Blog

A quote from Peter Drucker’s book Adventures of a Bystander always struck me: 

“I once, as a boy, looked at the suits my grandfather had left behind — he had died in 1899 when my mother was fourteen. There was not one pocket in them except for the waistcoat fob pocket for the watch. ‘Your grandfather was a gentleman,’ my grandmother explained, ‘and gentlemen twenty years ago had a servant walking behind them, carrying; a gentleman did not use his hands.'”

The idea that servants would be so prevalent that some people wouldn’t need pants pockets… It’s just fascinating to me. Just as watch pockets long ago disappeared, because watches moved to the wrist (or phone), why would a tailor add pants pockets if the wearer had servants to carry whatever he needed?

Drucker’s example was from Austria more than one hundred years ago but while the commonality of servants has declined around the world, people still employ them.

Servant work is still common in places where wealth mixes closely with poverty. For nations with lots of wealth disparity it can be common for families to hire live-in servants from other parts of the country to do cooking, cleaning, and childcare. In other locations that don’t have enough of a low-income population for such work, they may offer a special work program to bring in servants — for example Hong Kong has a special minimum wage for domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia.

In other locations, history, attitudes, and ideas of fairness may prevent people doing similar work from being called or considered servants. In a strange way, fairness may also prevent the establishment of official servant work, which is not necessarily a better outcome. For example, for decades, middle class households in some parts of the US have used gray market groundskeeping and housecleaning labor from Mexico. As opposed to the official status in Hong Kong (which brings with it much higher requirements), in the US that status is gray market and with looser work expectations.

Go back in history and you find that even poor families had servants. But the long-term trend has been a decline in official servant jobs.

Was it likely or inevitable that servant eliminated work would later return (although in a different way)? And did the return of these jobs contribute to other problems?

Much of the servant work from a century ago is still common today, though the jobs are physically easier. And as the activities became easier, more former employers took on those servant jobs themselves. For example, a century or more ago, 10% to 30% of servants in the USA (depending on time) were employed as launderers and laundresses. Just that laundry work was 2.6% of total employment about a century ago. Today this type of work, depending on location, is at around 0.9% of employment. Much lower, but still suspiciously high, if you ask me.

The overall trend toward a decline in servants extended beyond the US. Britain and Germany saw a decline in servants as well.

Almost as many servants were employed as cooks. Again, cooking was a more difficult task in the past. Managing a fire-fueled stove, carrying water, cleaning, and preparing meals without automation and doing all this with limited refrigeration took much more effort than today. There’s some entertaining fiction written about that in the series A House for the Season.

But instead of the dramatic employment drop in clothes washing, people working as cooks and in food preparation went from being 1.4% (in 1900) to increase slightly to 1.6% in 2018. I believe this is because there are fewer benefits from scaling effects of technology in food preparation. Apart from pre-made processed foods, most meals today are still cooked in the moment. It requires a similar number of people-hours even though on the whole, food today is more plentiful, cheaper, and better than in the past.

The commonality of in-home servants taking care of a wide range of household needs has long been forgotten in most communities in the US. The reduction of these jobs and the need for former servants to be reemployed elsewhere was a major social change.

In the post-war decades in the US (though changing in recent years), just the idea of having a “servant” would seem strange or embarrassing in many social circles.

Even if having a servant doesn’t embarrass, having the wrong type of servant might. This is from Tom Wolfe’s 1970 book Radical Chic (p 9-10):

“[T]he current wave of Radical Chic has touched off the most desperate search for white servants. Carter and Amanda Burden have white servants. Sidney Lumet and his wife Gail, who is Lena Horne’s daughter, have three white servants, including a Scottish nurse. Everybody has white servants. And Lenny and Felicia [Bernstein, the conductor] — they had it worked out before Radical Chic even started… [T]hey have a house staff of three white South American servants… Can one comprehend how perfect that is, given… the times? Well, many of their friends can…”

The kind of servants one chooses sends signals other beliefs. This is probably true whether those servants are people or machines.

