I also find these articles odd because of the tension between what I assume are the liberal values of the authors and the nature of the moves. Cheap and luxurious expat living is bankrolled by the relative poverty of the native people. Yeah, having a bunch of servants has it’s charms. When I was a kid in Bangladesh my dad worked for a Planned Parenthood affiliate. We had a cook, a nanny, a maid, and a driver on what was maybe the equivalent of a $65,000 salary today. But that’s possible because people are poor. My dad has this story where he sent our cook’s teenage son with some money to get some cigarettes. And he couldn’t bring himself to buy them because a pack cost as much as what he was paid in a week. In my mind people who want to live that kind of lifestyle are kind of morally defective.
> Cheap and luxurious expat living is bankrolled by the relative poverty of the native people.
How are expats employing locals at local wages (instead of at the equivalent wages in their home countries) being "bankrolled" by poverty? They contribute more money (and more directly) to people in poor countries than the people living in Western countries whose houses are filled with goods made by poor people in countries they probably couldn't locate on a map.
> We had a cook, a nanny, a maid, and a driver on what was maybe the equivalent of a $65,000 salary today. But that’s possible because people are poor.
If your cook, nanny, maid and driver didn't work for your family, what do you realistically think they would have done to earn income?
Are people in Bangladesh poor because the tiny community of Western expats living there hire cooks, nannies, maids and drivers and don't pay them what they would earn in those roles in the US or Europe? Or are people in Bangladesh poor because of the country's troubled history, overpopulation, low urbanization, corrupt and ineffective institutions, etc.?
> In my mind people who want to live that kind of lifestyle are kind of morally defective.
Those are really strong words.
In your mind, are people in the West who buy and use products manufactured on the cheap in poor countries every single day of their lives also morally defective?
Edit:
You mentioned that your dad worked for a Planned Parenthood affiliate. Poor countries often desperately need knowledge, skills and experience that are in short supply locally, in all areas from medicine to infrastructure.
At the same time, it can be very difficult to find skilled foreigners willing to relocate to these countries and contribute their skills for the benefit of these countries. Even with high salaries, a cook, nanny, maid and driver, life in a place like Bangladesh is not going to appeal to the vast majority of Westerners.
So employers often help arrange for expats to have benefits, like household help, to incentivize people to come.
I've seen a lot of resentment towards tech workers in tech-hubs for bringing up the cost of living. They're blamed for bringing up the prices with to their outsized spending power allowing them to push up the prices beyond what locals can afford.
Expats in poorer country exceed this by at least an order of magnitude or two in relative spending power. I wouldn't be surprised if a high density of expats would cause resentment among the locals due to the resulting gentrification.
I've lived in numerous developing countries and while I can certainly think of a number of places where gentrification pushed locals out of certain neighborhoods, I've never seen expats doing this on the scale I witnessed in the US.
It's a complex issue.
First, expats are not a homogeneous bunch. In a lot of developing countries in SE Asia, for instance, the expat communities are not made up of large numbers of truly affluent people. Generally, the expats who live in the expensive buildings/houses and employ local help (maids, cooks, etc.) work for large companies (in higher-level roles), embassies and NGOs. The majority of the "digital nomad" types don't actually live affluent lifestyles in my experience. Sure, they make a lot more than the locals, but they're not spending $3,000/month on an apartment in Bangkok or HCMC. This doesn't mean they don't have an effect on local economies, but there just aren't enough expats in fast-growing, fast-developing cities to cause negative gentrification effects like you see in places like the SF Bay Area.
Second, in some places, like Bali, the economies are totally built around the presence of foreigners (expats, "semi-permanent" foreign residents and foreign tourists). Take them away and the locals suffer massively. Bali has been absolutely bleeding because of COVID. I guarantee you if you asked the average Balinese person if they want "normal" to return (which means a heavy foreigner population), they would tell you "yes x10000000000000".
Finally, a lot of developing countries, while still poor, have fast-growing economies and there is a lot of development taking place that is driven by the growing wealth and urbanization locally. I worked in Phnom Penh (Cambodia) for a time and while you could see the effect expats had in a neighborhood like BBK1, other neighborhoods were clearly changing more as a result of the growing wealth of locals and increased urbanization (people coming from the countryside to find opportunity in the city).
My in-laws lived in Central America back in the 50s, as my father in law worked there for a large international bank. They did have a live-in maid and a cook. My mother in law said at first it made her feel uncomfortable, but was told in no uncertain terms that Americans who could afford help but didn't hire help were seen as selfish. The locals needed the work.
No doubt there are people who hire local help and are terrible about it, but I think so long as the employed people are treated humanely, with empathy, and paid as good or better than local rates, there isn't a problem.
> My mother in law said at first it made her feel uncomfortable, but was told in no uncertain terms that Americans who could afford help but didn't hire help were seen as selfish.
Yes, because Americans aren’t even seen as the same kind of human in these countries. These societies often have rigid class structures even among the locals—my family is Bangladeshi, but affluent and our servants definitely didn’t think they were our equals—much less between locals and European/American foreigners.
The locals are reacting rationally to the situation. But what kind of person would want to leave an egalitarian society and live like that, just so they can be at the top of the pecking order?
