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This is an insightful article but it misses the elephant in the room, which is wealth inequality. In Shanghai, there is vastly more wealth inequality than in Ne

This is an insightful article but it misses the elephant in the room, which is wealth inequality. In Shanghai, there is vastly more wealth inequality than in Netherlands. The reason why nannies are affordable in China is because those nannies aren't paid very much, and consequently enjoy a much lower standard of living than their employers. In Netherlands, nannies are relatively expensive, but you the employee is much closer to the socioeconomic stratum to that of their employer. Same goes for the other examples in the article. The author, having a fancy car, modern phone, etc, clearly enjoys a high level of wealth and is able to leverage that wealth to acquire goods and services at a high level. But that only works if there are people willing to provide those goods and services for a price that he can afford. The author didn't mention that the people who provide these goods and services do not enjoy the same benefits of those goods and services: their nanny cannot afford to hire a nanny, nor a Chinese EV, nor a giant smartphone. The Netherlands has made the intentional decision to reduce wealth inequality and to achieve a fairer society. You can agree or disagree with that decision. But if I had to choose between NL and China, being cast into one country or the other without any choice about where in that society or what level of wealth, NL would be a much better option.

epgui 2mo ago
There’s a term for what the last sentence expresses: John Rawls’ “Veil of Ignorance”.
- hackyhacky 2mo ago
  Thanks. I knew that I had read about that thought experiment somewhere but couldn't recall the name.
steveBK123 2mo ago
I do worry that the “app / gig economy” independent contractors with weak i9 verification is basically trying to import the developing-world inequality permanent underclass service sector here.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- iambateman 2mo ago
  I would say this is true, but should be understood in the context of sharecropping, Jim crow, and slavery as a long and continuous outworking of poorly-checked capitalism. I’m not saying that you meant to say that it’s our first round with this…just pointing out that Americans have significant experience at maintaining a underclass.
  - steveBK123 2mo ago
    Right, it's not the first time we've built upon a permanent underclass, but it feels like a quiet reversion that doesn't get a lot of attention. Arguably migrant workers working the harvests on farms is similar and bridges the Jim Crow era to now, but that has been more behind the scenes and didn't have the veneer of "tech".
- choutos 2mo ago
  Do you mean in terms of a loss of employment rights?
  - steveBK123 2mo ago
    Yes. These services allow mass employment of people who are more on the margin of society without any of the protections around minimum wage, working hours, benefits, etc because they are "independent contractors". Uber alone supposedly has 1M "independent contractors" in the US. Quick google searches would put them as the 3rd biggest employer in the US behind Walmart & Amazon, if they were actually classified as employees.
- red-iron-pine 2mo ago
  basically, yeah. in Canada they use Temporary Foreign Workers, but it's the same idea. Import the developing world inequality instead of using locals -- but only because the population base isn't there.
smokedetector1 2mo ago
In fact, a lot of wealth is only created by inequality. If wealth is power to effect your will, you have more of it when others are more desperate. The Shanghai wealthy have to spend less to get the same service - they have more real dollars DIRECTLY BECAUSE someone else has less.
- engineer_22 2mo ago
  Wealth != power But you hit on an important point that wealth cannot accumulate unless consumption is disciplined. Sometimes discipline is self-imposed (e.g. calvinists), other times by the organizing authority (e.g. state, church). In the 2nd type, authority as the source of discipline, there’s debate on the right balance of disciplining the elite classes vs the under classes. This debate will never cease, as long as there are human beings consuming wealth.
  - sm-silversight 2mo ago
    Can you elaborate please?
    - engineer_22 2mo ago
      I’ll simplify a lot here but here’s my understanding of wealth. Wealth has lots of flavors but usually we mean material wealth. Material wealth is the items and properties that people covet. And people figured out they can store wealth with money and everyone agreed that money is a fair way to store wealth and use it to transfer ownership of the items and properties people covet. (In hindsight maybe not wisest of all decisions but open for debate). Material wealth is not permanent. It is consumed. By typing on my iPhone, using it daily, it’s degrading, eventually it’ll not be functional and it’ll be harder to get money in exchange for it. Real estate appreciates in monetary value but that’s an effect of the money system not a natural state of things, real estate actually degrades without real work put in to keep it up, consuming value. Food and fuel are easy to see as consumables, one-time use only. Calvinists are historically frugal, their theology emphasizes thrift and industry, basically the backbone of capital accumulation - create wealth, but don’t consume it, invest the wealth to create more wealth. This is the bedrock of “capitalism” (capitalism in modern and postmodern age has taken a new meaning, but originally it meant ~using capital to create wealth). China famously imposed (and still does) very strict discipline on consumption, and they used their excess capital to reinvest for industrialization. Western economies imposed consumption limits in the continental wars, which enabled a huge surplus of wealth in USA following WW2 because the population was used to the discipline. Churches (Vatican) accumulate treasures by disciplining their flocks to tithe. Churches in the east were looted by the Bolsheviks to finance their revolution, the eastern church had huge reserves of wealth that was consumed by the revolution. Eventually they had trouble balancing their economy and the holodomor took hold in the wheat belt - the wealth was exhausted. The soviets eventually established absolute control, disciplined their populations and went on a long run of impressive industrialization