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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14434 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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Copying over @RenOS's post from the old thread because I want to talk about it:

Let’s assume you’re a car mechanic. You love your job, even though it is dirty, hot and physically straining. You go through a bookshop, and stumble over one book in particular: “Why being a car mechanic is great”. It explains the importance of the job for society, it talks about the perks, and so on. You look up the guy who wrote it and yep, he runs a car shop. You buy the book and recommend it to many of your friends, maybe even some teens who might consider the path.

Fast forward, the writer is on some talkshow. Somebody asks him how he handles all the grease. He reacts, uh no, of course he doesn’t get greasy, that’s his staff. He just really likes talking with customers. Maybe he does one car once in a while, if the work isn’t too hard and the car is really nice.

I can’t help but think this after reading Scott’s latest book review of “Selfish reasons to have more kids”. No, we don’t have nannies and housekeepers. In fact, almost nobody we know has them. Some have a cleaning lady coming … once per week, for an hour or so. Tbh, this significantly lowered my opinion of both Scott and Caplan. If you want a vision of a more fertile, sustainable future for the general population, it should not involve having your own personal staff. Two hours is nothing.

And I find this especially frustrating since I think it’s really not necessary; Yes having small kids is really exhausting - after putting the kids to bed around 8-9, my personal routine is to clean the house for two hours until 10-11 every day, and then directly go to bed with maybe an audiobook on (but often I’m too tired for even that, and enjoy falling to sleep directly) - but it’s doable, and the older the kids are, the less work they are, at least in terms of man-hours. The worst is usually over after around 3 yo. And the time before that in the afternoon can be a lot of fun.

At least for me, one of the biggest draws of kids is that it’s, to use poetic terms, “a glimpse of the infinite” that is available for everyone. Everyone wants to leave something behind, political activism is sold on making a change, careers are sold on becoming a (girl-)boss managing others. Yet, the perceptive (or, less charitably, those capable of basic arithmetic) will notice that only a tiny sliver of the population can ever cause the kind of innovation that really changes culture, or who can come into positions of substantial power over others.

Kids, however, everyone can have them. And they really are their own little person (especially my stubborn little bastards). And they will have kids as well, who will also carry forward some part of yourself. I’m not just talking genetics here, though that is a large part, the same will go for how you raise them. Unless you leave that to the nannies, I guess, but that’s your own fault.

I wouldn’t have written this since it’s mostly venting tbh, but I’ve seen some here mentioning wanting to discuss it, so I thought may as well start. What do you think?

Growing up I never thought I would be so rich as to own an automobile, or so poor as to lack a maid. -- Agatha Christie

Rich people should hire more domestic servants, it is the normal course of life that has been derailed by the universal American pretension of being Middle Class.

Wouldn't encouraging rich people to hire more staff to help them raise more kids be one of the most profoundly eugenic changes we could make to culture? Shouldn't we be happy that they are having more smart kids, and spending their money on that instead of whatever weird dumb crap they'd spend it on otherwise? By having more smart rich kids they're raising the IQ of the next generation, by paying child-oriented young women money as nannies and babysitters they are helping those young women accumulate resources that will hopefully lead to their reproductive success.

-- Being raised largely by a succession of nannies, maids, servants, babysitters, boarding school headmasters, and seeing your father as largely a distant Zeus-like figure is pretty normal throughout human history for much of the upper class. Most of the trad upper class of the old European Aristocracy imagined by the reactionary right was raised that way.

-- Domestic service is a clearly positive sum transaction in which people whose skills max out at watching babies or doing laundry or scrubbing floors get paid to do that, while people whose skills are much more highly paid avoid wasting their time on those tasks. An upper class that doesn't hire servants is in a sense failing the lower class by not providing that employment.

-- Related to this: Successive administrations have made Au Pair programs more onerous and difficult. This is the worst administration policy imaginable: Au Pairs are essentially the best immigrants imaginable, employed family oriented young women. There is no number of them you could bring in that would be harmful the country.

