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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

#211

Post by tuankiet65 »

andi999 wrote: post #122
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…

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

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

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

#212

Post by netcan »

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.

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

#213

Post by fxtentacle »

fastball wrote: post #104
dendriti wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#214

Post by vintermann »

e4e78a06 wrote: post #23
mherdeg wrote: post #3

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…

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 wa…

> 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.

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

#215

Post by roel_v »

shellfishgene wrote: post #184

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.

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

#216

Post by tuankiet65 »

csours wrote: post #39
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…

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?

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.

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

#217

Post by Mvandenbergh »

shellfishgene wrote: post #184

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.

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.

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

#218

Post by ledak »

geomark wrote: post #150
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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)

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

#219

Post by pm215 »

adrianN wrote: post #92
amscanne wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.)

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

#220

Post by roel_v »

shadowofneptune wrote: post #175

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?

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).

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