So, we shouldn't do business with folks of lower means, is that right? And to avoid doing so we should restrict ourselves to particular heterogeneous countries, with geographic boundaries that aren't particularly effective at that goal. Spending money in places it is needed rather than already concentrated is morally defective because the spender might also benefit from the transaction?
(Believe I read something similar once about folks trying to help the homeless. If the helper benefited one iota as well, the helper was branded a "monster.")
I don't believe this is a healthy or valid take. We should all be helping each other, and a win/win situation is the best outcome imho. Because it incentivizes more.
> what kind of person would want to leave an egalitarian society and live like that, just so they can be at the top of the pecking order?
To play devil's advocate, say it's not about having servants or "living like a king", but about having the freedom to do things that don't make money.
How many bad things are done because someone thought it was "necessary" to pay rent, or to afford college for their kid?
If, instead of optimizing ad engagement to pay a mortgage in Palo Alto, I buy a modest house, outright, in a little Columbian town nobody's heard of, and open an ice cream shop out of the first floor, is that so bad? There's an electrician on YouTube who did that.
Or if I spend my days building strange concrete domes and planting banana trees? There's another guy who does that.
Or running a backpacker hostel that employs (and pays fairly) a local cook and a maid? Probably a lot of us have stayed at such a place.
I had friends who backpacked through South America after college. They ran into an American who, one day in the States, said "fuck it", got in his pickup truck, and started driving south. Eventually he fell in with an Amazon tribe; he doesn't speak the language too well, but he has the truck and he knows how to drive, and that's how he contributes. He's much happier now. Who knows what he'd had to do to pay rent in America.
What if all I want to do is walk around, and drink tea, and chat with people? What if I'm somehow tired and bored at the same time?
What if I get a donkey and work as a traveling children's library?
Do I have to keep my position at the top of World Empire, or can I just take my good fortune and use it to drop out and chill?
I'm no savior, but maybe I can get a well drilled or something. Maybe I need the water too. Or maybe I can do the bushes in the local park, if everybody else is too busy with some other thing that earns dinero.
Hell, there's a white girl on YouTube who met a Maasai dude in Africa, married him, and now lives there doing... I don't know what, but it can't earn much. Granted I think she's going to be a little more independent than is, uh, traditional in that culture. But he's like, "ok, whatever, I have a good wife". Doesn't demand much, is happy.
Surely if you're born inside the harem, with all its advantages, there's got to be a way out.
Hell, if I'm an American, maybe me leaving creates a slot at a company that'll be filled by an H1B, and the circle of life continues. "Have at it, brother; I'm done."
Yeah the harm with employing people is not in hiring them and benefitting from their work. Rather, it is in exploiting them--cheating them on wages in one of many ways, ordering them to do harm, having dangerous working conditions, degrading them, those are only a few examples. And exploitation in these forms exists according to the local context of the foreign land, and simultaneously is strongly informed by American views. Both.
I have seen many instances when expats try to treat foreign workers much better than they need to, but it does not work at all for either party. The intention is still worth indulging, however, in ways that aren't mutually harmful. It's just difficult sometimes.
But it can be done. And it's beautiful when it is done.
There may be harm in diverting human resources from uses that are more productive in the long term. The best arguments I've heard for minimum wage run in a similar vein, and perhaps there's some parallels to the "resource curse".
Back in the day aristocrats paid people to keep their coats on the shelf. It wasn't like they couldn't do it themselves. It was expected from aristocrats to support such jobs so that the lower classes can have some employment.
It's unclear to me why this is bad. The expat is not the cause of those people's poverty. The relationship between paid servants and employee should be mutually beneficial, as each gets what they desire, money on one hand, and convenience or more free time on the other.
It's not like wealthy people in developed countries don't have servants who are comparatively poor. Multiples of those servants salaries are spent on frivolous amusements. What's the better alternative? That they not spend money on staff and instead hoard it, depriving others of job opportunities? Hand out bags of money for no reason?
I understand your economic arguments. But I still think that anyone who would want to leave their relatively egalitarian western society to live among such inequality is morally defective.
And the social stratification in third world countries is completely different than what you have in America. For awhile we used a cleaning service run by someone who lives in our subdivision. In these third world countries, the lives of affluent expats and the natives who serve them pretty much don’t intersect at all except through the service relationship.
> But I still think that anyone who would want to leave their relatively egalitarian western society to live among such inequality is morally defective.
Open up your closets, cabinets, etc. How many of the goods you own are made in the West? How many are made in places like China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, etc.?
How can you say that Western society is "relatively egalitarian" when the majority of the goods Westerners consume are produced in poor or developing countries where inequality is the rule not the exception?
For heaven's sake, for decades, the West has literally shipped its trash to these countries for disposal or "recycling".
The West is only "relatively egalitarian" so long as you pretend that the West is a closed, self-contained society. In reality, the West has outsourced poverty, ultra-abusive labor practices, corruption, pollution and environmental destruction to countries most of their citizens can't locate on a map. Out of sight, out of mind.
