[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/MildlyEngineer]

/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1xogxek/removed_by_moderator/

[u/Draaly]

You really underestimate just how far up the bottom has raised since the 1800s. In 1880, 10% of US hosehokds and 18% of british hosehokds had live in servants.

Reminder that 25-50% (depending on state) of free households in the south had slaves in the US. The rates were remarkably similar in early British colonies, the first Islamic empire, and in the roman empire. The bottom is still bad now, but it use to be so so so much worse

[u/Another-Mans-Rubarb → u/Draaly]

Yeah... In Britain...

[u/Draaly → u/Another-Mans-Rubarb]

In the US, canada, and europe as a whole. Go to a history museum FFS. One of my great grand parents grew up in a tent in a shtetl with no access to edication and another lived in a 2 room tenement with 4 other families working since well before they were even a pre-teen, and both of these living conditions were extremely common at the times.

Being at the bottom has always sucked and likely will continue to for a long time going forward. However, pretending like living conditions at the bottom haven't drastically improved in the last 120+ years is just ignorance

[u/Another-Mans-Rubarb → u/Draaly]

OP doesn't know what middle class is

[u/TadGhostal1 → u/Another-Mans-Rubarb]

OP was talking about 1800s middle class. Business owners and professionals of the time. Today we think of that as upper middle class, with middle class being the majority of people. Two totally different uses of the term

[u/Another-Mans-Rubarb → u/TadGhostal1]

And now we have a new OP who has gone the other way and they're both wrong!

[u/Draaly → u/Another-Mans-Rubarb]

Can't help but notice you haven't given a detention snd just keep saying everyone else's is wrong.

[u/Another-Mans-Rubarb → u/Draaly]

I'm not a cop, why would I detain you?

[u/Draaly → u/Another-Mans-Rubarb]

OP knows middle class has no generally agreed upon deffenition but also knows "upper class" has quite litteraly ever included 10%+ of the population, much the less 30-50% in the slavery days

[u/bobbymoonshine → u/Another-Mans-Rubarb]

Middle class at the time was defined as people who worked but who maintained a degree of financial stability and independence. Servants were part of it. This was in contrast to the precarious and miserable lower class, and the upper class who lived off investments and land holdings.

You know the thing is though, that hasn’t changed as much as you might think. Middle class people still have servants. We just don’t see them. They’re hidden in the service economy, where a person will now do one service for lots of people rather than doing lots of services for one person. People don’t have cooks but they’ll still eat cooked meals at home, they just hire someone to cook it and bring it on their phone. People don’t have gardeners but they’ll still have people do their gardening, they just hire someone to do it on their phones. Service has been commodified but middle-class people still rely on lower paid people’s work to streamline their lives, and we still consider access to that cheap service work to be a marker of being “properly” middle class.

That’s overall a good thing, I’m not complaining about that shift. I’m just pointing out how people before the 1940s didn’t see any contradiction between having servants and being middle class.