{"id":44119,"date":"2018-07-12T06:00:43","date_gmt":"2018-07-12T10:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=44119"},"modified":"2024-06-13T17:58:52","modified_gmt":"2024-06-13T21:58:52","slug":"and-that-is-how-the-flat-century-dies-upstairs-downstairs-isnt-just-our-past-its-our-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/07\/12\/and-that-is-how-the-flat-century-dies-upstairs-downstairs-isnt-just-our-past-its-our-future\/","title":{"rendered":"“And that is how the Flat Century dies. Upstairs, downstairs isn\u2019t just our past, it\u2019s our future”"},"content":{"rendered":"

ESR<\/a> looks in his crystal ball and finds a much less egalitarian future lurking just ahead of us:<\/p>\n

I think we all better hope we get germ-line genetic engineering and really effective nootropics real soon now. Because I think I have seen what the future looks like without these technologies, and it sucks.<\/p>\n

A hundred years ago, 1918, marked the approximate end of the period when even middle-class families in the U.S. and Great Britain routinely had servants. During the inter-war years availability of domestic servants became an acute problem further and further up the SES<\/acronym> scale, nearly highlighted by the National Council on Household Employment\u2019s 1928 report on the problem. The institution of the servant class was in collapse; would-be masters were priced out of the market by rising wages for factory jobs and wider working opportunities for women (notably as typists).<\/p>\n

But there was a supply-side factor as well; potential hires were unwilling to be servants and have masters \u2013 increasingly reluctant to be in service even when such jobs were still the best return they could get on their labor. The economic collapse of personal service coincided with an increasing rejection of the social stratification that had gone with it. Society as a whole became flatter and much more meritocratic.<\/p>\n

There are unwelcome but powerful reasons to expect that this trend has already begun to reverse.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

But now it\u2019s 2018. Poverty cultures are reaching down to unprecedented levels of self-degradation; indicators of this are out-of-wedlock births, rates of drug abuse, and levels of interpersonal violence and suicide. Even as American society as a whole is getting steadily richer, more peaceful and less crime-ridden, its lowest SES tiers are going to hell in a handbasket. And not just the usual urban minority suspects, either, but poor whites as well; this is the burden of books like Charles Murray\u2019s Coming Apart<\/em>. J. D. Vance\u2019s Hillbilly Elegy<\/em>, and the opioid-abuse statistics.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard not to look at this and not see the prophecies of The Bell Curve<\/em>, a quarter century ago, coming hideously true. We have assorted ourselves into increasing cognitive inequality by class. and the poor are paying an ever heavier price for this. Furthermore, the natural outcome of the process is average IQ and other class differentiating abilities abilities are on their way to becoming genetically locked in.<\/p>\n

The last jaw of the trap is the implosion of jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled labor. Retail, a traditional entry ramp into the workforce, has been badly hit by e-commerce, and that\u2019s going to get worse. Fast-food chains are automating as fast as political morons pass \u201cliving wage\u201d laws; that\u2019s going to have an especially hard impact on minorities.<\/p>\n

But we ain\u2019t seen nothing yet; there\u2019s a huge disruption coming when driverless cars and trucks wipe out an entire tier of the economy related to commercial transport. That\u2019s 1 in 15 workers in the U.S., overwhelmingly from lower SES tiers. What are they going to do in the brave new world? What are their increasingly genetically disadvantaged children going to do?<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s where we jump into science fiction, because the only answer I can see is: become servants. And that is how the Flat Century dies. Upstairs, downstairs isn\u2019t just our past, it\u2019s our future. Because in a world where production of goods and routinized service is increasingly dominated by robots and AI, the social role of servant as a person who takes orders will increasingly be the only thing that an unskilled person has left to offer above the economic level of digging ditches or picking fruit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ESR looks in his crystal ball and finds a much less egalitarian future lurking just ahead of us: I think we all better hope we get germ-line genetic engineering and really effective nootropics real soon now. Because I think I have seen what the future looks like without these technologies, and it sucks. A hundred […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7,15,13],"tags":[262,119,1235,95,96,91],"class_list":["post-44119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-history","category-technology","category-usa","tag-culture","tag-drugs","tag-esr","tag-jobs","tag-minimumwage","tag-poverty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-btB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44120,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44119\/revisions\/44120"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}