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

fullstackeconomics.com

431–440 of 500 posts

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

#431
post #268

"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 mo…

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?

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

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

#432
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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'…

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

#433
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, usu…

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.

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

#434
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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!

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

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#436
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 respon…

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 o…

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.

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

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

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

#439

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…

> 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.
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