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graemepyesterday at 2:15 PM2 repliesview on HN

They already do and always have. They never stopped hiring butlers (who are pretty well paid BTW), chefs, chauffeurs, maids, gardeners, nannies.....

The terminology may have changed a bit, but they still employ people to do stuff for them

One big difference is while professional class affluent people will hire cleaners or gardeners or nannies for a certain number or hours they cannot (at least in rich countries) hire them as full time live in employees.

There are some things that are increasing. For example employing full time tutors to teach their kids - as rich people used to often do (say a 100 years ago). So they get one to one attention while other people kids are in classes with many kids, and the poor have their kids in classes with a large number of kids. Interesting the government here in the UK is increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school which is the nearest we can get to what the rich do (again, hiring tutors by the hour, and self-supply within the household).

They also hire people to manage their wealth. I do not know enough about the history to be sure, but this seems to be also to be a return to historical norms after an egalitarian anomaly. A lot of wealth is looked after by full time employees of "family offices" - and the impression I get from people in investment management and high end property is that this has increased a lot in the last few decades. Incidentally, one of the questions around Epstein is why so many rich people let him take over some of the work that you would expect their family offices to handle.


Replies

pixl97yesterday at 5:11 PM

>increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school

There is a whole lot more nuance here than you're giving the topic.

There is one side that wants to give their kids a good education, they have the resources and the motivation to ensure they come out ahead.

They are not the problem, the problem is the other side of this coin.

Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organizations. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization and have little ability to work with the outside world at large. They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.

I still remember being a kid myself and having to educate these other kids my age because they were missing large chunks of important information about the world.

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ghaffyesterday at 2:45 PM

A lot of it is probably more part-time but, yes, people who are some definition of rich spend more money on people to do more work for them (cleaning, landscaping, accounting, etc.) Doesn't mean they don't do any of those things--and outsourcing some can be more effort than it's worth--but they don't necessarily cut their own lawn or do car repairs.

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