-- I just can't see where Nanny-Envy splits from envy for any other material good or marker of upper class status. This seems like a good place for Scott and his wife to put their resources, a better place than most other things rich people do with their resources! It seems odd to say that a rich person can do whatever they want to do with their money, freedom and capitalism and whatnot, but that it's wrong if they use that money to hire people to make their lives easier. Would the people who are jealous of Scott's nanny, which we'll say costs him $100k/yr, be similarly up in pitchforks if he owned an expensive house or car or bought his wife jewelry of the same value?

You look at pro-natalism from the PoV of an aristocrat (edit: not implying whether you yourself are one or not). I'm not an aristocrat; I want a pro-natalist vision for the general public. I'm already trying to live it, to some degree, and plan to carry on. Caplan's book gives off the impression that he does so, too, but in reality, he lives it in a way that is not generally attainable. He is not a good role model for such a vision. That is fine, I don't begrudge him his privilege in itself and I'm not at all against rich people having nannies. But it also means I have to look elsewhere, and I do dislike the wrong impression he gives.

Taxes, regulations, formal employment with fixed/limited hours, reduction of inequality, and Baumol's cost disease have pretty much wiped out any financial advantage for hiring help. It's pure luxury now, and expensive luxury at that. You can't pay someone $30/hr and spend the time saved at your $80/hr job. One, you're probably salaried and the marginal time won't pay at $80/hr. Two, you're paying that $30 out of post-tax money and the $80 will be taxed at your marginal rate, perhaps in the 45% range. Three, you'll have to pay payroll taxes on the $30 too. Four, it won't be $30 on the legal market, it'll be more. So no, you really can't afford help.

You can definitely make it work in the legal market in the UK, and the US has lower taxes and higher inequality, so it should work better in the US. Apart from your maths being off on the wage gap between hired help and the PMC, the crucial point is that in a city professional job the marginal hours are the highest-paying hours in the long run because they are the ones that get you promoted. Professionals who work 50 hour weeks earn a lot more over the length of a career than professionals who work 40 hour weeks, not just 25% more.

In the US, you have to pay for your employee's health insurance. This is cost prohibitive for all but the very wealthy.

By national law, not until you have 50 employees. State law may be more strict.

We have far fewer servants in part because we have far more labor-saving devices. We have a dishwasher and laundry machines with wrinkle free fabric(my wife doesn't have to spend much time ironing) and a microwave and a refrigerator so we can save leftovers and a vacuum cleaner with attachments that let us get behind furniture instead of moving it and etc etc. Domestic labor used to just take so so much more time.

But we also have much higher returns to specialization. A surgeon that’s invested five years and a residency has much higher relative marginal output than in decades prior.

Oh absolutely- and I’d imagine most surgeons don’t mow their own lawns, scrub their own toilets, etc.

I'm reminded here of Arnold Kling's "Where are the Servants?" from back in 2011:

In an economy where some folks are very rich and many folks are unemployed, why are there not more personal servants? Why don’t Sergey Brin and Bill Gates have hundreds of people on personal retainer?

Both in the comments there, and in responses I remember reading elsewhere, some posit cultural factors (I recall someone elsewhere recounting a passage from a history book talking about the culture clash when a European aristocrat visiting a wealthy American in the mid 19th century tried treating an employee like a European domestic servant). But plenty of people point out that the same services are still available to the rich, just in the form of specialized firms. To quote commenter "mark" on that page:

It’s a definitional issue – what is a “servant” vs “employee” vs “contractor”. Think of administrative assistants, personal trainers, personal chefs, cleaning services, car services, handymen, private plane pilots, personal book keeper, family wealth manager (the “family office”) and so on. Would you call them “servants”? I suspect not. But all they do is provide personal services to higher income people who have specialized their labor towards a lot of income. You can call them “small business owners”, “contractors or “employees”. The differences are modest. Maybe “servant” connotes livery, a small room in one person’s mansion etc. But in the old days “servant” was just another word for employee – “master – servant” relations was another phrase for the employment relationship.

