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.
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%
But if you can call it with an app, then welcome to the new upper-upper middle class.
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.
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.
Here's a overlay of the favelas of Rio.[1]
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zuw5NU9HNh_k.krdIMl...
We used to just say that there was no middle class though.
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".
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.
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".
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."
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.