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>I wonder what the age breakdown Skewed, but not skewed towards the elderly nearly as much as you clearly think it was. Not everybody is like us. >It must ha

>I wonder what the age breakdown Skewed, but not skewed towards the elderly nearly as much as you clearly think it was. Not everybody is like us. >It must have on the margin, surely? Not necessarily. It might just mean that, on balance, people who were never going to employ a maid in the first place live in slightly less filthy houses. >Toilet cleaning will probably be one of the last things to go as the worst-case scenario there is pretty bad I can't actually see any evidence that anybody's even trying. It's not like driverless cars where we're being told every year that they're, like, 5 years away tops. Who is even working on this? As far as I can tell, nobody.

lmm 9y ago
> Not necessarily. It might just mean that, on balance, people who were never going to employ a maid in the first place live in slightly less filthy houses. But, like, there's no massive discontinuity in how likely people are to employ a cleaner (is there)? I'd expect that distribution to be a bell curve like anything else, with lots of people on the margin (and I'm pretty sure I was one of them), and the introduction of the Roomba shifts where that line is slightly. > I can't actually see any evidence that anybody's even trying. It's not like driverless cars where we're being told every year that they're, like, 5 years away tops. Who is even working on this? As far as I can tell, nobody. I'm not aware of anyone working on toilets, but I think that's the highest hanging fruit. You already mentioned Roombas, and I mentioned LaundryBot or whatever it's called; I'd expect us to progress gradually from there to things like dusting, window cleaning, oven cleaning and toilets in that order or close to it.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  >But, like, there's no massive discontinuity in how likely people are to employ a cleaner (is there)? I'd expect that distribution to be a bell curve like anything else Even if it was a bell curve (and I see no reason why reality ought to be that neat), there's no reason to suppose it doesn't just lead to slightly cleaner houses rather than fewer maids. > You already mentioned Roombas, and I mentioned LaundryBot Roombas are singularly unimpressive as a means of cleaning your house (I know of nobody who actually owns one, and the reviews on amazon are... only really impressiveif you are without stairs and have a pet hair problem). Googling laundrybot gives me some japanese thing invented in 2015 that costs $280,000 and, product-wise, doesn't seem to have gone anywhere since then. It's almost as if the automation hype isn't matching reality. I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years time nothing has really changed in this space either. Roombas came out in 2002 - 16 years ago. Significant potential I'll be dead by the time a robot that can clean my toilet exists and I'm not exactly old.
  - lmm 9y ago
    > there's no reason to suppose it doesn't just lead to slightly cleaner houses rather than fewer maids. If we assume people's willingness to hire a cleaner is a function of how dirty their house is (and how could it not be?) then the two are equivalent. The only way roombas could not be putting people out of work on the margin is if there's some sort of mysterious discontinuity, and why would we assume such a thing?
    - crdoconnor 9y ago
      >If we assume people's willingness to hire a cleaner is a function of how dirty their house is (and how could it not be?) Because: a) lots and lots and lots of people clean their own house and maybe they're the ones buying the vast majority of the roombas, not people with maids. b) just because your roomba cleans up your pet hair really well upstairs doesn't necessarily mean you will want your cleaner to stop coming on tuesdays. c) tolerance for dirt to me seems like a textbook example of something that has a high demand elasticity
      - lmm 9y ago
        > lots and lots and lots of people clean their own house and maybe they're the ones buying the vast majority of the roombas, not people with maids Surely the one substitutes for the other. The thought "I'm spending longer than I want to cleaning, and my house still isn't as clean as I'd like, and I've had more money lately, I can afford to..." could be completed "hire a cleaner" or "buy a roomba". > tolerance for dirt to me seems like a textbook example of something that has a high demand elasticity What do you mean? Different people will have their threshold in different places, certainly, and the amount they're willing to pay will vary, but I don't see how that changes anything. I'm generally struggling to understand what your model is here. Are you saying people make the decision about whether to hire a cleaner when they're born and then never change it?
        crdoconnor 9y ago
        >Surely the one substitutes for the other. If a roomba approximated a maid, perhaps. It very much does not. >I'm generally struggling to understand what your model is here. Are you saying people make the decision about whether to hire a cleaner when they're born and then never change it? No, I'm saying that: A) building a neoclassical economic model on this at all is pointless because of the assumptions you'd have to make. You've just tried to make about four assumptions in order to build your model and they weren't just poor assumptions, they were cringeworthy assumptions. B) the total number of people who actually own roombas or roomba like devices suggests to me that the effect on cleaner employment is likely, in any case, to be < noise.

