Uncouth Reflections

Fenster writes:

The normally sensible Walter Russell Mead sometimes leaves me scratching me head.  As with this article about whether we are headed towards a Downton Abbey economy.

Mead notes the growing tendency of those with the resources to outsource services.  Some of that is garden variety handyman stuff on the part of those that are only moderately well off: paying people to assemble IKEA furniture, for instance.  The truly wealthy are unlikely to buy IKEA in the first place.  But Mead also notes that

the WSJ reports that demand for full-time live-in domestic help is growing rapidly, including for chefs, housekeepers, estate managers, and even maids and butlers. The return of butlers and maids is attention grabbing enough, but the story is full of many other eye-popping details. The pay, for instance, can rise as high as 200,000 dollars thousand a year for a butler, and some agencies say families have begun to build separate kitchens in their houses for the kitchen staff in order to maintain family privacy.

What to make of this?  Here, Mead falls back on that hoary argument: the magic of the market.

As manufacturing and clerical jobs decline, creating enough demand for service labor will push wages up to good levels.

Yes, so as inequality increases to Edwardian levels, we are not to be concerned because it heralds its own opposite, courtesy of that magic market.

I am somewhat more persuaded, and certainly far more worried, that Tyler Cowen is right, that inequality will continue to increase, and that those who are not rich will be living on rice and beans.  Whatever you make of that argument, it is more plausible than arguing, as does Mead, that rising inequality leads to greater equality.  That is the opposite of an Occam’s Razor contention.

IMHO a stable democracy needs a thriving, not a hollowed out, middle class.

I also find it amusing how other right-of-center voices deal with the Downton phenomenon.  Over at Instapundit, Mead’s article warrants a link and a lengthy excerpt.  But what does Reynolds make of it?  Here’s his revealing conclusion:

There’s nothing dishonorable about domestic service, but this isn’t the Hope And Change we were promised. Then again, they don’t call him President Goldman Sachs for nothing.

To unpack this: “I don’t want to say anything bad about domestics since I tilt right and a lot of folks on my side use ’em.  But maybe maybe there’s something unsettling about it, and maybe maybe I’ll give you that.  But if there is a problem, it’s Obama’s fault.”

This is exactly the kind of spin–I am in favor of what helps my side–that I detest.  Lurking under the surface, perhaps, is a shared distaste for a return of servitude, especially if it is a marker for a hollowed-out middle class.  It would be good if both right and left could talk about that.  But that would require some sort of conversation between progressives and Tea Partiers, and we can’t have that.