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I'm honestly not sure how much larger on a percentage basis the labor pool is that's associated with "I'm too rich to be bothered with this task" services is.

After all, lawn/cleaning/etc. services have long been a thing. So are babysitters, taxis, etc. For someone with enough money, they could have had full-time personal assistants, cooks, drivers, etc.

What seems to be mostly new is that technology is making certain tasks more efficient and/or more efficient to time-slice in a way that people who are merely comfortably well-off but not really wealthy can afford them. (And the challenge is that tasks that are sliced up that way need to be sufficiently cookie-cutter that the context and knowledge a full-time assistant might have aren't required.)




> After all, lawn/cleaning/etc. services have long been a thing. So are babysitters, taxis, etc.

With the exception of taxis, those have traditionally been cash (i.e. untaxed) businesses with no middlemen and long-term relationships. They're "I'm too rich to be bothered," but also "I've been paying you to mow my lawn for years." The new insta-serf companies break this relationship and take a big cut to pay six-figure salaries to a handful of techies.




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