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This seems to me like the US becoming a lot like Brazil, where income inequality allows the middle class to have maids. Except, of course, americans would do it
by forinti 11y ago
This seems to me like the US becoming a lot like Brazil, where income inequality allows the middle class to have maids. Except, of course, americans would do it more efficiently and with a positive attitude.
- RodericDay 11y agoIn peruvian, and I find this very insightful. We used to just say that there was no middle class though.
- refriedbeans3 11y agoNot so much the 'middle class', more like top ~15% of people.
- crpatino 11y agoHistorically speaking, the so called "middle class" does not imply the median of population, but the people in the range from 80% to 96% of wealth/income. Paraphrasing a comment I read earlier today: "[Middle class] is someone with the power to fire you, [Rulling class] is someone with the power to fire everyone, close the plant and outsource the operation abroad".
- fennecfoxen 11y agoYou're on Hacker News. Plenty of people here are programmers pulling in six-figure incomes (more than most managers in this nation) but only some of them have the power to fire anyone. If you say we can't call these people "middle class" (or better) we're choosing language which is either at odds with reality or at odds with communicating effectively (pick one).
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoI think crpatino is looking at it based on (social) class rather than on income. To the degree that you can separate them, whether one is a manager or not puts one in a higher social class. But as non-managers start making large incomes, and as demand outstrips supply for some technical fields, that distinction doesn't seem to reflect reality very well...
- crpatino 11y agoHistorically speaking, there's no such thing as Hacker News. One could draw parallels and say that programmers are managers that control not fellow human workers but machines. But we would be splitting hairs. The point of the argument is that middle class is a social layer between a much larger underclass and a much smaller elite class. And yes, many of those in the middle class make it there by virtue of their specialized knowledge and not the number of warm bodies they oversee. Though there is much room for variation. Two examples come to mind. In the guilds of the middle ages, master craftsmen were undoubtly middle class. They were typically self employed and had firing power over their apprentices or waged journeyman working under them. Also, in the classical world, there were such things as highly specilized slaves. They were treated fairly well compared to the grunts chopping wood or carring water from the wells, but they were slaves nonetheless. AFAIK, they did not have firing power (or life-or-dead power) over other slaves, though it was legal for them to receive monetary compensation and eventually buy their own freedom.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y agoServants of some sort have been a staple of the historic middle class for a long time. The thing we often overlook is that the consumer technologies of the 1950's and forward meant that we could use machines (like washers and dryers) instead of people, and as a result our perception of middle class changed: if you had a car, a washer and dryer, a refrigerator, and a phone, you were middle class. As someone said on HN a while ago, a lot of these gig economy apps of publicly sourced private service seem to be there just to make the 1% feel like the .01%
- sneak 11y agoI think you mean the 10% - the 1% in the US is a household income of >=$380k/year or so.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y agoThanks for the data, but it is worth mentioning that in a major metro area having services like private drivers, chefs, maids, butlers etc is unheard of at a mere $400k. But if you can call it with an app, then welcome to the new upper-upper middle class.
- dopamean 11y agoI lived in New York for a long time and have friends who make around 400k annually and they live very large on it. Maybe not personal drivers but the hedge funds they work for will send a car for them at any moment. Maybe not live in chefs but luxurious catered meals at the office every day couple with a generous budget for offsite company lunches. And they all have maids.
- ghaff 11y agoAnd even if high income urban (in particular) individuals don't have all those company perks, they avail themselves of many services that historically meant having a cook, driver, etc. Today, it often makes sense to contract out to companies rather than have dedicated staff, which is indeed expensive and often not justified outside of a business context. They have an account with a black car service and use Uber. They have groceries and prepared food delivered--and/or eat out a lot if that's their preference. They probably do have a maid who comes in periodically. If they have a young child, some sort of help is not uncommon. They may well have some sort of laundry/dry cleaning service.
- crpatino 11y agoI am almost afraid to ask, but what do you mean by "more efficiently" and "with a positive attitude"? I confess what I imagine out of those frases is roughly: "for less money/with no strings attached" and "in blissful ignorance of the economic violence that entails".
- personlurking 11y agoI don't pretend to know the commentor's intentions but, for reference, there's something in Brazil called the Stray dog/Mongrel complex which was thought up by a famous Brazilian writer, and which may explain it for you. Of his phrase, this writer said it's “the inferiority with which the Brazilian positions himself, voluntarily, in front of the rest of the world”. From a NYT piece written by author Larry Rohter in 2004: "Writing in the 1950's, the playwright Nelson Rodrigues saw his countrymen as afflicted with a sense of inferiority, and he coined a phrase that Brazilians now use to describe it: "the mongrel complex." Brazil has always aspired to be taken seriously as a world power by the heavyweights, and so it pains Brazilians that world leaders could confuse their country with Bolivia, as Ronald Reagan once did, or dismiss a nation so large -- it has 180 million people -- as "not a serious country," as Charles de Gaulle did."
- forinti 11y agoI meant that in the US you could do this through an app and never even have to meet the people doing your chores. In a developing nation, you would have to interview this person and you would definitely have to oversee their work.
- xkcd-sucks 11y agoI took it as "they'd better be grateful to have this shitty service industry job, or else"
- devindotcom 11y agoincome inequality allows the middle class to have maids That's an interesting way to phrase it. From the perspective of the maids and people being forced into poorly paid labor jobs to get by, the view is decidedly different.
- Animats 11y agoYes. America has progressed from the Levittown dream of a middle-class life for everyone to the favelas of Brazil which surround a small city of the rich. I notice that Google, in response to complaints from Brazilian authorities, has changed the maps of Rio to not show the favelas. When Google was more honest, Rio's named slums were properly marked on the main map.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoDoes OpenStreetMap properly display this data?
- Animats 11y agoSort of. Here's a overlay of the favelas of Rio.[1] [1] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zuw5NU9HNh_k.krdIMlOXDnaU&hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zuw5NU9HNh_k.krdIMl...
- rmc 11y agoThere are some slums mapped in OpenStreetMap. And often much better than Google Maps. e.g.: Kiberia in Nairobi http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/#16/-1.3116/36.7905&num=2&mt0=mapnik&mt1=google-map http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/#16/-1.3116/36.7905&num=2&mt0=m...