And Bryan Willman:

I’m no billionare, though I have known a few.

But there is a squad of people who maintain my lawn – I don’t call them servants, or retainers, I call them the landscaping company, and I hire them for that specialized task like all the rest of their clients. The “manage the staff” bit that a butler (I think) would have done is dealt with by me hiring the company – that company’s management deals with everybody else.

Likewise the house cleaners (again, a company that specializes in that.)

No so different, the garage I take my cars to for maintence (they give me a ride to my office), my Doctor (who is no retainer but certainly provides personal medical services better than any King of England got until fairly recently.)

I do, in a sense, have “retainers” – but we tend to call them lawyers….

I have an accountant, whom I share with his other clients, but is very much paid to tend to a particular part of my affairs.

Bill Gates has private planes, whose pilots are most likely provided by a service like netjets even if the plane isn’t leased out. So there’s a “family transportation staff” even if none of them see a check signed directly by Bill.

You don't have a gardener, you hire a landscaping service to come by regularly. You don't have maids, you hire a cleaning service. Instead of a "lady's maid" taking care of your hair, you've got a hair dresser. You don't have a coachman, you call up a car service. And instead of nannies, you've got daycare.

From other comments there:

Dan Hill:

As Don Bordreaux points out that they probably buy many of these services in the marketplace, rather than employing people to provide those services as rich people used to do.

That’s a function of two things; how efficient and liquid markets now are at providing these services and the significant fixed costs (and legal risks) in being an employer in a modern regulatory environment.

Bottom line, I’m pretty sure one way or another these guys do not mow their own lawns, wash their own cars or clean their own toilets!

Tracy W:

I’m a bit puzzled by your terminology. The labour market is as much a market as the appliance market. Perhaps the main difference is standardisation – if I buy a dishwasher I can get a pretty good idea of the quality by recommendations and reviews of dishwashers, if I own a good dishwasher and I suddenly lose it (say to a home fire), I can buy another of the same brand with reasonable confidence that I’ll get another good quality one. But people differ more, my neighbour might employ a great maid, but her sister might be hopeless, and if I employ a fantastic maid and she quits for whatever reason, I can’t just go out and hire another version of her. (Not that I employ servants, but I have for example noticed far more quality differences between different waiters than between different dishwashers of the same brand.)

More from Bryan Willman:

“Help” is NEVER CHEAP, unless the help ALREADY KNOWS WHAT TO DO.

It’s not just minimum wage, or government regulations and burdens.

It’s that for very many tasks, I can do it faster than I can explain it. That’s not true of landscaping or house cleaning, but it is of many many other tasks. No matter how I value my time, paying somebody else to listen to me explain it and then do it, all more slowly than I could do it, is a loss. Worse when they have to ask me questions about it.

Now add management of people, the risks and hazards of having people around (being sued for something, having stuff stolen, people quarreling with one another, people forgetting their keys, etc.)

Note that most of these issues apply even if the wage rate is 0. That is, I would refuse to have people come “help me” for free.

The person who had a staff in Thailand (which was a pain) only had to put up with that due to lack of appliances and weirdness of the transport system. Who today would hire a dish washer for their household? Somebody to manually do what the clothes washer does?

…

Two more items to add to the thread.

1. My accoutants and lawyers give me a body of advice which can be summed up as “NO EMPLOYEES EVER”. There is a minimum cost associated with having an employee – a minimum (long) list of things one must do and do right to avoid fines, surprize costs, meddling, and sometimes jail. Hiring all services out to companies side steps all of that.

People who already have companies with employees have a much easier time adding a personal assistant using that same infrastructure.

2. A fair part of the current “rich” are folks who are geeks like me, often from modest backgrounds, who made fortunes in the PC revolution (and to a lesser extent the .com bubble.)

There’s a whole host of “fancy services” some of these new rich just don’t care about. Another set that involve human interactions they are uncomfortable with. (Remember, we’re talking programmer geeks here. We can be way stranger than most people realize.)

