Servants Without Masters
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>And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me.
In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of societal and legal inequality. That isn’t the case when ‘being served’ by waitstaff or a barista, who can both walk across the street and afford the same level of service you got from them at a different establishment.
If the master has 10x the income of their servant, that means they are spending only 10% of their income on the servant. I.e., that's a manageable proportion to spend for the significant time-savings that having a servant represents.
The US (and many other countries) have income inequalities that far exceed a factor of 10. Honestly if the divide between the lowest and highest income was a mere 10x, I would not be worried about inequality at all.
And I can't agree with "driven by high levels of societal and legal inequality" either. While high societal and legal inequality certainly exist (and probably help somewhat), the concentration of capital is, I think, mainly caused by more fundamental market forces. Synergy, anti-competitive practices, barriers to entry, economies of scale, mergers, and so on. Lobbying for laws that entrench existing corporations is one of the factors, that could fall under "societal and legal inequality", but I think capital would concentrate even without that, albeit slightly slower.
[0] https://voxeu.org/article/consumption-and-income-inequality-...
Is it the extra indirection of the salary coming from company instead of personal coffers that does it? What if the person hiring the assistant has 100% ownership of the company like in the case of a small business?
It's a role that would have been called secretary at one time. The title change was intended to show more respect and try ditch some historical social baggage for such jobs.
I think the main implication is that a personal assistant is a qualified, educated person who is well positioned to find another job, while a personal servant evokes images of someone less well off and more at the mercy of the employer. There is a second implication as well: you hire a personal assistant to help you with your job, to be more productive and get more done, but you hire a personal servant to help you with your personal life, so you can get more leisure time and be more lazy.
In some ways, there might not be much practical difference between a personal assistant and a personal servant, but the words have different connotations. There are some questions that I think are relevant to ask oneself: Do you have the same reaction to the word "personal servant" and the words "butler," "housekeeper," "majordomo," etc? When you think of the word "personal servant," is the first image that comes to your mind that of a maid, a footman, a housekeeper or a butler, or something else?
Also, I'm not American so I can't comment on this point, but it may also be that the word "servant" is uncomfortably close to the word "slave".
I would bet that is incredibly uncommon compared to the obvious alternative, which is someone working to make ends meet at the best job they can find because of who knows what constraints.
Without data, it seems disingenuous to suggest otherwise, although I'm sure it's the kind of thing Uber employees tell themselves.
Having maid is pretty common in bay area. They come in once or twice a week to clean your house, and do laundry. There are many people I know had someone come and cook meals for them on weekdays.
I moved from bay area to Ohio for a business. I bought a used Jeep from a dealership out of town. The salesman that sold me the car lives where my hotel is. He would pick up/drop off my car from my business for oil change/regular maintenance. After a couple of times, I told him I will do myself as I started feel different.
Instead of a personal cook, now you use doordash to get food from restaurant. The cook at the restaurant or person delivering food can use the same service. Similarly when we had servants in India, we would eat the same food, and work in the same farms. Living situation were more segregated just like able to afford in Palo Alto vs East Palo Alto.
I did say it requires grotesque levels of income inequality.
In all seriousness, a maid service coming in once a month is not the same thing as having live in servants.
The people (often of color) who work in the back of the nice restaurants everyone with means loves to eat at can't afford to eat there, much less live near their work.
The nannies who take care of the children of high earners (enabling them to be high earners and avoid the stress of a big chunk of parenting) can't afford to have nannies for their own kids. In fact, they often end up having less time with their own children than they do with their "masters" kids.
I could go on and on.
Your cherry picking the waitstaff (usually white people, who get high tips) and baristas makes your argument better; though I'm sure most baristas will disagree with you. Making coffee in a rather social setting is a rather nice job where you interact with customers, and can be fun (I've done it). What about the janitors, who usually work at night, alone, cleaning our toilets (I've done that too)? It is very alienating. If you did that for a year, the stuff Marx wrote about stops being some intellectual hocus pocus and actually starts to ring very very true.
What about the farm workers that pick your strawberries and blueberries for that $14 plate of pancakes?
Again I could go on and on.
I honestly don't see why people are so uncomfortable with inequity. A worthwhile thought experiment is to imagine a world with perfect equity across everyone in society. Once you consider the consequences of perfect equity, especially second and third order effects, it gets pretty dystopian pretty fast.
For example, most of those with the most talent to offer to improve the lives of everyone else cease to pursue vocations where they provide the most value to the world. Instead they pursue vocations they enjoy or find easy if they pursue a vocation at all. If there is perfect equity, why work. The pace of improvements in quality of life across all society would slow to a crawl, if not stop or possibly even reverse.
Seeing as all humans, regardless of where you are in society today, are all basically on a hedonic treadmill and are most content when they see improvements in their circumstances over the course of their life, perfect equity would be a disaster. The only exception to this would be maybe someone who has reached a Daoist/Buddhist level of contentment in all aspects of how they experience and interact with the world.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that extreme inequity is good either.
Instead what I'm saying is that inequity can be benign or even beneficial and that the ideal outcome for the most people is achieved when the power law distribution of inequity isn't extreme. e.g. a distribution of -10/x is preferable to a distribution of -1/(10x). The more smoothly sloped the power law distribution of inequity (less extreme tails), the more room there is for individuals to experience gradual improvements in one's circumstances and the more clearly does a individual experience a positive relationship between effort and reward. Experiencing an improvement in one's condition and have stewardship over that improvement both contribute to being content wherever you are on that distribution.
The same way he points out that a human master can disregard their incentives in the interest of their subordinates, they can just as well disregard the interests of their subordinates and even their own incentives for some kind of personal enjoyment.
