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Comment by kafkaesq | Hacker News Reader

They were thinking about where to buy a second home and whether their young children should go to private school. Then she made a confession: She took the price tags off her clothes so that her nanny would not see them. “I take the label off our six-dollar bread,” she said.

She did this, she explained, because she was uncomfortable with the inequality between herself and her nanny, a Latina immigrant. She had a household income of $250,000 and inherited wealth of several million dollars. Relative to the nanny, she told me, “The choices that I have are obscene. Six-dollar bread is obscene.”

Then how about paying your nanny enough so that she can also afford six-dollar loaf of bread now and then, also?

The remedies for this kind of "guilt" are ready available and quite simple, actually.

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She's presumably paying the nanny some kind of market rate. If instead she were to bump the pay up well above market rate, she would either attract significant competition over that particular nanny job (presumably not the goal), or be effectively giving a large cash handout to someone basically on the basis of happening to be around at the time. It doesn't seem obvious that this is a useful or desirable course of action, either on the basis of addressing inequality in the economic system or optimizing your interpersonal relationships.

(Also, I feel like I may have some kind of disconnect here, because I'm not anywhere near those income levels, but $6 bread doesn't scan as horribly unreasonable to me.)

Or be effectively giving a large cash handout to someone basically on the basis of happening to be around at the time.

"Doing right by those around me, even if it doesn't change the whole world" is another way you could look at it.

I agree that it seems she's a bit over-triggered by that $6 loaf of bread, at least.

or be effectively giving a large cash handout to someone basically on the basis of happening to be around at the time

Or be paying someone in exchange for value. Loyalty and discretion are valuable. Why shouldn't someone compensate someone for that?

If you're paying that particular nanny for exceptional value that is provided on the basis of her individual relationship with you, that's great and a good idea.

If you're paying it to whoever the nanny happens to be because you feel guilty about being rich, that's got less of a rationale behind it.

I can't imagine any parent hiring a nanny to care for their children who would hire "whoever the nanny happens to be". Your point is valid for a lot of other cases, but not this one.

If you're treating the nanny as fungible, then you should feel guilty about being rich, and hiding your bread price tags isn't going to help you!

I like tempered capitalism, but sometimes communities are just better if we're not ashamed to pay over market rate if we can afford it. I straight up don't care that my tip for a coffee is a buck and a quarter for a $2.75 coffee, cafe workers don't make enough money.

It doesn't make sense for individuals to martyr[1] themselves for a cause. The same goes for people who pick on climate change campaigners who fly in planes or still drive cars.

But it does make sense that if you, as a wealthy individual, feel guilty about things like this support moves that improve equality overall in society: Medicare for all, higher minimum wages, good labor laws, good social safety nets, uniform access to education, maybe UBI, etc.

[1] this is probably a bad word choice but it's all I could come up with on the moment.

If you feel so guilty about how little your nanny makes, so much so that you're pulling tags off everything you buy, maybe it's not a bad idea to pay your nanny a little above the going rate. Partially for your own sake as well as hers.

I also think only supporting larger movements is the wrong way to go about things. The more local the problem, the more impact you can have on it. Support Medicare for All? That's certainly good to do if you feel that's right, but that's going to be a long, drawn-out battle. Paying your nanny a little bit more? That's very easy to do and can immediately improve someone's life.

This a bizarre view of virtue. Instead of displaying and modeling virtuous behavior yourself, it's sufficient to tell other people that they should be more virtuous.

Or think global, act local.

This is, of course, ridiculous.

If you have a $250,000 household income, you would need to pay your nanny half of that to have equal income, but why would you expect or want to have equal income in the first place? If you get a raise, do you pay your nanny more even though she's doing the same work?

If people give you money, you earned it. If you want somebody else to have your money, give it to them, they will have earned it. If you aren't willing to give somebody your money, then they have not earned it.

If people give you money, you earned it.

Are you really sure about that? You may want to revisit this assumption.

He wasn't suggesting giving the nanny equal income, but just enough that a $6 load of bread would not be unaffordable. (You don't have to be very rich to afford the occasional $6 treat.)

> Relative to the nanny, she told me, “The choices that I have are obscene. Six-dollar bread is obscene.”

I believe this is called humble-bragging.

What's the matter with six dollar-bread?

That's about the price I pay for 400 g of traditionally baked high-quality bread. It comes directly from a bakery in a paper bag and has no price tag anyway. I buy such bread two or three times a week – it remains fine for about a week in a wooden bread box but fresh bread is always best …

The sourdough from the local bakery is $10 AUD

When this nanny starts a nanny management company and sends nannies to people who need them, she will probably earn enough to afford the six dollar bread.

Why is there so much hate towards the rich on HN? A few years ago HN was all about sharing your projects and talking about technology, completely different than what it is now.

There's nothing wrong with being rich, or buying $6 bread. I think most of the hate is towards people who feel guilty about being rich. It's hard to empathise with people in situations that have simple solutions.

It's really not that simple. The plans that people are likely to come up with and the amount of motivation they'll feel to follow through with them have a lot to do with their personal background. There are a lot of reasons that it might be easy for you to imagine starting a business and making a success out of it. But you shouldn't be confident that those same reasons will come into play in the life of this nanny.

Seems like you're striving for equality of outcome, instead of equality of opportunity. And I'm the first person to concede that there is no real equality of opportunity per say, a lot of individual factors come into play. At the same time, say if your parents had the foresight to save money for you to go get a good education/etc (personally I had to take loans), does that mean that those people should be taxed and their money redistributed to those who did not save for their children? Think about this as a software developer, what kind of incentives would that provide, what kind of behaviors would that encourage?

What does any of that have to do with the nanny? Anyone who feels guilty about how little their nanny earns is free to either (i) pay the nanny more or (ii) do without a nanny.

. . . and inherited wealth of several million dollars.

I think you missed this part.

What are your arguments against inheritance?

I don't have a problem with someone inheriting a few mil. Once you get beyond 10M, I think the money should be redistributed to society, but you said, When this nanny starts a nanny management company and sends nannies to people who need them, she will probably earn enough to afford the six dollar bread. So, I find it ironic that you're telling the nanny to pull herself up by her bootstraps, while failing to acknowledge that her employer inherited her wealth.

Thats because I don't see anything wrong with inheritance, in an utopia everybody might work for the benefit of the community as a whole, but that will never happen. Ask your plumber when he is digging in shit whether he is doing it out of the goodness of his heart, and get back to me with the answer.

I'd rather incentives would be such as to let people amass as much benefit for themselves as possible, and then if they want to voluntarily give back - all the power to them. Forced redistributions give wrong signals to people. If anything there should only be a flat tax, say 10% all types of economic activity (work/investment/etc...), and the government should provide as many services as that 10% can afford, not perpetually expand the list.

Forced redistributions give wrong signals to people.

What signal does does it send to people when you allow a privileged few to inherit (for practical purposes) anything they want without having had to put any work in to get it? What signal does it send when those same people can use what they've inherited to buy policies that only increase the discrepancy between them and their plumbers - who are doing hard work that few of us would enjoy?

Wow, you must be angry about something.

How you mean?

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