That’s true of course but “servants” are not merely workers among workers, they’re in [lower] class of people. I had a girlfriend who was a tenured professor at a major university. She told her grad students to get cleaning ladies, and not to waste their valuable time on housework. Although I never mentioned it, that was probably one reason the relationship didn’t last.

On a related note someone should do some research on the return of the sensibility (the esthetic) of willed servitude. It’s popular these days to choose to see oneself as a “bottom:” to ask others to bear the burdens of moral responsibility and to offer up your ass as payment for the privilege. Examples are everywhere, in employment and in private life. It’s all very “story of ‘O’” and not a good sign in a democracy.

And related to that:
Radek, if you want to measure people as numbers than do so. On the question is whether to consider that an ideal or a vulgar necessity I’ll argue with you and win.
I’ve seen blog posts about scientists with equations tattooed on their chests. All symptoms of the same “posthumanism”

That’s not Heisenberg and depends on what you mean by precision: oscilloscopes work perfectly well, as do televisions which you used as an example.

“This is an exact counterpart to a well known result in signal processing—- the shorter a pulse in time, the less well defined the frequency. The width of a pulse in frequency space is inversely proportional to the width in time. It is a fundamental result in Fourier analysis, the narrower the peak of a function, the broader the Fourier transform.”

This result is what I was referring to – the implication of those sentences is that if we take a larger sample of time we can measure the frequency more precisely, but then we don’t know the time it happened as precisely as before.

Which means that we cannot measure precisely the characteristics of EM signals for fundamental reasons, not merely due to inadequacy of our current equipment.

Not being a philosopher, I don’t really care whether utility can be proved to exist or is measurable in any formal sense.

Having been on several sides of this conundrum both personally and professionally I know what I want the world to start doing. Quite simple really – start comparing the cost of doing something reasonably well – the carer, the parent – with the cost of not doing it at all or doing it very badly.

If as the carer I completely lose the plot – fail to teach a child to speak, mess up someone’s medication, allow the parent with Alzheimers to wander or the one who is bedridden to develop pressure sores then the degree of misery caused may be difficult to measure but the cost of sorting it all out – hospital, prison, armies of social workers will have a string of zeroes on the end. That’s where we start.

I am not suggesting that every carer should be paid as much as a consultant geriatrician – or tenured philosopher? – but we then have a starting point. We can see precisely why the minimum wage or zilch are not adequate reward for work which will cost us all dearly if it is not done.

The word “utility” is left over from utilitarianism but it doesn’t play the same role in modern economics as it did 100+ years ago.

Is temperature measurable? Is 100 degrees F “twice” as “hot” as 50 degrees? Is 200 twice as hot as 100?

Things can be non-measurable but still ordered. 100 degrees is still hotter than 50, whether or not it really is twice as hot.

In reply to #18: I should have signed my #9 by what my nieces & nephews call me: Uncle Jim.

This discussion has been amazing. It’s been my commonplace observation that since we ceased to deny women the opportunity to work outside the home, apart from teaching and nursing – in other words, when we allowed women to work alongside men in whatever field of endeavor they chose – the proessions of teaching and nursing went to hell, perhaps because we could never rid ourselves of the impression that those professions were merely women’s work, or perhaps because we could never bring ourselves to pay more than we used to, back when mainly women did those jobs.

In other news, the patriarchy is still alive, but showing signs of dementia, and Americans still revere the Reagan presidency.

Bzzzt.

“I also don’t know why you say that if something can’t be measured precisely, it either doesn’t matter, or doesn’t exist.”

Ask a philosophy professor in any department in the US, Great Britain, or Australia
Again, I’m not agreeing with the argument, except as a sometimes necessary vulgarization and impoverishment of language in service to the banalities of functionalism; the functionalism that is the ecstasy of autism.
Do we want childcare to be governed by such banalities? Is autism the moral philosophy of the day? I’d say yes, actually.
I just spent the afternoon with an autistic architect.
A tragedy he can not understand.

Actually no. A central concept to economics is utility, which is unmeasurable. Or in other words, “there is no arguing with preferences”. It’s weird to see you criticising economics on the basis that it requires a concrete measurement of function, I’m far more used to economics being criticised on the basis that economics rules out inter-personal comparisons of utility as economics says that utility is immeasurable.

I also don’t know why you say that if something can’t be measured precisely, it either doesn’t matter, or doesn’t exist. We know by Hesienburg’s principle that we cannot measure precisely both the frequency of a electro-magnetic signal and the time it occurred – does that mean that therefore radios or TVs or wireless LANs don’t exist, or don’t matter? Has any economist argued that electromagnetic signals don’t exist and/or don’t matter? Can you provide some cites for this extraordinary claim about economic theory?