In short, hiring somebody directly is legally and financially scary, requires out-of-the-ordinary personal interactions, and may have low perceived effective returns.

The modern way is more efficient, taking advantage of specialization and centralization. (Of course one can make the case, as Yarvin once did, that this is the sort of area where increasing employment might be preferable to raw economic efficiency.) Further, the burden of finding and sorting out quality staff, of dealing with all the tax and regulatory burden of employment, the employer liability, et cetera, is borne by the landscaping/cleaning/daycare/whatever service instead of the rich person.

Thus, as Steve Sailer notes:

Life is better for rich people than ever before. They get all the advantages of being rich, including all the personal services they want when and where they want them, without the old-fashioned disadvantages like having to dress for dinner to set a good example and discussing things “not in front of the servants.”

Edit: here's a follow-up of sorts from Kling on his Substack "Servants to the Rich, 1/18" in 2022:

Some of the components of the twentieth-century middle class are declining . The percentage of the work force that can be called manufacturing production workers is down. Many mom-and-pop retail businesses have been defeated by Wal-Mart and Amazon.

Ten years ago, I wrote Where are the Servants?

In an economy where some folks are very rich and many folks are unemployed, why are there not more personal servants? Why don’t Sergey Brin and Bill Gates have hundreds of people on personal retainer?

Perhaps we are now living in the New Servants economy. Tyler Cowen has a series called “those new service-sector jobs.” My favorites include Coffin Whisperer and Wedding Hashtag Composer. The demand for such services can only come from people with excess wealth, and the supply comes from people who realize that their best source of income is to cater to those with excess wealth. This is very different from the age of mass consumption, when Henry Ford tried to manufacture cars that his workers could afford.

Actually, I think that the biggest engine of the trickle-down economy is the nonprofit sector. I don’t have data on this, but I suspect that if you ask the next 10 young professionals you meet where they work, at least 3 of them will reply that they work for nonprofits.

In the 1970s, the catch-phrase “petro-dollar recycling” became popular among international economic technocrats. The idea was that oil-rich countries accumulated substantial wealth, and this wealth would somehow find its way to poor countries, primarily being channeled as loans.

Today, I think that what we are seeing is “techno-dollar recycling.” Winners in technology and finance have accumulated substantial wealth. This wealth finds its way to young professionals, primarily being channeled through nonprofits.

(One interesting bit — for me — that really dates the piece is from the very end:

And here is Sam Harris interviewing, and slobbering over, young billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. Not once does Harris ask the question of why it is more ethical for Bankman-Fried to donate his money in an unaccountable way than it is for him to invest his money in profit-seeking business. I don’t count on Congress allocating resources wisely, so I don’t favor wealth taxes. But I don’t count on any billionaire allocating resources wisely without any feedback mechanism.

I find Bankman-Fried scary, and my guess is that I would find other billionaires with his approach to altruism just as scary. I don’t think that any one person has as clear a picture of morality as Bankman-Fried and Harris believe that they own.

Yeah, we saw how that turned out, didn't we?)

From "Servants Without Masters" by Harold Lee:

Singapore’s policy on guest workers would make for an interesting essay in its own right. Briefly, though, the government makes it easy for guest workers to come if they can find work in various industries, including domestic service. Once in, you get a visa for a couple years, which does not come with voting rights or many of the perks of citizenship. But because this system is so rigorous in ensuring that would-be guest workers are net economic positives, it’s politically feasible for Singapore to take in a lot of guest workers. Proportionally, Singapore’s guest worker population is equivalent to the US taking in about two-thirds the population of Mexico – with huge net benefits to them and their families.

Which is all well and good from a policy perspective, but did nothing for me when faced with the reality of interacting with my host family’s maid. There, in the flesh, was a middle-aged Filipino woman who was just there to attend to my needs, as a guest of the family. I was expected to ask her to wash my clothes, for example, and prepare whatever I wanted for breakfast. And for all my admiration of the political needle-threading of Singaporean immigration policy, this situation completely freaked me out. It made me intensely uncomfortable to have someone hanging around just to attend to my needs, and tell them to do menial chores for me.

