50 years ago, Germany also still had a popular saying "Eigentum verpflichtet" which I would translate as "ownership creates a duty". In short, people who owned companies, large plots of land, or other infrastructure were expected to spread their wealth by creating jobs.
Nowadays, the spirit still lives on somewhat in the fact that we have free public scenic hiking trails through what looks like very expensive private property. When the land was privatized, the government made it a condition that the hiking trail would remain for the general public to enjoy, and so it did.
I believe Vietnam still has a similar system, too, in that the government will calculate how much jobs a foreign company needs to create, based on their annual revenue. It's one of the reasons why Korean milk tea shops tend to be crammed full with 10-20 schoolgirl employees.
"private property is subordinate to the common good" is even in our "Constitution" (grundgesetz, literally foundational law), although it has been neutered by precedent and other laws.
The right of way is a concept which is still strong in a bunch of countries, including England and famously Norway where "Allemansretten" allows "all men" the right to camp in public spaces.
I personally find these habitual rights an interesting expression of positive freedom, laws and customs limiting the power of those that have a lot of it (i.e., property owners) to monopolise and exploit, thus creating a public good. I think we should have more of it, especially in the physical but also the digital realm.
Particularly, the concept of adversarial interoperability https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera... is connected, it would be a different world of Google, Facebook and any other platform were obligated to make their internal APIs and documentation available at cost+a legislated profit margin do anyone can be compatible with them.
Scotland is a much better example of "right to roam" than England.
Very generally, England allows a right to cross property on foot. But, that doesn't include camping, cycling, etc. The list of allowances is relatively short and exceptions relatively long.
Scotland allows all a lot more freedom to roam, including cycling and camping. I don't recall exactly how it's codified, but it's approximately a default right to access, with limited exceptions (close proximity to homes, farms with active lambing, estates during hunting season, stuff like that).
> The right of way is a concept which is still strong in a bunch of countries, including England and famously Norway where "Allemansretten" allows "all men" the right to camp in public spaces.
This is like saying France and the US both have freedom of speech. Technically true but the difference in how strong the laws are between Nordic countries and England is enormous.
This is a great post. When I moved away from the United States, and started to learn -- in earnest -- about other countries, I was surprised to learn about "freedom of speech" in other highly-developed, liberal democracies. Two specific things come to mind: slander/defamation/blasphemy and pro-Nazi (German National Socialist) material. Initially, I was aghast -- "Why isn't 'everything' allowed?". Over time, I began to understand that each nation and society needs to define their own version of "freedom of speech" -- and what it means to be a liberal democracy. As a good example: Read the Wiki page for Geert Wilders. He is a hateful person who says many dreadful, discriminatory things. More than once, he has lost court trials in Nederlands over hate speech. I recall once that he was fined zero euros. Complex! And, there are some nations where it feels like they voluntarily use "freedom of speech" less than Europe/US/CAN/AU/NZ/SouthAmerica -- like East Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea) and Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia -- don't get me started about Singapore!) And South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, etc.) are so culturally diverse and complex that I cannot begin to generalise.
You wrote: <<Technically true but the difference in how strong the laws are between Nordic countries and England is enormous.>>
I am sure you were thinking of a specific example when you wrote this post! Can you share it? It would be nice to learn.
It's surreal as an American watching a couple of UK photographers on YouTube just stroll through random gates and cross land without any locks or "No Trespassing" signs. Meanwhile, I got a shotgun shoved in my face for walking too close for the comfort of the owner of a house on the other side of a highway's shoulder. I'm pretty sure brandishing is a crime in Georgia, but I was a teen and wasn't about to argue with someone who could end me with a twitch.
I once read this is actually tied to the degree of agriculture vs animal raising.
Because animals are easily stolen, cultures around animals as food, tend to consider weapon ownership essential, and tend to think highly of self defense and whatnot.
These same cultures also tend to believe strongly in "hospitality", in the sense that if you have guests you need to take care of them and whatnot, because you might need to be someone guest too.
Meanwhile plant-based cultures tend instead to favor things like schedules, calendars, seasons, festivals and so on, because this is what essential to their food instead, meanwhile it doesn't matter if someone is strolling in your land when it is not harvest season, the person won't steal your food.
