I wonder, will the rich start hiring elaborate casts of servants including butlers, footmen, lady's maids, and so on, since they'll be the only ones with the income?
I wonder, will the rich start hiring elaborate casts of servants including butlers, footmen, lady's maids, and so on, since they'll be the only ones with the income?
As far as I can tell, the rich have never stopped employing elaborate casts of servants; these servants just go by different titles now: private chef, personal assistant, nanny, fashion consultant, etc.
The fact that it's a voluntary arrangement instead of forced makes a significant difference.
They already do. In fact, we are all working in service of their power trips.
They already do and always have. They never stopped hiring butlers (who are pretty well paid BTW), chefs, chauffeurs, maids, gardeners, nannies.....
The terminology may have changed a bit, but they still employ people to do stuff for them
One big difference is while professional class affluent people will hire cleaners or gardeners or nannies for a certain number or hours they cannot (at least in rich countries) hire them as full time live in employees.
There are some things that are increasing. For example employing full time tutors to teach their kids - as rich people used to often do (say a 100 years ago). So they get one to one attention while other people kids are in classes with many kids, and the poor have their kids in classes with a large number of kids. Interesting the government here in the UK is increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school which is the nearest we can get to what the rich do (again, hiring tutors by the hour, and self-supply within the household).
They also hire people to manage their wealth. I do not know enough about the history to be sure, but this seems to be also to be a return to historical norms after an egalitarian anomaly. A lot of wealth is looked after by full time employees of "family offices" - and the impression I get from people in investment management and high end property is that this has increased a lot in the last few decades. Incidentally, one of the questions around Epstein is why so many rich people let him take over some of the work that you would expect their family offices to handle.
>increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school
There is a whole lot more nuance here than you're giving the topic.
There is one side that wants to give their kids a good education, they have the resources and the motivation to ensure they come out ahead.
They are not the problem, the problem is the other side of this coin.
Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organizations. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization and have little ability to work with the outside world at large. They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.
I still remember being a kid myself and having to educate these other kids my age because they were missing large chunks of important information about the world.
> Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organization. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization
Not true in the UK. Studies in many countries (the UK, US, Australia) and others have shown that home educated kids have better outcomes than school going kids after correcting for parental education, wealth etc.
Yes, there are exceptions, but there are also bad schools and some terrible schools.
UK law also requires children to receive a "suitable and efficient" full time education and there are legal mechanisms for sending children to school if they do not.
> They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.
Stats in the UK show home ed kids are MUCH less likely to be abused, to self harm, or commit suicide.
Of course there are bad home educating communities, but there are also some horrific schools and the latter are a lot more common. Does that mean we should shut down schools?
A lot of it is probably more part-time but, yes, people who are some definition of rich spend more money on people to do more work for them (cleaning, landscaping, accounting, etc.) Doesn't mean they don't do any of those things--and outsourcing some can be more effort than it's worth--but they don't necessarily cut their own lawn or do car repairs.
If you are rich "outsourcing" is easy because you have people to handle that for you. You have senior servants like butlers and housekeepers who manage the rest of the staff, for example, so you are not directly hiring cleaners.
This is the difference between the affluent and the truly rich.
It's fair that's probably the difference. You don't have a full-time personal assistant/butler/whatever you want to call it. But you personally outsource a lot of individual tasks that you don't really want to do.
I pay to have my car serviced... but I don't employ a full-time mechanic.
In this day and age, how often do you actually need to have your car serviced? And there is no shortage of places that will do it for you in a few hours.
Similarly, if money were no real object within reason, I'm not sure what I would really need done on a day-to-basis that I couldn't just order or contract for pretty easily.
You clearly don't have enough cars. Once you get enough cars, especially if any of them are classic cars you actually want to drive occasionally and want to be in a driveable condition, you might want to have a full time mechanic.
Who do you think is building the machines for the rich? All of these tech companies are nothing without the employees that build the tech.
This is what the service economy in the imperial core already is.