I love this kind of economic analysis of cultural trends and I’d eagerly consume more of this kind.
I didn’t realize that the reason why house servants largely disappeared in the first half of the 20th century was because household appliances were partial substitutes for them! But that makes perfect sense!
I thought, and a very brief google confirms, that the causality ran the other way. The appliances offered a solution to “the servant problem”. The servant class was going away because of the First World War. In the UK a lot of servants were called up (and their employers nobly made do with a reduced staff for their country’s sake), not just for soldiers, but to work in the factories and on the farms. They would do a day’s work for a day’s pay and the rest of their time was their own. Afterwards, they wouldn’t go back to life in service. They might not be making much more in a job than they had in service, but they had freedom. If you’ve heard the saying, “you just can’t get the staff”, that’s the era it comes from. So does the song “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After they’ve seen Paree)”. Then the Second World War and “Rosie the Riveter” did the same thing again.
Servants these days are a much higher class of luxury than in Victorian times, when even middle class families would often have a live-in general housekeeper.
I don’t know much of the history, but they may not have had such options. A servant in search of another job was absolutely dependent on a good reference from their employer, and if it didn’t work out, there was no public safety net. The government cut out such difficulties by organising their assignment and relocation. Jobs were there due to the war effort, not just production for the war, but women replacing men who had gone off to fight.
Yeah, the appliances are just particularly salient milestone in a general trend. Economists call this trend cost disease.
I’m currently reading a book about mid-20th-century Japan where labor was so cheap that high-end service workers had their own maids. It’s like the servants had servants.
I think you meant Baumol’s cost disease: when productivity in manufacturing rises and new jobs there appear, potential service workers chase those more lucrative jobs, and all the salaries in the service sector increase.
It’s the same reason emigrants to the West from less-developed economies, where the effect is less prominent, are usually surprised by expensiveness of haircuts, extreme expensiveness of dental medicine and low quality of manicure. Dentists and nail masters now offer much better services than 50 or 100 years ago but they work just as slowly, and the hairdressers don’t even have the former benefit.
P. S.
In many Indian cities, as I’ve read, middle or upper-middle class still can afford servants as of now, but that’s likely to disappear soon
I love this kind of economic analysis of cultural trends and I’d eagerly consume more of this kind.
I didn’t realize that the reason why house servants largely disappeared in the first half of the 20th century was because household appliances were partial substitutes for them! But that makes perfect sense!
I thought, and a very brief google confirms, that the causality ran the other way. The appliances offered a solution to “the servant problem”. The servant class was going away because of the First World War. In the UK a lot of servants were called up (and their employers nobly made do with a reduced staff for their country’s sake), not just for soldiers, but to work in the factories and on the farms. They would do a day’s work for a day’s pay and the rest of their time was their own. Afterwards, they wouldn’t go back to life in service. They might not be making much more in a job than they had in service, but they had freedom. If you’ve heard the saying, “you just can’t get the staff”, that’s the era it comes from. So does the song “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After they’ve seen Paree)”. Then the Second World War and “Rosie the Riveter” did the same thing again.
Servants these days are a much higher class of luxury than in Victorian times, when even middle class families would often have a live-in general housekeeper.
This seems surprising. Did servants not know that they had better-for-them options before WWI? What caused that ignorance and how was it stable?
I don’t know much of the history, but they may not have had such options. A servant in search of another job was absolutely dependent on a good reference from their employer, and if it didn’t work out, there was no public safety net. The government cut out such difficulties by organising their assignment and relocation. Jobs were there due to the war effort, not just production for the war, but women replacing men who had gone off to fight.
Yeah, the appliances are just particularly salient milestone in a general trend. Economists call this trend cost disease.
I’m currently reading a book about mid-20th-century Japan where labor was so cheap that high-end service workers had their own maids. It’s like the servants had servants.
I think you meant Baumol’s cost disease: when productivity in manufacturing rises and new jobs there appear, potential service workers chase those more lucrative jobs, and all the salaries in the service sector increase.
It’s the same reason emigrants to the West from less-developed economies, where the effect is less prominent, are usually surprised by expensiveness of haircuts, extreme expensiveness of dental medicine and low quality of manicure. Dentists and nail masters now offer much better services than 50 or 100 years ago but they work just as slowly, and the hairdressers don’t even have the former benefit.
P. S.
In many Indian cities, as I’ve read, middle or upper-middle class still can afford servants as of now, but that’s likely to disappear soon
Thank you for the market research feedback!