alt Hacker NewsNot in the least. Today in the US less than 1% of the population works as home service. In victorian England it was around 10%.
The US is a powerful "empire", but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.
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Nowadays service jobs are externalized. Try to compare how big chunk of the population are in service industries now and then.
Back then they had a private coachman and now you have an independent contractor with the Uber app.
21% of US jobs are service occupations. All you've really done is establish that cars exist so the wealthy have deemed it no longer necessary to allow filthy peasants to live in their mansions.
That's an unusual measure -- and I like it. I wonder what those percentages are in very wealthy communities in America, e.g. Greenwich and surroundings, Nantucket, Hamptons plus labor communities west.
I'm not sure that demonstrates anything. That just demonstrates that people work different jobs than they did back then; it doesn't tell us anything about wealth distribution.