I don't think we picked the greater or the lesser of two evils, I think we picked the more consistent of two evils. If it were possible to plot "good" and "evil" on an axis, and if we were to plot to plot "human masters" and "uncaring system" on this axis, we'd see two bell curves. Maybe the mean of the "uncaring system" is farther towards the "evil" end of the axis, but the curve would have a very sharp peak, while the "human masters" bell curve would be a lot shallower, with a lot of variance.
I think we chose the systems we have now, or more correctly, the systems we have now are the way they are (nobody consciously chose them) because we as a society prefer things predictably kinda bad, rather than having the possibility of things being really bad or really good, this is made even worse when the outcome is decided by the whims of a person and not pure chance. At least when the system is predictable, we can plan around the bad parts, and introduce a system of checks and balances in an attempt to shift the mean more towards the "good" side. A benevolent dictator might be better than the best democracy, but a malevolent dictator is way worse than the worst democracy, for the majority of the people at least.
Yup. With all due respect for reactionary philosophies, this is why we still vote for our leaders, instead of going with the Confucian way and asking the gods for a king to rule us.
Anyone who works in the service industry can tell you that their customers are terrible. Could you imagine how bad it would be if the proverbial lady demanding to speak to the manager was the manager?
Purely transactional relationships have clearly defined rules - I pick my food on DoorDash's app, someone delivers it, I pay and tip. Done. Once the relationship becomes personal, any request becomes more complicated than just a transaction. This definitely applies at work - it's weird that I have to build up and use social capital within an organization in order to get things done. It's an inefficient system of distributing resources (charming/friendly people get what they need, instead of everyone optimizing for what's best for the business), and if I don't have the social capital, it can be uncomfortable to ask for the things I need to do my job.
I think there's something to be said for a hard separation of the personal and professional/transactional, though obviously that total separation isn't possible in real life.
Probably at least in part because humans tend to actively reinforce pecking order. Institutions will let you escape it.
Humans will actively seek to put you back in your "place" and maintain the status quo where they are socially superior to you.
If you graduate college and get a better job, the college is okay with that. So is society, so long as you pay your student loans.
But mentors, masters, etc want to remain above you, even if they have to tear you down to keep their superior position. And it's really poisonous, insidious stuff to deal with.
To get large-scale things done in the world, some people need to make plans and other people need to carry them out. And the last 5000 years of civilization has been an exercise in defining exactly how people are expected to do that.
In a fully developed civilization (which we are, at least, approaching) power dynamics between people are always contained in an institutional framework with explicit limits and rights. Otherwise, power tends to get abused.
There are some horror stories on masters abusing their servants, but my family treated our live in servants well though we are not by any means rich. Most of the work for the servants are light such as cooking, washing clothes, watering plants, helping moms taking care of the babies, etc, and they can do whatever they want, watch TV in their own room or in our lounge, etc.
Inequality? Sure. That is one thing that I can't fix. But one thing for sure that I know. Most of our servants like working with us, and actually do not want to choose other jobs or work for other families despite higher pay. Average tenure of our servants were about 4 - 5 years. Our longest servant has been with us before before I was born (I am 32).
A really provocative and intriguing article. I'm not sure if I agree with all of it, but I do notice that some Americans are myopic to any description of freedom that cannot be expressed as an arrangement between two supposedly free economic actors. For example, some Americans are particularly resistant to describing the relationship between a boss and his or her subordinates as inequitable and potentially exploitative, even though a boss can sometimes exert more control over an employee's life than the state can.
A personal master servant relationship carries over to places where the servant may not consent to. It's a personal relationship, meaning it encompasses your entire person. It's far harder shed that relationship than it is a job.
Making the master role institutional, and one where the person filling it is interchangeable, also means that it's meritocratic. Anyone can fill the master's role, because it's ultimately about how useful they can be in that role (e.g. by spending more money), rather than about them having a personal status of 'master', which they need not contribute value to maintain.
in retrospect it'll've been the smoothest option for our eventual transition to submitting to algorithm/machine bosses. first get comfortable submitting to humans acting like machines, then replace them with machines.
This is also known as the crab mentality. If you try to pull just one crab out of a pot, the others will grab on mercilessly, until the first crab's legs are ripped off.
How does individualism, "the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual", imply envy? That's just a weird non-sequitur assertion.
If everyone earned the same living, then there would be very little serving happening, because everyone's time is effectively worth the same amount, and thus it wouldn't make sense to give away all your money to people to perform services for you that you could have done yourself if you didn't have a job.
The reason that people serve other people in our society is that we're unequal, and there are socio-economic reasons for that. I believe it has more to do with economic inequality than Nietzchean slave morality.
So, if lawyers and surgeons' compensation were similar, lawyers would do their own operations, and surgeons would represent themselves in court?
You seem to be arguing that, if all specialisations have equal market value, then there are no/few gains from specialisation.
1. I don’t think that fits into the category of servitude that the other was talking about. 2. Why would one put in the effort required to go through specialized school and certification processes if there wasn’t a huge payout waiting for them? I think only the most passionate would bother.
I may be wrong about what they meant, in which case the preceding paragraph may be attacking a straw man.
> In every restaurant, except a buffet (and I am not pro-buffet), I feel like an aristocrat who pays someone to put on his clothes for him. I know I can supposedly mitigate this by being polite and tipping well. But it’s the whole concept of paying someone to feed me that I don’t like. Yes, obviously, it’s better if I pay someone well than if I pay them badly, and better to be appreciative than abusive. It doesn’t make any more of a difference to my gut reaction, though, any more than it would if I found out that the millionaire who pays a valet to tie his cravats for him is extremely generous in compensating said valet.