> 50 years ago, Germany also still had a popular saying "Eigentum verpflichtet" which I would translate as "ownership creates a duty". In short, people who owned companies, large plots of land, or other infrastructure were expected to spread their wealth by creating jobs.
> When the land was privatized, the government made it a condition that the hiking trail would remain for the general public to enjoy
Here in Massachusetts, our trespassing laws only apply to "improved" land. So you are free to transit any wilderness areas, even if they are privately owned, and even if "no trespassing" signs are posted. Of course, nobody knows this or follows it. People regularly call the police, who are just as ignorant on the law, because people are on their land.
I guess this is the reason in Germany it is very common to run your own business when you are employed while countries like India most of companies add very brutal moonlighting clause in job agreement.
Very true currently in Kenya, if you integrate at all. People don't usually live in isolation, they are part of a local community and it's natural and expected that they share opportunities and risks with their community. If you can afford to, you are expected to hire other people to do things that save you time and energy, distributing your wealth in the local economy. Having a housekeeper, one or more people responsible for childcare, a gardener (if you have a garden), etc, are all very normal and it lifts everyone up.
That's genuinely interesting. Here in my part of the states, you're expected to do it all yourself, and in my area (exceedingly rural and exceedingly low income) having anyone do some of those things would be seen as being stuck-up or snobbish or something to that effect. For example, I still catch grief for being a "rich bitch" from my neighbors because I hired someone to put a roof on my covered porch on the back of my house 6 or 7 years ago.
This may sound naive, but I had legitimately never considered that it's a valid and useful way to spread my opportunities through the community.
The way of the American suburb is so different from cities in most of the world that the rest of the cultural differences seem natural. In places with this social bonding arrangements, you have contacts across social strata that fit people and jobs: Your friend's housekeeper is often a great contact for more good housekeeping. They might have friends and family members that need work in other occupations too, and thus entire social groups of people of different social classes bond together. You typically hire the people directly, not through a company, and personal reputation hits ripple through the social network. There might be people in-th-know, which act as brokers for the top opportunities without charging a cent.
I compare that to the American suburban experience, where most people who do manual work are considered too flakey to deal with directly, most tasks are nowhere near enough to count as a full time job, and everything is handled via companies led by people who code-switch. If I need a roofer or a landscaper, I will find few companies led by a mexican, or even someone with mexican ancestry, but their workers are almost assured to be: There's layers of isolation on top of layers of isolation, so you aren't building a relationship with your roofer, your handyman, or your housekeeper. The intermediaries make all of that work exchange have a very different nature.
On top of that, barring a small number of neighborhoods, there's a good chance you'll never see one of those workers outside of the contract, because the housing they can afford, and the housing they can afford, are so far apart you have few reasons to frequent the same establishments. So while places where more people live together might make it easier to see how different social classes are, in the US we might have a larger social distance, but completely hidden by housing. It's not just that the rich American can take their kids to a private school: It's that the way things are set up, the public schools for many a rich American will have few families who aren't rich in the first place, just via suburban zoning.
It's as if different social classes were happy to coexist in many other places, but in the US, they loathe each other, and can only interact via intermediaries.
>It's as if different social classes were happy to coexist in many other places, but in the US, they loathe each other, and can only interact via intermediaries.
Is it possible that the US is big enough and rich enough that it allows different social classes to not have to co exist, whereas in many other places, they have no choice but to co exist due to lack of land and other wealth?
> This may sound naive, but I had legitimately never considered that it's a valid and useful way to spread my opportunities through the community.
Because the better way to spread opportunity is to use that money to pay for poorer people to get an education so they do not have to do menial tasks for richer people.
Knowledge isn't zero-sum, but credentials are. Educating everyone doesn't make "menial" jobs go away. Better, really, to recognize some of those jobs as more important, and be willing to pay for them.
Also, there are gains from trade, and economies of scale. The time to cook two meals is less than double the time to cook one. And the person who specializes in it is probably better at it than the person who specializes in some other thing. When things are working correctly, these gains are then distributed across society by exchange.