Also, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed…

Servants’ Returns

The external cooks and laundry “servants” from above — the modern-day dry cleaners and restaurants with pickup and delivery do something different than the in-home servants of the past. Today they support households where no one has time or the desire to do these jobs. 

Those servant jobs came back. Just in a different way.

With commercial washing machines and home pick-up and delivery, it became common — and made sense — to outsource laundry to others. When it comes to cleaning professional clothing — items that require dry cleaning, for example — just the equipment needed meant that the activity had to be shifted externally.

Food preparation was similar. The change was from servants cooking, to the family cooking at home, to the family eating out, to the family eating in food that was delivered.

A lot of convenience also came from processed or packaged foods picked up at grocery stores and clothes that do not require pressing and are more easily washed in home washing machines. But there are still large numbers of people employed in food services and laundry today — even if they are just doing delivery. Food and laundry have become conveniences many people take given the option.

Their efficiency means that the people who hire these activities can spend their time doing other things (even if that means they are working another job to pay for their rising cost of living). 

We haven’t even mentioned AI and robotics. But the future may be low-tech when it comes to servants.

Yes, AI agents and process automation gives us a form of computational servant. This is especially useful for what Drucker called “knowledge work.”

But if AI leads to job losses in knowledge work, then some of those who otherwise would have worked those  jobs may take on physical servant work.

That earlier decline of household servants was more about shifting where the work was done and who did it, rather than eliminating the work itself. Tasks formerly handled by live-in staff moved to outsourced gig workers and specialized businesses. While there are robot butlers in the works, there may instead be more humans doing personal servant work out of financial necessity.

Likewise, if immigration reform continues long-term in the US, then some of the population that did domestic work just won’t be there. Those jobs may go undone, at least for a while, will eventually be filled by those who would have earlier been uncompetitive for the roles. Or there may indeed be a trend toward true automation.

“As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.” Or, in German and with a similar rhyme, “Wenn die Münze im Kästlein klingt, die Seele in den Himmel springt.”

A friar named Johann Tetzel may or may not have said those words in the early 1500s, but the money he raised by selling indulgences helped rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica.

But what is an indulgence?
Continue reading “Secular Indulgences”

In the early 2000s while in Mexico City I ended up on the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. This is an enormous university, by any of the standards I know. The university had 370,000 students (as of 2023, but I believe a similar number 20 years ago). 

Walking around I met some students and followed them to a meeting of the Spartacist Youth League. 

I had no idea what that was, other than the name seemed interesting and the people were nice. 

Then the meeting started. After a long speech by the organizer (my Spanish was only good enough to understand half), students took turns standing and giving their own speeches. A few of the speeches were in English, which surprised me. The content was surprising too. One of the speeches was to persuade mainland China to abandon capitalist reforms. Another was in support of North Korea. 

As the meeting ended, my new friends asked me what I thought. 

“I’m not sure if I understood, but was there a speech in support of North Korea? In support of the government of North Korea? And the continuation of the revolution there?” Continue reading “The Youth”

Even if we’re not good at dealing with them, we tend to see a lot of systems surprises that arise from expansionism – the situations where something grows faster than expected, dangerous positive feedback loops, or good intentions with bad outcomes that negate the original good intentions.

So I was surprised when I recently learned about the way some forager hunter societies found to create stability in environments with both limited food (meaning successful hunters could accumulate status) but with few ways to store that food (limiting the ways others could accumulate status).

My main source here is a paper titled “Leveling the Hunter,” by Polly Wiessner.

Continue reading “Borrowing an Arrow”

Between the Current Thing and the Great American Safety Valve is another pathway to guiding desired social change. That of designing a grand new outcome, in its entirety, top-down, in one attempt. To decree a deity. Has it ever worked?

Or, to quote from Christopher Alexander, on “unselfconscious” and “selfconscious” cultures, why does it fail? From Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form:

“In slow-changing, traditional, unselfconscious  cultures, a form is adjusted soon after each slight misfit occurs…. Unselfconscious design is a process of slow adaptation and error reduction…. Nobody makes a picture of the context, so the picture cannot be wrong. But the modern, selfconscious designer works entirely from a picture in his mind – a conceptualization of the forces at work and their interrelationships – and this picture is almost always wrong. To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context – the extent of invention necessary is beyond the individual designer.”