And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me. My emotional reaction was not really about being an American with sturdy frontier values of self-sufficiency. I was perfectly happy to farm out menial work – as long as it was done by a faceless worker in a uniform, rather than a single person I was expected to have a relationship with. This incongruence was one of the major lessons I took from my trip to Singapore. Even after I returned to the Land of the Free, I kept being struck by the ease with which I blithely accepted the service of servants as long as they were framed as business transactions with dehumanized service workers.

And I noticed that the same blind spot applied in the other direction, in people’s attitudes towards submission towards superiors. The very word “submissiveness” tends to raise people’s hackles in our culture, but in fact we are happy to accept it – if and only if it’s submission to a faceless institution, rather than to someone’s personal authority. In an old-school apprenticeship, the master essentially runs your life for seven years and can bring you back if you run away, possibly with a flogging for good measure. This seems incredibly coercive today, and is probably one of the reasons apprenticeship and other forms of demanding mentorship are in short supply. But at the same time, it’s considered completely unremarkable for someone to go into nondischargeable debt to go to grad school and work hard to satisfy every whim of their professors. For a more barbed example, it’s considered entirely unremarkable for a woman to be submissive to her boss, but sounds terribly suspect to expect her to be equivalently submissive to her husband.

The very rich do still have servants, though the job titles may be different. It's just that you need to be (a) extremely rich and (b) accustomed to the notion of having servants (or staff). Gates may be extremely rich, but he did not grow up with servants in the house.

Employment agencies aren't a new thing, they were around in the 19th century where people looking for domestic and service positions would hand in their details and clients would seek servants from such, because the idea was (pace that comment about dishwashers versus maids) they would be pre-vetted and a reputable agency would provide good servants.

Thanks for putting this together!

A fair part of the current “rich” are folks who are geeks like me, often from modest backgrounds, who made fortunes in the PC revolution (and to a lesser extent the .com bubble.) There’s a whole host of “fancy services” some of these new rich just don’t care about.

This is the part that I'm really pointing at and asking why. I think a lot of the cost, trust, complication, regulation, and availability would become soluble if there were more desire. If my entire law school graduating class (sub med school, MBA, or first years at McKinsey as you prefer) were looking for nannies, word would get around, there would be a roster of trustworthy women to do that kind of work that my peers would be able to pass to me in the same way they once passed me lists of classes and outlines and apartments to rent.

If there were a desire on the part of the upper-PMC to hire large numbers of domestics, then we would see the market and regulations alter to accommodate their desires.

But I posit that there is a market-irrational lack of desire to hire domestics, or even a desire to avoid doing so that feeds into the cost disease and lack of choice and poor options all around.

Zooming back in to childcare in particular: annual cost of daycare can run north of $25,000 per child per year. Multiply that by 2-3 kids, and you quickly get close to the cost of a $20/hr full time employee!

So there should be more of a market than there is. This is a soluble problem.

But I look around at my peers in Dual-High-Income/Prestige households, young couples that met at a T10 law school and both work high end jobs, and what I'm seeing isn't that they don't want or don't "care about" the "fancy services" of domestic help. What I'm seeing is a weird cultural tendency to lean towards services and daycares regardless of cost, by equating daycare to "school" (regardless of cost); while an antipathy exists towards having a nanny, something like having a desire to have a slave.

To some extent I do think that the managers and pimps of service providers largely act as very profitable sin-eaters of the PMC, taking on the cost of hiring and firing and disciplining employees. But we see that really break down with child care, where providers are paying employees peanuts and charging families gold, and there doesn't seem to be a will or opportunity to cut out the middlemen.

For hiring an FTE, keep in mind that you are typically on the hook for all the fun things like healthcare and retirement plans that you never see the costs of as an employee. Those can run hideously expensive. It’s possible to hire someone under the table, but there are risks associated because it is quite literally illegal.

