Where are the Servants?

I asked this question five years ago. Recently, on Facebook, Nathan Smith wrote,

Consider the following hypothesis. Once upon a time, there was a notion of “respectability.” Society, represented chiefly by the gossip of housewives, imposed honesty, chastity, and maybe some degree of piety, not so much by force as by public opinion. And I think that mere “respectability” qualified one for certain jobs, such as child care, handling money, personal service, etc. Nowadays, tolerance and the Sexual Revolution have abolished the category of respectability, but there are still a lot of jobs where people don’t need special skills but do need to have good character, so some filter is needed. So education has become the new respectability. . .A whole social stratum finds it hard to get access to jobs they could do, because our nonjudgmental society refuses to circulate the information about people’s characters that potential employers need, and the substitute for respectability, education, can’t be universal because, while everyone could be chaste and honest, many don’t have the academic ability to succeed in college, and/or can’t afford it. So personal service, which almost vanished during the economically egalitarian mid 20th century, but would be well worth reviving today, doesn’t make a comeback for lack of an identifiable class of respectable people whom the rich would allow to be present in their homes. . .

My thoughts.

1. There are a lot of jobs that involve personal care. Elder care and child care are what I have in mind.

2. What Smith calls “character” might be described as conscientiousness.

3. I do not get the impression that the personal care market fails in any dramatic sense. That is, I do not get the impression that there are many conscientious people willing to take jobs in personal care who are unable to find such jobs. If such a market failure were to present itself, it could be solved by entrepreneurs forming companies to vet and guarantee the quality of individual providers of elder care and child care.

4. Not that Smith was responding to my original post, but there I was suggesting that the high concentration of wealth would imply not so much that every middle class family should have personal servants but that rich people should have hundreds or thousands of personal servants. I think it is an instructive issue to ponder, but I have not come up with any new theories in the past five years, although I would add that the “supply problem” might include the fact that there are many people who are not conscientious.

13 thoughts on “Where are the Servants?

  1. I have friends and relatives in industries (agriculture and lodging) who say, with unanimity, that the reason they hire mostly Central American immigrants extremely disproportionately over natives for low skill work is that, for the wages they can afford to pay and stay in business, the employer-relevant personal qualities of these immigrant workers are vastly superior over natives who would accept the same pay.

    Something about a contemporary American upbringing simply ruins lots of people in terms of what most employers want, and that’s especially true for low marginal-productivity youth.

    ‘Conscientiousness’ does not at all capture the full range of character traits involved that employers find attractive or even essential to their operations, where problem employees can create ruinous trouble or management headaches.

    I also know plenty of middle class families who have au pairs, and who report similar impressions about the relative trustworthiness and work ethic of foreign girls over their low-wage domestic counterparts.

    There is a recent legal reform movement gaining steam which seeks to prohibit the all but specially exempted employers from investigating criminal backgrounds and credit records as proxies for these character traits. But the elimination of the best available proxy will only exacerbate this problem as employers start to rely on their next best proxy which is nationality. The EEOC says it will prevent this kind of discrimination from happening, but reading their latest policy clarification, it seems that they will be doing so in favor of these immigrants instead of the other way around.

  2. They do have thousands of servants, but they have basically ‘outsourced’ the supervision and atomized the effort. They outsource the kitchen staff to fine dining restaurants, the garden staff to grocers, the garage staff to a mechanic, the grounds staff to a contract landscaper, and so on. Less specialization by the person, more by the task.

    • Right. But also:

      1. Today’s developed country elites value privacy more than in the Downton Abbey era.

      2. Number of low skill servants is no longer the status symbol it used to be. High skill personal / executive assistants and bodyguards are more impressive.

      3. Upper middle class people now don’t occupy manors or estates and often live in small profile homes near city centers, where live-in servants quarters are not feasible and servants find it too hard to live close because the nearby rent is too damn high.

      4. In addition to outsourcing, online ordering, and fast delivery, the modern home is a more automated place than ever, with laundry, dishwashing, and food prep easier and quicker than ever before.

      The holy grail is cheap and trustworthy 24/7 childcare. That’s not going to get automated anytime soon.

    • I wonder how many credit scores have tanked solely due to student loans, and not terrible impulse purchases or gambling habits. In previous generations these people wouldn’t have risked a loss of respectability merely for going to school.

  3. BenK is right. A partial answer to Arnold’s question is in Bill Bryson’s book HOME (or similar histories). Even in very wealthy homes prior to 1930, servants provided relatively direct care (dressing, bathing, serving, etc.). Most of them were simply the supply chain. They prepared huge amounts of food from scratch; cared for horses, buildings, and equipment; and made standard household items like toothpaste, soap, linens, shoe polish, etc. They carried buckets of water up and down stairs and repaired cartwheels.

