Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by aksss » Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 5:24 PM UTC

hnlmorg wrote: post #399

CSMastermind wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we (rich white people) I hate to break it to you but rich white people are generally far less likely to be a sexual predation risk in these situations because they often have more to lose, have easier access to consenting parties, and come from countries that stigmatize that type of behavior to a much greater degree.

I'm not going to comment whether it's more or less likely than in other cultures. My point wasn't to start a race war, I was just commenting that we have a history on such topics (eg https://www.ukessays.com/essays/history/rape-in-american-sla... )

everyone has a history of it, and many non-western societies still have a barely concealed if not government sanctioned industry of it.

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

#452

Post by binarybits » Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 5:25 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #419

thaumasiotes wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The £200 of passive income presumably came from a stock of wealth. And the passive income by itself was still 6 times the salary of the live-in maid. The stock of wealth should therefore have been valued similarly to six healthy female slaves. (Give or take some adjustments, but broadly similar.)

> The £200 of passive income presumably came from a stock of wealth Given we're talking about Agatha Christie here, I imagine the £200 of passive income came from book sales.

No, this was before she became a successful author. About half of it was an inheritance on her side. The other half came from his side.

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

#453

Post by speeder » Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

Kye wrote: post #340

igorkraw wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"private property is subordinate to the common good" is even in our "Constitution" (grundgesetz, literally foundational law), although it has been neutered by precedent and other laws. The right of way is a concept which is still strong in a bunch of countries, including England and famously Norway where "Allemansretten" allows "all men" the right to camp in public spaces. I personally find these habitual rights an i…

It's surreal as an American watching a couple of UK photographers on YouTube just stroll through random gates and cross land without any locks or "No Trespassing" signs. Meanwhile, I got a shotgun shoved in my face for walking too close for the comfort of the owner of a house on the other side of a highway's shoulder. I'm pretty sure brandishing is a crime in Georgia, but I was a teen and wasn't about to argue with s…

I once read this is actually tied to the degree of agriculture vs animal raising.

Because animals are easily stolen, cultures around animals as food, tend to consider weapon ownership essential, and tend to think highly of self defense and whatnot.

These same cultures also tend to believe strongly in "hospitality", in the sense that if you have guests you need to take care of them and whatnot, because you might need to be someone guest too.

Meanwhile plant-based cultures tend instead to favor things like schedules, calendars, seasons, festivals and so on, because this is what essential to their food instead, meanwhile it doesn't matter if someone is strolling in your land when it is not harvest season, the person won't steal your food.

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

#454

Post by binarybits » Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

addaon wrote: post #5

"Even if someone managed to invent a robot nanny that kept kids safe as well as a human being, I wouldn’t want it to take care of my baby. I bet you wouldn’t either." This glosses over the purpose of child care -- it's more than safety, it's socialization, learning, etc. In a world where some level of automation (or offshoring) is possible for these services, I could definitely see some adoption. Think "Diamond Age."

Right, that was my point: the nanny does more than just keep the kid safe.

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

#455

Post by NoPie » Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

throwawaygh wrote: post #445

NoPie wrote: post #198

I have a different conclusion. The article mentions that the car would have cost her 3 months of income. That doesn't sound too much and is roughly about the same what people pay for cars today, maybe even more. The reason she thought about the car as a luxury and not a necessity is that then the society wasn't dependent on cars like we do today. They travelled less, worked closer to home, milkman brought milk to hom…

> maybe even more Average new car sale price at the end of 2021: $47,077 Average monthly household income at the end of 2021: $5,307 Even highly paid FAANG engineers are probably spending a few months income on a new car.

Many people, maybe even majority, buy used cars which cost less. They are probably more reliable than new cars in 1919. I was probably biased because I recently bought a used car without getting a loan which cost me about 3 months of income.

In any case, she actually had a nice income if should could have bought a new car with 3 month income only. She just didn't have a real need for it. The story should have been not so much about her but that most other people were much poorer than today and had to work as maids to survive.

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

#456

Post by greeneggs » Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 5:54 PM UTC

goodpoint wrote: post #315

koolba wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haggling is fun. I’m convinced the modern aversion to haggling in first world countries is because people grow up avoiding all direct confrontation. They think it’s somehow how rude to disagree with someone about the price of the article at hand. The next level of it is when they justify this “politeness” by claiming that haggling is inefficient or a waste of time.

When all sellers and customers haggle it creates a zero-sum game where nothing useful is achieved and everybody is wasting their time. Fun when you do it once, not so fun when is expected every day. A similar zero-sum game is advertising. Yet, some cultures look down on haggling and embrace advertising with open arms...

It enables differential pricing, which is not zero sum.

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

#457

Post by goodpoint » Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 5:57 PM UTC

twox2 wrote: post #402

dahfizz wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The transaction itself is not zero sum. The existence of the transaction itself is proof that both parties value what they received more than what they gave away (otherwise they would not have transacted). The waste of time is having to haggle to arrive at the price, when the price could have been published. It benefits nobody, because that's the price the transaction would have happened at anyway. But we have to do…

> It benefits nobody, because that's the price the transaction would have happened at anyway. But this is not true. Haggling is price discovery. Either way, I think this is mostly a cultural thing that's lost on a lot of westerners.

> Haggling is price discovery

True, but the discovery is made necessary by artificial opacity.

It does not benefit society as a whole and that's why shops are legally required to have transparent pricing in most countries.

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

#458

Post by hogrider » Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

SergeAx wrote: post #264

"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…

Allow me to be an armchair social scientist for a second, I think this proof that work and labor participation in the economy is firwt above all a social contract. So we did not deem musicians useless in this time and forced to change careers, we have to make them part of society still. Same reason we have bullshit jobs.

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

#459

Post by nybble41 » Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 6:08 PM UTC

dahfizz wrote: post #356

tbrownaw wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly would that "should" work if there just isn't a standard set price?

There is a standard price, or at least there could be. It would be trivial for the apple seller to calculate the average price he ends up negotiating, and setting that as the published, firm price. That is what's frustrating about negotiating for commodities like food. The seller is taking advantage of information asymmetry. They know what the standard price is, and they hope that you don't. It's scummy. It is differ…

> That is what's frustrating about negotiating for commodities like food.

While I generally agree with you, if you're buying fresh food at a market, such as the apples in your example, it isn't necessarily a commodity. Quality and size will vary from one item to the next; why must they all be the same price? Places where goods tend to be more standardized seem to rely less on haggling and more on sorting: you don't haggle over the price of an apple out of a mixed lot, you pay a set price for a certain grade of apple which has been separated out in advance.

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

#460

Post by lotsofpulp » Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 6:22 PM UTC

hibikir wrote: post #436

Loughla wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thu…

>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.

Is it possible that the US is big enough and rich enough that it allows different social classes to not have to co exist, whereas in many other places, they have no choice but to co exist due to lack of land and other wealth?