> 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.
In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of societal and legal inequality. That isn’t the case when ‘being served’ by waitstaff or a barista, who can both walk across the street and afford the same level of service you got from them at a different establishment.
>And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me.
In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of societal and legal inequality. That isn’t the case when ‘being served’ by waitstaff or a barista, who can both walk across the street and afford the same level of service you got from them at a different establishment.