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

fullstackeconomics.com

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

#51

Post by notfbi »

" 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.

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

#52

Post by maxerickson »

snidane wrote: post #4

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.

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...

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

#53

Post by mannerheim »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #31
kureikain wrote: post #7

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?

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…

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-...

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

#54

Post by mrosett »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #31
kureikain wrote: post #7

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?

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…

> 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 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...

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

#55

Post by tomrod »

joe_the_user wrote: post #41
freddie_mercury wrote: post #16

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…

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.

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

#56

Post by metacritic12 »

jacknews wrote: post #49

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.

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

#57

Post by beerandt »

manquer wrote: post #22

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.

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

#58

Post by olliej »

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.

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

#59

Post by stackdatcamp »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #50
csours wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#60

Post by jacknews »

metacritic12 wrote: post #56
jacknews wrote: post #49

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…

'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'.

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