I looked into nanny costs, and in my state, it really isn’t $20/hr. And this is true for most affluent states, to the best of my knowledge. A good daycare built around a tight-knit and inherently somewhat exclusive community will almost always run you cheaper, like the church-associated ones that others have mentioned. (I saved significant cash going from 3/wk to 5/wk from a downmarket nanny to one such daycare.) I think the arbitrage is way less than your instincts are telling you.

I think the obvious answer is that it smacks of slavery.

I looked hard into starting a daycare a couple years ago precisely because the economics were so insane that it seemed like an obvious opportunity. Demand is high and supply is low. The rates are unbelievable.

My findings: The regulations suck but are manageable. The problem is finding any women to do the job. Very few seem willing. The success stories I found leveraged hiring from within a church and so on.

Recruiting for childcare services, if the service is reputable, means that there are basic qualifications the staff must have. If it's not reputable, they'll hire any warm body. The pitfall for workers in both cases is cost-cutting. Labour is a big cost, so trying to keep wages costs down is important in order to be affordable for parents. But if the wages are too low, it's not worth working there. And if it's a shady operation, it'll pay even worse, have higher child-to-staff ratios (even than legal), and the money goes into the pockets of the owners rather than on the premises and equipment for the kids.

People legitimately complain about the high price of childcare, but it's a job and you have to pay employees a reasonable wage. And just brushing it off as "anyone can do it" - well, there's Scott's entire piece about how he can only handle a couple of hours a day taking care of his own kids.

Men are just not generally suited to caring for small children. Last I checked, the highest rate of antidepressant usage by sex and profession was men working with small children, and it was more than twice the next item on the list.

I don't know why people have such a hard time believing that women are psychologically better-suited than men for caring for small children.

Last I checked, the highest rate of antidepressant usage by sex and profession was men working with small children, and it was more than twice the next item on the list.

I mean, have you ever tried throwing a toddler over your shoulder and spinning him around while he giggles? It's pretty great.

I can totally see how childcare at daycare scale with daycare constraints would grind me down. I also wonder how much the current rules are the way they are because they're written by and for women. And I'm also curious how much the depression you refer to is increased or decreased by selection effects.

To play devil's advocate, how much of that antidepressant use is the combination of 1) everyone assuming they're deviants and 2) tail effects from an extremely small population?

I'd be interested in seeing the difference(if it's been measured) between male elementary school teachers and little league coaches.

Devil's advocacy is fair, but this is one of those things where it occurs to me as terminally reddit-brained to ask for a source (not that you did). Someone would have to be so incredibly propagandized and blind to what's right in front of his face to doubt the matter.

More comments

I don't know why people have such a hard time believing that women are psychologically better-suited than men for caring for small children.

Because the follow-up question is "are men better-suited psychologically to certain tasks?", and the answer, "yes", strikes at the heart of how Western society's nobles (women as class) justify their current position as nobility.

Last I checked, the highest rate of antidepressant usage by sex and profession was men working with small children, and it was more than twice the next item on the list.

Possible source (tables 3 and 4)

ProfessionIncrease to chance of
taking antidepressant (%)
for men		…for women
Not human services+0+0
Human services+22+0
Human services:
Education professionals		+9−8
Human services:
Education professionals:
Secondary-school teachers		+8−7
Human services:
Education professionals:
Preschool teachers		+20−2
Human services:
Education professionals:
Childcare workers		+72+7
Human services:
Social workers		+62+19
Human services:
Social workers:
Not benefit administrators
or social care workers		+111+27

Domestic labor is broadly unaffordable. When I was looking for a nanny the going rate was $30-40/hour. Between unemployment and demand I'd expect the market to sort this out, but the underclass is apparently comfortable enough, and regulation enough of a hindrance, that it doesn't happen. The only people I know with full-time nannies are single moms who make hundreds of thousands per year.

Yes, and your mother took care of you when you were sick. But if you are sick and go to a hospital and have nurses looking after you, they don't do it on the same basis as "well my mom gave me chicken soup and aspirin when I was ill, anyone can do this, why pay the big bucks to have someone just give me soup and aspirin?"