and growth - but it eventually toppled due to imbalances in production and consumption, people don’t thrive under strictest disciplines, they grew tired and the economy got sick. Today, the highly developed nations in the west are wrestling with questions of discipline. Wealth inequality its called. There’s an upwelling of popular sentiment that people want to consume more, and it’s hard not to sympathize with that, Id love to live like the elites do. But from my perspective there’s not much consideration to how much consumption is sustainable or desirable. The key question from my view is what end does material consumption serve? Is it for pleasure’s sake alone? Or is it to unlock more human talent? Is it converted to unleash other flavors of wealth such as spiritual fulfillment, thriving families, arts, wisdom? How can a material value be placed on these things in balance with real material constraints? More questions than answers, and that’s sort of the crux of the eternal argument. Obviously things have gone well in the west, most people live lives of extreme wealth compared to their great-grandparents. Some of that has to do with warfare, some with luck, some with thrift and industry. Maybe that’s about to change, or maybe not. I for one am happy to work harder than most to create wealth, I find work fulfilling, but I am also well compensated for my labor and so I consume more than most people too… the balance happens at the micro-level and the macro.
anovikov 2mo ago
This is striking. So much for the "socialist" society in China as opposed to "capitalist" in Netherlands.
- dahart 2mo ago
  Yeah there is a little bit of irony versus the common narratives, though if you ask Google what type of economy these two countries are, it will tell you the Netherlands is a “social market economy” and China is a “socialist market economy” (and an example of “state capitalism”), at least since 1978 (~50 years). There is a difference between social and socialist in those terms, but both countries are still summarized as market economies…
MattGaiser 2mo ago
Its astonishing how many people miss that if you have servants, you must be an elite, as by definition, we cannot each have 5 servants.
gopalv 2mo ago
> The Netherlands has made the intentional decision to reduce wealth inequality and to achieve a fairer society Netherlands was the poster child of the "Dutch Disease"[1]. They in some ways could've turned into Qatar (and Norway into Aramco) without the right people twisting a few dials at the right time. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
betaby 2mo ago
> The reason why nannies are affordable in China is because those nannies aren't paid very much, and consequently enjoy a much lower standard of living than their employers. In Netherlands, nannies are relatively expensive, but you the employee is much closer to the socioeconomic stratum to that of their employer. In Canada there are people making peanuts and living very poorly while technically inequality is low. The problem in Canada and other developed countries is excessive taxation of salaries. That's an orthogonal to wealth problem.
- triceratops 2mo ago
  > The problem in Canada and other developed countries is excessive taxation of salaries. That's an orthogonal to wealth problem. I'd argue it's part of the same problem. Salaries are excessively taxed in developed countries because wealth is so lightly taxed. People with wealth have outsize influence in law and policy. They can make all sorts of fancy arguments for why taxing wealth is bad. But money for government services has to come from somewhere. So regular working stiffs end up screwed.
slibhb 2mo ago
> The Netherlands has made the intentional decision to reduce wealth inequality and to achieve a fairer society. The Netherlands does redistribute more, but the main reason China is less equal is that China is a massive, developing country with huge divides between rural and urban areas, and between east and west.
ertgbnm 2mo ago
I think you nailed it. If the author was a billionaire in the Netherlands he might not notice the differences as they do in the article.
bluGill 2mo ago
That isn't the full picture. Nannies are not common amount the wealthy in the US - they exist, but they are less common even though the money to pay a full time nanny is there. Also where they exist they often are part-time, often young people who are doing the job for the experience of living in a different country: the primary pay isn't money, it is the legal right/ability to live there for a year with minimal responsibilities.
woopah 2mo ago
While it's true that a lot of China's conveniences come from essentially labor market arbitrage and rural/urban inequality, the fact that the Netherlands can afford to attempt to reduce wealth inequality is a sign itself that it's a very wealthy country. I would also prefer the pace of life in the Netherlands, but I wonder to what extent you also have to buy more fairness and a slower pace of life?
- smallnamespace 2mo ago
  > attempt to reduce wealth inequality is a sign itself that it's a very wealthy country Poor countries also reduce wealth inequality. In fact, China went through a Communist revolution where all private landowners’ wealth was taken from them. This happened from the 1930s through the 1950s and was a fairly bloody, violent process, involving lots of revolutionaries inciting peasants to forcibly occupy land and buildings and killing landlords if they didn’t cooperate.
  - woopah 2mo ago
    Good point, I guess another way to reduce inequality is by your ruling party having an extremely ideological stance, pragmatics be damned, although I imagine most people wouldn't prefer this method
mkozlows 2mo ago
I think the article actually _does_ call that out, noting that the reason for some of these things is due to how wealth propagates through society, even noting the minimum wage specifically. (But it does bring to mind the Agatha Christie quote about never imagining she'd be so rich as to afford a car, nor so poor as to not have a maid.) Also, though, I think some of the weird poverty-culture stuff of the Netherlands is just a culture thing. Netherlanders are absolutely rich enough to buy paper towel if they wanted to, it's just a cultural thing that they don't. And air conditioning is a whole cultural hot button flashpoint issue for reasons that have nothing to do with money.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
fittingopposite 2mo ago
And that in a communist country...