I wrote education, not credentials. That includes learning how to farm, be an electrician, a crane operator, a researcher, learning how to cook, it could be anything.
It is obvious that a society with widespread use of personal drivers/housekeepers/nannies is simply one with a wider income/wealth gap.
One option is to spend multiple generations slowing bringing the housekeepers kids up the ladder with the housekeeper’s meager savings, and then their kids, and so on. Or we can cut the crap, and redistribute wealth more quickly and directly via a public education/training system.
> Because the better way to spread opportunity is to use that money to pay for poorer people to get an education so they do not have to do menial tasks for richer people.
...and then a data scientist with an advanced degree spends the day hand-crafting SQL to root-cause a customer complaint after Bezos sends a one-byte email, "?"...
(EDIT: I may have focused on one aspect of the parent's point at the expense of the other, clarified below).
Is there any question that a housekeeper is better off if they were able to spend their time studying or training for something that offers a higher probability of earning higher incomes?
Or should society continue to perpetuate the relative socioeconomic class you are born into by having you spend your time washing other people’s clothes and homes?
Because you've combined two concerns, the amount of money people make, and what level of stratification is involved in making it. You can study, train, and improve your economic security considerably, but still end up essentially doing menial tasks for rich people, just for more money.
(EDIT: That said, upward economic mobility is always desirable and education is essential to achieving it. It's an escape from poverty, but it's not a foolproof escape from hierarchy).
I can't speak to the social expectations to have a housekeeper or cook as a domestic employee, but in many developing nation environments with high income disparities between the working class and those who hire domestic staff, there's another thing to consider.
In some places that don't have supermarkets the process of buying groceries for a whole family is much more time consuming and labor intensive. For example, you get vegetables from one market, you go to another place if you want chicken and wait while they literally kill it in front of you, chop it up and put it in a plastic bag.
Everything comes from its own decentralized market and requires a lot more time/effort to buy on an ongoing basis.
Shopping and the process of buying all the supplies for a household is not nearly as convenient as going to Costco or similar in north america.
Often the role of cook is combined with general duties of procuring household supplies, handling things like the local electrical bill, hiring laborers for household repair and maintenance, etc.
Your post is spot on. I'm an immigrant (to the US) from one of these countries. It's easier to get domestic help because people are desperate for money and there is no social safety net. A lot of the domestic help typically has no/little education (maybe only elementary school), so they are trapped in that situation.
Grocery shopping is a huge effort compared to the US. Also, with smaller homes, kitchens, and smaller fridges, you have to go grocery shopping multiple times a week.
Cars and Gasoline are also heavily taxed. Even "rich" families will typically only have one basic car, so you need a driver to drop someone off at work, come home to take somebody to the various grocery stores, etc.
Over the last 10-15 years as job and educational opportunities have improved, more and and more of the people I know complain that it's harder to find "good" domestic help. Lots of people who would typically go into basic construction jobs or domestic help jobs are finding other opportunities. Basically, what is going on in the US right now.
That's a fairly common attitude in poorer countries - there is an expectation that if you are wealthy, you have (at the very least) an obligation to provide employment.
Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.
I think this has a lot of truth. My brother was based in the Philippines for a while for work and was expected to have at least a housekeeper and a chauffeur. I think having a driver was a very reasonable safety measure given the traffic there too. At the time it seemed very ostentatious to us at home, but it was totally the norm.
Car ownership, especially in Manila, is also not the norm there. There's over 110 million people on a handful of small islands. Also, public transit is way more efficient there than anywhere in North America.
True - it was better to hire a chauffeur who had his own car than to buy a car (also traffic was crazy). He is from the UK - Public transport is pretty good in the UK and across much of Europe. As I recall, there were issues with terrorist bombing shopping centres and public transport in Manila at the time, so I think he avoided both.
That is not how it was taught to me. Expat is when your job moves you to a new country, as in "you're an expatriate employee". Immigrant is when you move for your own reasons. Expats are expected to come back to their original country, or move to a third one at some time. Immigrants are establishing themselves in the new country.