But people go to the hospital for a different set of problems than they're fed chicken soup by their mothers, as evidenced by the fact that children with mothers still end up in the hospital at times.

With childcare it does seem like we're looking for simple skills: I'm sure some people would want nannies that are teaching their kids algebra, but there's clearly a demand for "keep them fed and clean and away from electrical sockets" level of childcare.

The bigger issue is I think trust: the actual tasks are simple but having someone reliable enough to do them every time, not cut corners, and not take opportunities to enrich themselves with access to the family home is a little more difficult when we're trying to bring costs down.

You don't want the type of people who are unemployed to take care of your kids though.

The people you want taking care of your kids are unaffordable since they've better options. The market can't really solve this for the middle class. The best you can do is usually hiring teenage girls from middle class+ families, but they can't do that full time for obvious reasons.

There's a lot of middle ground between "unaffordable except for the hyper rich" and "just skip your starbucks sometimes and you too can have it."

E.g. once a week for four hours is ~50*4*35 = $3500 7000/yr - considerably less than many people spend on vacation or dining out. I think Scott's point is more that he was failing to acknowledge that even that level was possible for him. Even if you drop that to once a month, it's still a real quality of life change to be able to recharge somehow without the kid as needed.

Of course there's something to be said for living near family and not needing to pay for this, but that's a harder option to make possible for many people than budgeting for occasional help.

E.g. once a week for four hours is ~50 * 4 * 35=$3500/yr

I'm getting $7000, which is almost 10% of the median household income. (Also how the heck can people be making that little?)

Also how the heck can people be making that little?

By having less and lower quality stuff than you.

It's more that I pay something like $70k in rent and my house is... acceptable, in an acceptable neighborhood. Granted this is a very nice town to live in and commutable to Silicon Valley, but still.

Shitboxes in the ghetto are, by world standards- to say nothing of historical standards- perfectly livable, and most towns are far cheaper than yours even for nice houses in nice neighborhoods.

I'm getting $7000, which is almost 10% of the median household income. (Also how the heck can people be making that little?)

I don't understand the question? I make $16/hr plus commissions which amount to about $1/hr, so approximately $17/hr, and work 4 days a week in eight hour shifts for a total of 32 hours. That works out to $2,176 a month or $28,288 a year. My yearly expenses are mostly room and board, for which I pay $1,300 a month or $15,600 a year. Let's add a few more thousand for things like gas (about half a tank at Costco twice a month), car insurance (legal minimum), etc. and round up my budget to $20,000 a year. That still leaves me with a healthy surplus to add to my bank account every year.

I don't know what a "household" is, but if I was married to a woman who made a similar amount as me, that'd bring us up to about $60,000/yr, and of course we could share the same room.

I make less. But then, my annual expenses, including housing, come to around $20,000 per year. It helps living in a low cost of living area.

Oops, corrected. 10% is a harder sell, but the general point stands. Knock it back to every-other-week for 5% then.

(Also how the heck can people be making that little?)

Yeah. Slightly less crazy if you look at HCoL, e.g. 95k for California or 141k for San Francisco, but of course then your nanny cost would go up. I suspect $35/hr will do nicely in most of California, but haven't looked into it.

I mean this is fine and all, but the angle that frames this as aw-shucksy, give yourself permission to spend on hired-help advice for the masses

e.g.

Instead it had a vibe: stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions. So I put out a classified ad for babysitters and got two people I really like. Things are a little better now. I can even write research-filled book reviews again!

He is calling 'being wealthy enough to outsource parenting' a vibe

I mean, if you can afford it, go for it. I get the impression that the new babysitters do different times to fill out the childminding over the entire week, not that he has his wife and a nanny and two babysitters all minding the kids at the same time.

It's definitely "yeah this only applies to a few people" but I think the important thing for him and his wife was "we can afford this, so why not? we are not failing as parents if we pay for help" encouragement that Caplan gave him.

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