Much of the difficulty in outsourcing is a simple result of principal-agent problems. Almost nobody can pay enough to get someone as competent as they to think about their problems as deeply as they. Only tasks with a pretty significant repeatability and efficiency premium (that is, actually takes less time when done by someone else, without loss in quality) can trivially be offloaded. Everything else takes a fair bit of analysis and meta-planning in order to get someone else to do tolerably.
This changes for the VERY rich—if being your PA/Butler pays well enough to be done by a smart, motivated person, you can shed a lot of things. From what I can tell, it’s not a smooth transition, though—normal people have to do most of their crap chores themselves, medium-rich people can outsource the trivial ones (gardening, grocery shopping, some parts of cleaning) and not the difficult ones (travel planning, making the grocery list to shop from, organizing things), and only the super-rich can really just forget the things they don’t care about.
Much of the difficulty in outsourcing is a simple result of principal-agent problems. Almost nobody can pay enough to get someone as competent as they to think about their problems as deeply as they. Only tasks with a pretty significant repeatability and efficiency premium (that is, actually takes less time when done by someone else, without loss in quality) can trivially be offloaded. Everything else takes a fair bit of analysis and meta-planning in order to get someone else to do tolerably.
This changes for the VERY rich—if being your PA/Butler pays well enough to be done by a smart, motivated person, you can shed a lot of things. From what I can tell, it’s not a smooth transition, though—normal people have to do most of their crap chores themselves, medium-rich people can outsource the trivial ones (gardening, grocery shopping, some parts of cleaning) and not the difficult ones (travel planning, making the grocery list to shop from, organizing things), and only the super-rich can really just forget the things they don’t care about.