epgui 2mo ago

There’s a term for what the last sentence expresses: John Rawls’ “Veil of Ignorance”.

hackyhacky 2mo ago
Thanks. I knew that I had read about that thought experiment somewhere but couldn't recall the name.

steveBK123 2mo ago

I do worry that the “app / gig economy” independent contractors with weak i9 verification is basically trying to import the developing-world inequality permanent underclass service sector here.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
iambateman 2mo ago
I would say this is true, but should be understood in the context of sharecropping, Jim crow, and slavery as a long and continuous outworking of poorly-checked capitalism. I’m not saying that you meant to say that it’s our first round with this…just pointing out that Americans have significant experience at maintaining a underclass.
- steveBK123 2mo ago
  Right, it's not the first time we've built upon a permanent underclass, but it feels like a quiet reversion that doesn't get a lot of attention. Arguably migrant workers working the harvests on farms is similar and bridges the Jim Crow era to now, but that has been more behind the scenes and didn't have the veneer of "tech".
choutos 2mo ago
Do you mean in terms of a loss of employment rights?
- steveBK123 2mo ago
  Yes. These services allow mass employment of people who are more on the margin of society without any of the protections around minimum wage, working hours, benefits, etc because they are "independent contractors". Uber alone supposedly has 1M "independent contractors" in the US. Quick google searches would put them as the 3rd biggest employer in the US behind Walmart & Amazon, if they were actually classified as employees.
red-iron-pine 2mo ago
basically, yeah. in Canada they use Temporary Foreign Workers, but it's the same idea. Import the developing world inequality instead of using locals -- but only because the population base isn't there.