Continue reading “Decreeing the Deity”

If you were plonked down in an unknown society, how would you identify their most remembered historical figures?

One guess would be to look at the notable physical memorials. Statues, plaques, and names on buildings.

These are the most noticeable, prominent names, and figures. But as someone who reads the plaques, I usually find they’re full of unrecognizable names and forgotten actions. If those pieces of history aren’t also present in the minds of passersby, a statue won’t educate them.

No, physical memorials are what yesterday’s committees and special interest groups decided was worthy to remember, or even, what should be remembered, even if it was worthy only of being forgotten. Continue reading “Dead Poet Societies”

A phrase in the recent Economist obituary about Ebrahim Raisi, the president of Iran, immediately struck me. 

According to the obituary, in the moments before his helicopter crashed, Raisi “stared sombrely” out of the window. And at the end of the obituary, “the president stared out of the window, unsmiling, as the fog closed in.”

I put it outside the ability of even US intelligence agencies to know that Raisi was staring at that moment and the way in which he stared. 

Quotes like this are a symptom of the way publications like the Economist and others project beliefs onto historical occurrences.

But this symptom is not new. When I read the Economist piece, I was also reminded of a section from the book What Do You Care What Other People Think? by physicist Richard Feynman. Continue reading “What People Think”

Well, is it?

In his book The Mansions of Philosophy, historian Will Durant has a chapter titled “Is Socialism Dead?” He wrote the book in 1929 but I think we could still seriously ask the question in 2024.

And for that matter, Durant had another chapter titled “The Breakdown of Marriage.” How long has it been reportedly breaking down?

But it was another chapter in his book, one titled “Is Progress a Delusion?,” that I thought most odd. 1929 was well into the 70 years of fast technological and social change (1870 to 1940) noted by Robert Gordon in The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Gordon claims that those 70 years of fast change might never be seen again in the history of the world.

So the question of whether progress was a delusion struck me as odd. Let’s  look at some of the Durant’s supporting examples:

Durant notes that the ancient Greeks thought of history as a “vicious circle” that repeated again and again. There was no mention of progress in the works of Xenophon, Plato, or Aristotle. Continue reading “Is Progress a Delusion?”

Six month ago I wrote a post called Ghost Shirts, Guilds, and Generative AI, which started with the infamous “Pause Giant AI Experiments” letter. In my post I looked at how groups historically tried to block or reverse change that the general public experienced as inevitable. But there are always options. I wrote about options for the situations where you don’t want that inevitable change:

“You could fight it indirectly and delay how fast the change happens. In that case, you will quietly subvert the system.

“You could fight it directly, even though you will probably lose. In that case, you are fighting for honor.

“Or, through a combination of luck and foresight you could build a system that shields you from the inevitable change taking over your corner or the world. In that case, you need to build and defend a boundary.”

Authors of the letter requested a pause of at least six-months in training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. It’s now six months after their letter, so I thought it was time for another look at the topic. Continue reading “The Strong Do What They Can (Addendum to Ghost Shirts, Guilds, and Generative AI)”

Are some things inevitable?

And if something is inevitable, what do you do if you don’t like it?

You could fight it indirectly and delay how fast the change happens. In that case, you will quietly subvert the system.

You could fight it directly, even though you will probably lose. In that case, you are fighting for honor.

Or, through a combination of luck and foresight you could build a system that shields you from the inevitable change taking over your corner or the world. In that case, you need to build and defend a boundary.

The Letter

The “Pause Giant AI Experiments” letter came as a shock to me. Not that someone wrote it, but that they wrote it yesterday.

Noteworthy signatories of that letter include Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and a number of business leaders and academics. The list also included Andrew Yang, whose 2020 presidential campaign platform included AI-fomented Universal Basic Income.

But I disagree with the pause argument because the bubble of history seems already to have popped.

Continue reading “Ghost Shirts, Guilds, and Generative AI”