lmm 9y ago

> Not necessarily. It might just mean that, on balance, people who were never going to employ a maid in the first place live in slightly less filthy houses. But, like, there's no massive discontinuity in how likely people are to employ a cleaner (is there)? I'd expect that distribution to be a bell curve like anything else, with lots of people on the margin (and I'm pretty sure I was one of them), and the introduction of the Roomba shifts where that line is slightly. > I can't actually see any evidence that anybody's even trying. It's not like driverless cars where we're being told every year that they're, like, 5 years away tops. Who is even working on this? As far as I can tell, nobody. I'm not aware of anyone working on toilets, but I think that's the highest hanging fruit. You already mentioned Roombas, and I mentioned LaundryBot or whatever it's called; I'd expect us to progress gradually from there to things like dusting, window cleaning, oven cleaning and toilets in that order or close to it.

crdoconnor 9y ago
>But, like, there's no massive discontinuity in how likely people are to employ a cleaner (is there)? I'd expect that distribution to be a bell curve like anything else Even if it was a bell curve (and I see no reason why reality ought to be that neat), there's no reason to suppose it doesn't just lead to slightly cleaner houses rather than fewer maids. > You already mentioned Roombas, and I mentioned LaundryBot Roombas are singularly unimpressive as a means of cleaning your house (I know of nobody who actually owns one, and the reviews on amazon are... only really impressiveif you are without stairs and have a pet hair problem). Googling laundrybot gives me some japanese thing invented in 2015 that costs $280,000 and, product-wise, doesn't seem to have gone anywhere since then. It's almost as if the automation hype isn't matching reality. I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years time nothing has really changed in this space either. Roombas came out in 2002 - 16 years ago. Significant potential I'll be dead by the time a robot that can clean my toilet exists and I'm not exactly old.
- lmm 9y ago
  > there's no reason to suppose it doesn't just lead to slightly cleaner houses rather than fewer maids. If we assume people's willingness to hire a cleaner is a function of how dirty their house is (and how could it not be?) then the two are equivalent. The only way roombas could not be putting people out of work on the margin is if there's some sort of mysterious discontinuity, and why would we assume such a thing?
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    >If we assume people's willingness to hire a cleaner is a function of how dirty their house is (and how could it not be?) Because: a) lots and lots and lots of people clean their own house and maybe they're the ones buying the vast majority of the roombas, not people with maids. b) just because your roomba cleans up your pet hair really well upstairs doesn't necessarily mean you will want your cleaner to stop coming on tuesdays. c) tolerance for dirt to me seems like a textbook example of something that has a high demand elasticity
    - lmm 9y ago
      > lots and lots and lots of people clean their own house and maybe they're the ones buying the vast majority of the roombas, not people with maids Surely the one substitutes for the other. The thought "I'm spending longer than I want to cleaning, and my house still isn't as clean as I'd like, and I've had more money lately, I can afford to..." could be completed "hire a cleaner" or "buy a roomba". > tolerance for dirt to me seems like a textbook example of something that has a high demand elasticity What do you mean? Different people will have their threshold in different places, certainly, and the amount they're willing to pay will vary, but I don't see how that changes anything. I'm generally struggling to understand what your model is here. Are you saying people make the decision about whether to hire a cleaner when they're born and then never change it?
      - crdoconnor 9y ago
        >Surely the one substitutes for the other. If a roomba approximated a maid, perhaps. It very much does not. >I'm generally struggling to understand what your model is here. Are you saying people make the decision about whether to hire a cleaner when they're born and then never change it? No, I'm saying that: A) building a neoclassical economic model on this at all is pointless because of the assumptions you'd have to make. You've just tried to make about four assumptions in order to build your model and they weren't just poor assumptions, they were cringeworthy assumptions. B) the total number of people who actually own roombas or roomba like devices suggests to me that the effect on cleaner employment is likely, in any case, to be < noise.