smokedetector1 2mo ago

In fact, a lot of wealth is only created by inequality. If wealth is power to effect your will, you have more of it when others are more desperate. The Shanghai wealthy have to spend less to get the same service - they have more real dollars DIRECTLY BECAUSE someone else has less.

engineer_22 2mo ago
Wealth != power But you hit on an important point that wealth cannot accumulate unless consumption is disciplined. Sometimes discipline is self-imposed (e.g. calvinists), other times by the organizing authority (e.g. state, church). In the 2nd type, authority as the source of discipline, there’s debate on the right balance of disciplining the elite classes vs the under classes. This debate will never cease, as long as there are human beings consuming wealth.
- sm-silversight 2mo ago
  Can you elaborate please?
  - engineer_22 2mo ago
    I’ll simplify a lot here but here’s my understanding of wealth. Wealth has lots of flavors but usually we mean material wealth. Material wealth is the items and properties that people covet. And people figured out they can store wealth with money and everyone agreed that money is a fair way to store wealth and use it to transfer ownership of the items and properties people covet. (In hindsight maybe not wisest of all decisions but open for debate). Material wealth is not permanent. It is consumed. By typing on my iPhone, using it daily, it’s degrading, eventually it’ll not be functional and it’ll be harder to get money in exchange for it. Real estate appreciates in monetary value but that’s an effect of the money system not a natural state of things, real estate actually degrades without real work put in to keep it up, consuming value. Food and fuel are easy to see as consumables, one-time use only. Calvinists are historically frugal, their theology emphasizes thrift and industry, basically the backbone of capital accumulation - create wealth, but don’t consume it, invest the wealth to create more wealth. This is the bedrock of “capitalism” (capitalism in modern and postmodern age has taken a new meaning, but originally it meant ~using capital to create wealth). China famously imposed (and still does) very strict discipline on consumption, and they used their excess capital to reinvest for industrialization. Western economies imposed consumption limits in the continental wars, which enabled a huge surplus of wealth in USA following WW2 because the population was used to the discipline. Churches (Vatican) accumulate treasures by disciplining their flocks to tithe. Churches in the east were looted by the Bolsheviks to finance their revolution, the eastern church had huge reserves of wealth that was consumed by the revolution. Eventually they had trouble balancing their economy and the holodomor took hold in the wheat belt - the wealth was exhausted. The soviets eventually established absolute control, disciplined their populations and went on a long run of impressive industrialization and growth - but it eventually toppled due to imbalances in production and consumption, people don’t thrive under strictest disciplines, they grew tired and the economy got sick. Today, the highly developed nations in the west are wrestling with questions of discipline. Wealth inequality its called. There’s an upwelling of popular sentiment that people want to consume more, and it’s hard not to sympathize with that, Id love to live like the elites do. But from my perspective there’s not much consideration to how much consumption is sustainable or desirable. The key question from my view is what end does material consumption serve? Is it for pleasure’s sake alone? Or is it to unlock more human talent? Is it converted to unleash other flavors of wealth such as spiritual fulfillment, thriving families, arts, wisdom? How can a material value be placed on these things in balance with real material constraints? More questions than answers, and that’s sort of the crux of the eternal argument. Obviously things have gone well in the west, most people live lives of extreme wealth compared to their great-grandparents. Some of that has to do with warfare, some with luck, some with thrift and industry. Maybe that’s about to change, or maybe not. I for one am happy to work harder than most to create wealth, I find work fulfilling, but I am also well compensated for my labor and so I consume more than most people too… the balance happens at the micro-level and the macro.

anovikov 2mo ago

This is striking. So much for the "socialist" society in China as opposed to "capitalist" in Netherlands.

