Maid in the Shade?
Harvard sophomore Michael Kopko is selling maid service to Harvard dorm residents. My good friend and rigorous economist Don Boudreaux has the scoop on how,
By creating yet another differential between the haves and have-nots on campus, Dormaid threatens our student unity….
As Don asks, “How many “have-not” students are enrolled in Harvard? Just curious.”
I knew quite a few “have-not” students at Harvard, myself included; it wasn’t unusual to find Harvard students of meager means who were on full or near-full financial aid. (I doubt many of us would have been upset if wealthier students were hiring maid service though.)
Roderick is right that there are plenty of students on full or near-full financial aid who come from impecunious families. Don’s point is that being *at* Harvard is being in receipt of a gift of enormous value. In that sense, it’s a bit odd to refer to students who are recipients of a gift of such proportions as “have-nots.” It seems more reasonable to consider them “receive-a-lots.” (And the reasonable ones certainly wouldn’t be worried about students from wealthier families receiving even more from their families.)
It appears that at Harvard the biggest “have-not” contingent must be those who lack the ability to think coherently. The critique of this maid service applies equally to any other service…so presumably nothing should be available to anyone. Either that, or else we should all be forced to consume identical combinations of goods and services.
But the students can’t be expected to be any smarter than their instructors. Lawrence Summers suggests that we should investigate whether the variance of the distribution of analytic capability is greater for males than for females. The faculty hears this and imagines he’s said that women are dumber than men…too stupid to realize that he has said no such thing, and that, if true, his hypothesis means there are more extremely stupid men than women.
When I first heard about this, I instantly thought, “hey, I’m smarter than Harvard kids.”
Claiming that the new maid service increases economic disparity is nonsense. The economic disparity already exists, if the rich kids didn’t spend their money on maids, they’d spend it on something else, like a PS2.
Of course, unlike a PS2, any student can have a clean room, they can just clean it themselves. Thus, if the new thing at is everybody who’s “in” has a clean room, well then the poor, although still disadvantaged, can in fact have a clean room. Whereas, if the rich “in” kids can’t buy clean rooms, well then they’ll just have to spend their money on PS2’s and home entertainment systems, which will leave the poor no chance of social status.
Y’know, I actually think the Crimson was onto something. Not something that warrants shutting the service down, but something that generates worry: this puts pressure on the ability of richer and poorer (‘receive-a-lots,’ sure, but Don’t snarky comment didn’t strike me as meaning that, and liqudity matters here) kids to room together. All the blogsnark hasn’t offered an answer to the question: if one roommate wants the service and the other can’t afford it, what’s the right way to proceed? And, no, this isn’t directly analagous to the PS/2. The expensive game system, computer, or TV doesn’t create a new expense category that both roommates have some obligation in fairness to shell out for. It’s common practice for both roommates to get to use the TV or the game system, but it’s still owned by the one who owned it to begin with. For the richer roommate to share with the poorer doesn’t impose any marginal cost on the former, or any obligation to pay on the latter.
The practice of people from vastly different financial backgrounds rooming or housing together is a relatively delicate one, and this actually does have the potential to complicate it quite a bit. Worked well for me most of the time, but not quite always even among very good friends. And it blows up for a lot of people already.
To the degree that the maid service creates new pressure for financial-likes to room only with financial-likes, that’s a bad thing, disruptive of one of the virtues of dorm life.
I genuinely don’t get the blogsnark about this, or why people seem not to see that there’s anything at all to worry about.
(Sorry– appear to have forgotten to include my name above.)
My posting on the subject appeared March 14, one day before Don’s.
I got my scoop from my most reliable news source: fark.com
What I would like to know is how much these budding entrepreneurs are paying the “cleaning professionals.” A few years ago, Harvard was forced to pay a living wage to their custodians. Are these kids linking a professional title with a professional salary?