If McArdle (and harl delos) thinks that doing laundry, feeding formula (no breastfeeding mothers in her world apparently) and changing nappies are all it takes to look after a baby, well, she doesn’t have a baby.

McArdle was talking about childcare provided by external sources. Wet nurses generally disappeared with the invention of infant formula. If a couple is hiring a worker to take care of their baby, then said worker is unlikely to be breastfeeding. If said worker is breastfeeding, then, like, uuggghhh!

The real “reason ‘housework, mothering, etc’ is defined as not-work is because”
is because the people doing the defining weren’t and aren’t doing that work, and in a not insignificant corollary were and are very keen on attaining and maintaining slaves of one kind or another, including the capitalist-industrial phenomenon of mechanical slaves (machines).
Getting someone(or something) to do necessary labor for you that you’d have to do yourself otherwise, without incurring obligations commensurate with the services rendered… peachy! Yeah!

So if defining things as not work means that you don’t have to pay as much, why not do that for everything? Why don’t the lords of government/companies define medical treatment as “not-work”? Why not define “building me a house” as not work? Why not define “cooking fancy meals in 3* restaurants” as not work? How many of the people you imagine as doing the defining were really down in coal mines, risking life and limb in terrible conditions? How many were heading out in a freezing stormy night to rescue their stock from rising floodwaters?

If such things are possible to quantify in the boardroom with very little sign of actual work on view then it is perfectly possible to do it in the home, a child care setting, in the full-time nursing of an elderly parent.

I don’t think the problem is quantifying. I think the problem is paying for what is incredibly-labour-intensive work if done well. For example, if we paid every childcare worker more than the median income, then we wouldn’t be able to pay for very many children to have childcare workers. And a low-carer-to-caree ratio seems to be an essential part of providing a quality care service (speaking as a non-expert in the field – if there is a way of providing high quality serivce without needing this low ratio I would be delighted to hear about it).

Also, the before-tax pay of the carer cannot be greater than the after-tax pay of the less well paid parent, or people do it themselves.

By contrast, Sister #2 worked off and on for a couple of years as a nanny for two preschool age children whose parents are freelance music teachers/musicians/composers. I believe she made somewhat less than $10 an hour for ~15 hours a week and no room and board (maybe lunches with the kids). However, the parents were very involved, they had a very flexible schedule, allowing her to work retail on the side, and the kids were generally happy and easy enough to deal with. From what she’s said the experience was almost unqualifiedly positive.

I don’t suppose either of these examples is a typical nanny experience, but anecdotally it suggests that just as with hod-carrying, lawyering and secretarial work, the specifics of job conditions and labor discipline can be just as crucial to happiness as pay, hours and benefits. Specifically, the empathetic drain on Sister #1 was pretty disturbing to see, where as Sister #2 was often energized and amused by her work.

“Furthermore, people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism are usually, outside certain narrow fields (software engineering, economics…”
political science, academic philosophy and the theory of ideas as opposed to the study of events.

Theorists of political liberalism still aren’t willing to admit that seduction is more important to politics than ideas; and if they are, they’re still unwilling to accept that seduction and assumptions are important drives for themselves as much as those they study. What after all is Rawls actually doing, and why? I’m always struck by the irony of attacks on Maureen Dowd by people who are much less observant than she is and just as driven by assumption.

Do claims of reason and rationalism mark the acceptance of simple self-interest (cf. theories moral hazard) or the promulgation of the academic ideals of collaboration? How many more examples do I have to lay out (and I’ve laid out quite a few over my time trolling here) of contempt of the educated elite for the majority? Never mind Kansas, what is the matter with Harvard?—-

“Under the present system our captains of industry are paid megabucks for…”
making the bets that either win or lose large amounts of money.
They’re the generals in the army of capitalism. I’ve know a few of them and they’re very smart men. But they’re out for themselves and not very well socialized. They don’t serve people, they use them, deploying an advanced instrumental rationalism in the service of self-aggrandizing and often destructive silliness. Some of them try to play the benign god, after the fact. And people buy into that.

It’s always struck me as odd that some of those who consider themselves intellectuals would actively defend the aggressively self-interested as opposed to simply acknowledging their presence, at what one would imagine would be the opposite end of the spectrum.
The intellectual defense of “efficiency” is the defense of whatever goal that efficiency furthers. And efficiency as a goal in itself is the definition of autism.

The manufacture and doubtless training of empathy—“The Managed Heart”—is a major aspect of the service economy, whose workers learn at least to fake it; so do politicians, as in “I feel your pain.”

If you’ve ever shopped in a store that appears to be staffed by citizens of the old Soviet Union, you agree that at least fake empathy is more pleasant in the service economy.

Furthermore, people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism are usually, outside certain narrow fields (software engineering, economics), considered unemployable. Stigma against the cognitively different is only part of this.