dahart 2mo ago
Yeah there is a little bit of irony versus the common narratives, though if you ask Google what type of economy these two countries are, it will tell you the Netherlands is a “social market economy” and China is a “socialist market economy” (and an example of “state capitalism”), at least since 1978 (~50 years). There is a difference between social and socialist in those terms, but both countries are still summarized as market economies…

MattGaiser 2mo ago

Its astonishing how many people miss that if you have servants, you must be an elite, as by definition, we cannot each have 5 servants.

gopalv 2mo ago

> The Netherlands has made the intentional decision to reduce wealth inequality and to achieve a fairer society Netherlands was the poster child of the "Dutch Disease"[1]. They in some ways could've turned into Qatar (and Norway into Aramco) without the right people twisting a few dials at the right time. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

betaby 2mo ago

> The reason why nannies are affordable in China is because those nannies aren't paid very much, and consequently enjoy a much lower standard of living than their employers. In Netherlands, nannies are relatively expensive, but you the employee is much closer to the socioeconomic stratum to that of their employer. In Canada there are people making peanuts and living very poorly while technically inequality is low. The problem in Canada and other developed countries is excessive taxation of salaries. That's an orthogonal to wealth problem.

triceratops 2mo ago
> The problem in Canada and other developed countries is excessive taxation of salaries. That's an orthogonal to wealth problem. I'd argue it's part of the same problem. Salaries are excessively taxed in developed countries because wealth is so lightly taxed. People with wealth have outsize influence in law and policy. They can make all sorts of fancy arguments for why taxing wealth is bad. But money for government services has to come from somewhere. So regular working stiffs end up screwed.

slibhb 2mo ago

> The Netherlands has made the intentional decision to reduce wealth inequality and to achieve a fairer society. The Netherlands does redistribute more, but the main reason China is less equal is that China is a massive, developing country with huge divides between rural and urban areas, and between east and west.

ertgbnm 2mo ago

I think you nailed it. If the author was a billionaire in the Netherlands he might not notice the differences as they do in the article.

bluGill 2mo ago

That isn't the full picture. Nannies are not common amount the wealthy in the US - they exist, but they are less common even though the money to pay a full time nanny is there. Also where they exist they often are part-time, often young people who are doing the job for the experience of living in a different country: the primary pay isn't money, it is the legal right/ability to live there for a year with minimal responsibilities.

woopah 2mo ago

While it's true that a lot of China's conveniences come from essentially labor market arbitrage and rural/urban inequality, the fact that the Netherlands can afford to attempt to reduce wealth inequality is a sign itself that it's a very wealthy country. I would also prefer the pace of life in the Netherlands, but I wonder to what extent you also have to buy more fairness and a slower pace of life?

smallnamespace 2mo ago
> attempt to reduce wealth inequality is a sign itself that it's a very wealthy country Poor countries also reduce wealth inequality. In fact, China went through a Communist revolution where all private landowners’ wealth was taken from them. This happened from the 1930s through the 1950s and was a fairly bloody, violent process, involving lots of revolutionaries inciting peasants to forcibly occupy land and buildings and killing landlords if they didn’t cooperate.
- woopah 2mo ago
  Good point, I guess another way to reduce inequality is by your ruling party having an extremely ideological stance, pragmatics be damned, although I imagine most people wouldn't prefer this method

mkozlows 2mo ago

I think the article actually _does_ call that out, noting that the reason for some of these things is due to how wealth propagates through society, even noting the minimum wage specifically. (But it does bring to mind the Agatha Christie quote about never imagining she'd be so rich as to afford a car, nor so poor as to not have a maid.) Also, though, I think some of the weird poverty-culture stuff of the Netherlands is just a culture thing. Netherlanders are absolutely rich enough to buy paper towel if they wanted to, it's just a cultural thing that they don't. And air conditioning is a whole cultural hot button flashpoint issue for reasons that have nothing to do with money.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

fittingopposite 2mo ago

And that in a communist country...