    When we think of the wealthy today having servants, we don’t think of people on their property assembling cars, sewing bath towels, or hauling sewage. I live in a middle-class suburban house with no servants, and with the exception of lacking a nanny and cook, I’m better served than many 19th-century aristocrats.

  4. The main place “respectability” is denied is in where you live and what school your kid goes to. A community can’t say, “those people don’t act respectably, I don’t want my kid around them.” For one, the results of such an inquiry would probably have a disparate impact and therefore be “racist”. You can try to come up with complicated HOA standards, but that is an expensive method with a lot of deadweight loss.

    So all you’re really left with is discriminating on price. If you take out a big mortgage and live in an expensive area your probably around other high earners. And if someone is a high earner they probably have IQ, high time preference, sociability, conscientiousness, manners, etc. It’s an imperfect proxy for simply stating and enforcing community standards, and its very expensive. If your an average worker you can’t really afford to do it.

    There is a greater problem you allude to though. If we have a culture that doesn’t promote respectability (in fact one that considers is “square” and “uncool”) then you’re not going to get much of it. Less then you otherwise would in any event.

    Currently, our moral culture holds that individual preferences are the highest moral good. However, for many people their individual moral preferences are not “respectable”. They are crass, self-destructive, and bad for the community. In theory such ideas are frowned upon (at least if they are perceived as impacting others), but in practice the bar for judging a behavior is bad is so high almost nothing falls into it. There is a major reluctance to view certain aspects of human nature as “bad”, especially if said preference involves buying something or sticking your genitals somewhere.

    Perhaps more importantly, even if someone does want to be a judgmental curmudgeon (cue Charles Murray), if you have absolutely no idea why people behave the way they do or how to get them to change then your basically screaming at people without accomplishing anything. You’ve got to hate the sin but love the sinner, with part of that love being that you have to put the work into understanding how to help them rather then throwing a bunch of trite slogans at them.

  5. What is AMZN, GOOG, FB, etc if not 100,000 of paid servants for Bezos, Page/Brin, Zuckerberg, etc?

  6. What does character have to do with anything? This sounds like yesteryear was great because people pretended to care about Character. Then explain Henry 8th to me and even most Victorian men were born into ‘Character’ but were allowed some degree of sin in their lives. (women not so much.)

    In terms of servants, one viewing of Downton Abbey will explain why the number of servants is disappearing:

    1) Modern household capital good (cars, telephone, washing machines, vacuums) lowers the need for servants. You called on a phone instead of sending somebody 2 hours to send messages.
    2) There are plenty of small businesses that cater to “Elder care and child care” needs out there. Include landscaping, maid service or even dog walking. And living in California, the illegal immigrant angle is absolutely correct.
    3) It is not like the servant’s life was great. They had limited options to start families, earned low wages, and could be let go (to be homeless) at any point. Notice in Great Britian when factory wages were higher than many left the service to make their own lives.

  7. The leisure class isn’t what it used to be. Nobody goes off to stay at their wife’s cousin’s country estate for three weeks at a time anymore or hosts dinner parties four times a week. That’s what you needed all those servants for. Hire a cook and start entertaining more, Arnold!

  8. In the Victorian England that you are using as a model everything was heated with coal. This created massive amounts of ash and soot that someone had to clean up, let alone spend much time in tending the fire. This took an amazing amount of the servants time, especially as it was all powered by the servants muscle Now the environment is much cleaner so that houses and clothing do not get as dirty as they did in Victorian times. Moreover,the present day cleaners have the aid of vacuum cleaners, dish washers, washing machines, etc. to make their job easier and faster..

    This is a major reason the demand for servants could never reach the levels you are projecting from the mental model of Victorian England.

    In America there already is a big industry of maids and lawn boys that you can hire for a few hours and they will achieve the level of clean homes and clothes and well tended yards that required a crowd of servants working full time in Victorian England.

    • Some years ago, there was a British show shown on PBS called “The 1900 House,” or something like that, in which people lived for a week or so in an old house with circa-1900 home technology. A staggering amount of human hard physical labor was required for daily civilized living back then.

  9. The other point I omitted is that you do hire there people directly. Rather you hire a firm who have their employees come to your home and do the work. So the firm is taking on the responsibility of assuring the honesty and character of the people who come to your home. Moreover, they take on the responsibility of having the proper insurance and seeing that all the social security taxes and other taxes are deducted and properly paid.

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