, but I do notice that some Americans are myopic to any description of freedom that cannot be expressed as an arrangement between two supposedly free economic actors. For example, some Americans are particularly resistant to describing the relationship between a boss and his or her subordinates as inequitable and potentially exploitative, even though a boss can sometimes exert more control over an employee's life than the state can.
You can change your boss, unless there's something seriously wrong with the local labor market. Your boss' highest threat? They can change you. Unless you are a farmhand in the middle of the Great Depression that's pretty fair.
The business is unlikely to be in existential danger if they change you; your life however, is in danger of ruin if you don't take that job right now; this is inherently exploitative, in terms of power dynamics. The consequences for each party are not the same. They never will be, either.
The ability to move between lots of autocratic states wouldn't be seen as freedom. The most probable result of your decision to move around in the local labor market is that you just end up under another boss who restricts your freedom.
I'm not sure how you would enforce freedom of movement if every country in the world was autocratic, but if that happened somehow then one of the countries could simply become free and take all of the best people from every other country. Sure if every employer was wordlessly conspiring to torture their employees for no reason things would be pretty bad, but that's not what happens.
You're making it sound a lot nicer than it actually is. Few issues are: you don't know if you're going to get a good boss before accepting the job, your boss can change attitude with no notice, power dynamics are impossible to ignore, your boss can fire you for no reason much of the the US, very difficult to know company culture without knowing insiders, you get fired and your life becomes significantly more difficult while your employer is mildly inconvenienced.
Weird conclusion. The best managers/masters tend to be predictable. Institutions by their nature have norms that enforce this. It's not even close to the same thing.
Institutions, rather than individuals, as masters, makes the master - servant relationship far more consensual. You choose to serve others in the context of a job, and when that job's over, they no longer have any power over you.
A personal master servant relationship carries over to places where the servant may not consent to. It's a personal relationship, meaning it encompasses your entire person. It's far harder shed that relationship than it is a job.
Making the master role institutional, and one where the person filling it is interchangeable, also means that it's meritocratic. Anyone can fill the master's role, because it's ultimately about how useful they can be in that role (e.g. by spending more money), rather than about them having a personal status of 'master', which they need not contribute value to maintain.
in retrospect it'll've been the smoothest option for our eventual transition to submitting to algorithm/machine bosses. first get comfortable submitting to humans acting like machines, then replace them with machines.
> this is really a case of Nietzschean slave morality run amok. Individualism isn’t about freedom so much as it is envy of the powerful and dominant. We therefore have a strong instinct to pull down anyone who’s in a position of personal authority, but this instinct doesn’t care about domination that doesn’t appear to be done by a human-shaped agent.
This is also known as the crab mentality. If you try to pull just one crab out of a pot, the others will grab on mercilessly, until the first crab's legs are ripped off.
Um. Bullying poor neighbors is how we solve elder n childcare. Bullying Bangladesh n India is how we solve hard manual labor. How does the author imagine singapore maintain all that greenery? Or how is the place kept clean? Or how can the people below median income afford to have kids(do u know how much a flat with 2 bedrooms cost here?)..or pay for their parents' healthcare?
Without the maids. Retirement in singapore probably generally wouldn't work.
Elder care is basically a combination of legal threats to the next generation to financially support their parents, maids and low living costs(in terms of public healthcare, food and transport).
> Individualism isn’t about freedom so much as it is envy of the powerful and dominant
How does individualism, "the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual", imply envy? That's just a weird non-sequitur assertion.
I feel Ike the feeling of being served on our society has everything to do with economic equality. There are professions that pay more or less, and people with professions that pay more are able to afford services that people with lesser paying professions can provide. Using words like "profession" and "service" tend to imply that these are normal, usual things that happen in "free" societies, a.k.a. capitalistic societies. If I'm not mistaken, this is essentially the exploitation of the working class that Marx was talking about.
If everyone earned the same living, then there would be very little serving happening, because everyone's time is effectively worth the same amount, and thus it wouldn't make sense to give away all your money to people to perform services for you that you could have done yourself if you didn't have a job.
The reason that people serve other people in our society is that we're unequal, and there are socio-economic reasons for that. I believe it has more to do with economic inequality than Nietzchean slave morality.
1. I don’t think that fits into the category of servitude that the other was talking about.
2. Why would one put in the effort required to go through specialized school and certification processes if there wasn’t a huge payout waiting for them? I think only the most passionate would bother.
Re #1, you're probably right, they were probably talking about serving where the one doing the serving is less well off that the customer. But in a world where everyone earns the same, this category by definition doesn't exist. So it's not a meaningful point.
I may be wrong about what they meant, in which case the preceding paragraph may be attacking a straw man.
There are still economies of scale i.e. it's a lot easier for me to make 100 lunches than for 100 people to make their own lunch. That's aside from how good I'll get at making lunches after making 100 every day.
You are mistaken. Exploitaition supposedly occurs because of unequal workplace relationships that lead to workers producing above what is the market value of their labor. Marx did not deny a free and equal labor market, although he treated the notion with some contempt. The closest thing you're referring to is the notion of commodity fetishism, but applied to labor as a commodity.
I like the job Nathan Robinson did on this topic with his essay "Service With A Smile" at Current Affairs:
> In every restaurant, except a buffet (and I am not pro-buffet), I feel like an aristocrat who pays someone to put on his clothes for him. I know I can supposedly mitigate this by being polite and tipping well. But it’s the whole concept of paying someone to feed me that I don’t like. Yes, obviously, it’s better if I pay someone well than if I pay them badly, and better to be appreciative than abusive. It doesn’t make any more of a difference to my gut reaction, though, any more than it would if I found out that the millionaire who pays a valet to tie his cravats for him is extremely generous in compensating said valet.
Then they smile, and say 'great, thankyou!', except actually their dog died the other day, and they're just saying that because their manager is right there, and the company policy is 'service with a smile'.
>And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me.
In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of societal and legal inequality. That isn’t the case when ‘being served’ by waitstaff or a barista, who can both walk across the street and afford the same level of service you got from them at a different establishment.