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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

#141

Post by slim »

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.

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)

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

#142

Post by asdff »

buescher wrote: post #32

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).

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

#143

Post by baron816 »

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.

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

#144

Post by asdff »

betwixthewires wrote: post #106
olliej wrote: post #58

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 land…

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…

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

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

#145

Post by nyokodo »

danans wrote: post #96
joe_the_user wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 qualit…

> 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.

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

#146

Post by Hamuko »

baron816 wrote: post #143

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 abou…

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

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

#147

Post by waynesonfire »

baron816 wrote: post #143

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 abou…

> immigration is about race anyway

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

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

#148

Post by Ericson2314 »

baron816 wrote: post #143

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 abou…

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.

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

#149

Post by asdff »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #21
fnord77 wrote: post #2

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

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.

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

#150

Post by geomark »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #64
tomrod wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In Thailand I can say this isn't the case

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.
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