From Walter Russell Mead:
Pundits across the spectrum were enraged this week by a consulting firm that teaches nannies to cook quinoa. The NYT published a piece
Wednesday profiling Stephanie Johnson and Dan Yashiv, a couple who
hired a “nanny consulting firm” to teach their nanny to cook more
“refined” meals for their daughter. Matt Yglesias has a good roundup of
the outraged reactions, and offers some thoughts about what’s fueling
the rage (that he himself shares) about these kind of luxury service
jobs:
A big problem here arises because this kind of service work strikes us as servile in
a way that proper working class jobs on assembly lines or in factories
isn’t. If you squint at it right, you can make the mark + marc saga look
like a happy story. Instead of whining about “skills mismatch” and
unemployment, here are Yashiv and Johnson acting like pro-social
employers and investing in the skills of their workforce. Not
only will little Erela Yashiv get her fancy dinners, but the nanny will
be able to command a [higher] wage in future years now that she’s a
super-fancy nanny instead of a regular old
heat-up-the-box-of-mac-and-cheese nanny.
Yet I seriously doubt anyone sees it this way. In a factory context, you have kaizen. In a domestic employment context, you have obnoxious and fussy rich people.
The article doesn’t release the nanny’s salary, but if it’s anything comparable to what similarly situated people are making,
she’s being well-compensated. And, as Yglesias points out, she’s
learning new skills. So Yglesias must be right that people are offended
by the apparent servility that these kind of service industries hint at,
because there’s nothing much else there to take offense at. People fear
that if these kind of service jobs become an increasingly important
part of the American economy—as we’ve argued at length they will—we could be doomed to a future of kowtowing to the rich.
Those kind of fears have a long history. At the beginning of the
industrial age, both the left and sentimentalists denounced factory work
as servile and destructive, compared to the honest independence of the
family farmer. The same factory system that pundits are now favorably
contrasting to the evolving service economy was itself expected to
result in permanent subservience. And just as those predictions didn’t
come true, the wailing and gnashing of teeth about an economy centered
around dog walkers and personal chefs and wedding planners will also
turn out to be unjustified in retrospect.
In fact, what’s likely to happen in the information age is that
services once reserved for a privileged few will increasingly be
available for larger numbers of people. There will be more and less
expensive personal chefs, for example, but more people than ever will be
able to eat high class meals. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing,
especially when you consider the appalling dullness and deadening conformity of those industrial jobs and social conditions that people are apparently so nostalgic for.
It is not the summit of human social organization to create an
economy where millions of people spend their working lifetime making
mechanical motions that a robot could replace. And serving people is not
necessarily servile or demeaning. Jobs that involve varied tasks and
using the worker’s talent and social skills to enhance and enrich other
lives are not bad lives....MORE