Expats usually don’t have immigrant visas. They also receive packages from their companies for their temporary assignments. If you go to the country on your own to fund a job, you usually won’t be referred to as an expat by those with packages who refer to themselves as expats. But you won’t be referred to as a migrant worker either unless you are poor and doing construction or farm work. We used the term half-pats to describe ourselves, but mostly it was just foreigners.
The USA is exceptional because almost every visa that allows for work is considered an immigration visa (eg H1 leads to a greencard, eventually). But in other countries that is most definitely not true.
H1 does not lead to a green card. Infact H1 approval receipt will show Temporary Non Immigrant Worker visa. You have to apply to get a green card, entirely separate.
No, backpackers in SE Asia are still mostly on the expat side. Even if they are broken students on a sabbatical year, they mostly have families home that can back them up in case of need. (Exceptions apply, YMMV etc etc.)
I have heard of the same in Ethiopia around the 90's. For white worker it was expected to:
- rent a house
- hire a house guardian
- hire at last one maid
- hire a chauffeur if you own a car
It was also recommended than they come form the local neighborhood.
It was a social norm, and if you do not do it you can expect the local policemen to "fine you" every time you take the car, the food cost to be x5 the price (or more), and many other additional costs and life inconvenience than just made more easy and cheaper to just hire the people.
That said the work was real.
A good chauffeur, will negotiate prices and bribes for you, and recommend you the good places.
The house guardian was also your speaker with the neighborhood committee (with was in fact a government organization).
(I will avoid the more complicated subject of the maid...)
This was OK if you where a man, a couple or a family. If you where a young woman... good luck with this.
There was a way to avoid all this: living in a flat in the city center and use taxis.
(For Addis Ababa this may not be true anymore because the city was changed a lot from the big shantytown it was then)
Some of the maid where indeed expected to also do "night duties" if asked. It was not a racial power stuff. It's was more a problem with a sort of "cultural prostitution" witch was everywhere in Ethiopia. The maids where still primary maids and not prostitute, and to be fair, the same problem also did exist in Europe at the time of Agatha Christie (How many European maid had become pregnant and then fired ?).
I hate to break it to you but rich white people are generally far less likely to be a sexual predation risk in these situations because they often have more to lose, have easier access to consenting parties, and come from countries that stigmatize that type of behavior to a much greater degree.
> No need to racially charge it - sexually exploiting servants is a universal.
The topic of race was already raised in the grandparent post, I quote (emphasis mine):
> I have heard of the same in Ethiopia around the 90's. For white worker it was expected to:
While I'm sure exploitation happens in most cultures I'm mostly familiar with it happening in white culture and given that context was already specified and my education being based on that context I decided to keep my reply specific to that context which I already knew.
Sorry if I offended anyone -- I just figured being a white male myself it was more offensive to drag other cultures into the discussion when they were previously outside the scope.
> Curiously, you said “rich white people” forgoing the one prejudice that actually does predict sexual exploitation - men!
I didn't need to specify men because that context was already defined in the post I was responding to. To quote the GP again:
> This was OK if you where a man, a couple or a family. If you where a young woman... good luck with this.
Frankly though, moaning about other cultures doing it too feels a little like trying to pull others down so we don't look so bad instead of acknowledging our own failings. Maybe that's an uncomfortable opinion for people to hear but as the saying goes "people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones".
Bare in mind I'm not suggesting an entire race is frequently abusing their maids to this day. What I'm saying is there is recorded history of it happening. You only have to dig through some of the abuses that happened during the slave trade to see evidence of this fact. So we do indeed have a bad track record in this regard. It might be an uncomfortable truth for some of us to hear but it doesn't make it any less true.
Nowadays, the spirit still lives on somewhat in the fact that we have free public scenic hiking trails through what looks like very expensive private property. When the land was privatized, the government made it a condition that the hiking trail would remain for the general public to enjoy, and so it did.
I believe Vietnam still has a similar system, too, in that the government will calculate how much jobs a foreign company needs to create, based on their annual revenue. It's one of the reasons why Korean milk tea shops tend to be crammed full with 10-20 schoolgirl employees.