If a Westerner is "morally defective" for choosing to live in poor, polluted, corrupt countries, what should one make of the Westerners who wouldn't want to even visit them but have no problem filling their lives with products made in them?
> In these third world countries, the lives of affluent expats and the natives who serve them pretty much don’t intersect at all except through the service relationship.
Ever lived in, say, the SF Bay Area? The dynamic between the affluent and the people who serve them isn't as different in the West as you make it out to be. The hotshot FANG engineer making $400,000/year and living in a $2.5 million house in Cupertino likely isn't "intersecting" with the cook at a Chipotle who shares an apartment with 3 other people in the worst neighborhood in the East Bay and commutes with multiple people to Mountain View every day.
I would never live in the Bay Area. I lived in DC, and the economic inequality was soul sucking. It was especially depressing only ever meeting non-white/Asian people in service roles. I got my family the heck out of there.
I lived in a developing country (China) for 9 years and could never bother with a maid if even a cleaning service. The logistics were just too huge for me, as a non native, and it didn’t seem to be worth it. I had friends who had babysitters, but more the part time kind and labor costs rose rapidly in the last decade. But the biggest thing is: the expats were often seen as poorer than many of the natives. The rich Chinese in Beijing had drivers, maids, etc… it wasn’t so common for the foreigners. I’ve felt the same way in Manila, Bangkok, the only place that seem to be where foreigners come out as the rich people are tourist towns (like Phuket, Bali, Boracay) designed completely around extracting their money. But admittedly, none of those places are truly third world.
I've lived in London and Vietnam. I don't think living in the relative poverty of Vietnam is a moral problem. The people will still be relatively poor if you don't go there and keep your eyes shut to the issues. Going there actually reduces local poverty as you can spend money there and benefit them rather than spending it London and benefiting millionaire property owners mostly.
I say relative poverty because most people there aren't that badly off and their economy is booming, growing far faster than the UK one.
> In these third world countries, the lives of affluent expats and the natives who serve them pretty much don’t intersect at all except through the service relationship.
How is this any different from in the US (or anywhere else, really)? Most well-off (or even just "comfortable") people don't mix much with low-income folks, outside of service relationships.
That’s untrue for huge swaths of America. In the Iowa town where my wife grew up, the doctor’s kid went to the same school as the poorest kids in town, because there was only one school for everyone. Even here in Annapolis, there’s e.g. not really any place to eat in town that nearly everyone couldn’t afford to go at least on a special occasion.
> In the Iowa town where my wife grew up, the doctor’s kid went to the same school as the poorest kids in town, because there was only one school for everyone.
But the same would be true if you decide to live in the countryside or smaller city in a developing country. In major cities everywhere in the world, including the West, affluents can and often do live in bubbles. This has nothing to do with expats.
From my experience, it's still true in rural areas. I lived in the middle of nowhere, and the doctors' kids didn't go to the same school as the poorest kids in town. Typically, one spouse didn't work and would handle ferrying the kids significant distances to get to a better school.
Country clubs were also popular among the wealthy, and they had restaurants most people couldn't access. Golfing was a sign of wealth, since the only nearby golf course was at the country club.
Hobbies also divided people. One family friend had his own airstrip and planes. Riding horses was another popular and expensive hobby, and many chose to pay those less well-off to take care of their horses in the stables.
Homes were a huge division. Labor was cheap, so it wasn't uncommon for the doctors to live in homes so large that they basically couldn't be sold when they wanted to move.
Time was also a big differentiator. Wealthy families spent a lot more time away from home, driving an hour or so to get to the closest major city to shop at larger grocery stores with more exotic ingredients, or going to ethnic restaurants, or going to shows/concerts/etc. That was enabled by only having to have a single working spouse and/or hiring a maid. Almost all the well-off families had maids.
The fissure still exists, it just comes out in different ways since the local market can't sustain a single $50/plate restaurant.
So it's better to NOT employ poor people than to employ them?
Your logic is .. curious at best.
I think that there's a better argument for paying them more than they could expect normally.
> My dad has this story where he sent our cook’s teenage son with some money to get some cigarettes. And he couldn’t bring himself to buy them because a pack cost as much as what he was paid in a week.
This is odd... Did none of the working class smoke (surprising), or were there vast differentials in price between different kinds of cigarettes?
When I spent a couple months in northern India about 20 years ago a lot of people smoked what seemed like self-rolled cigarettes (or at least they looked different that the kind of cigarettes that you get in the west). Western cigarette brands were also available.
Highly agree. Why would you want to just keep up the cycle of poverty? Especially the fact that this guy is 66 and had kids with a Vietnamese woman who is most definitely 40 years younger than him. I see it all too often where white men take advantage of south east Asian women and live comfortably by keeping others in poverty.
You are assuming that these hypothetical "south east Asian women" are being exploited due to their contrast with "white men" i.e.:
- They are not white
- They are women
And they are being exploited solely because of these factors. This is both racist and sexist, which is just entirely a bad starting point for a view of the world. Everyone that you speak of has agency and makes choices. Perhaps you feel one side has been coerced, but frankly I do not see it from what you've pointed out here. All I see is people using the agency they have to make life choices that they think are best. That's a good thing.
