site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16193 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

I really don't doubt your explanation, I just think it isn't the full picture.

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

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats