The future Career of Your Children: Butler ?

Excerpt from minyanville.com

"What do you get when there's an ongoing devaluation of the U.S. dollar, a negative personal savings rate, declining personal incomes, the erosion of a middle class and the richest 1% of Americans possess more wealth than the bottom 90% of Americans? A boom in butlers, of course!

* According to the Wall Street Journal, today's rich, with their high-tech estates, globe-trotting schedules and complicated lives, need more than a traditional butler to run things.

* "They want a hands-on manager, a kind of chief operating officer for My Life Inc."

* As of 2004, there were more than 1.4 million U.S. households worth at least $5 million and more than 530,000 worth more than $10 million, according to the Federal Reserve.

# Friends, fear not, just make your way to the Starkey International Institute for Household Management. Seriously. (Note: Surprisingly, Butler University is not a university for butlers, as the name clearly implies.)

# In just eight weeks Starkey students learn how to cook, clean, polish, dust, wash and fold for rich people.

# "They learn how to iron a pair of French cuffs in seconds flat. They learn how to clip a 1926 Pardona cigar, how to dust a de Kooning canvas and whether to pair an oaky chardonnay with roasted free-range game hen. They learn how long it takes to clean a 45,000-square-foot mansion (20 to 30 hours depending on the art and antiques), where to find 1,020-thread-count sheets (Kreiss.com), and how to design a "stationery wardrobe" -- envelopes and letterhead specially designed to reflect the owner's wealth and social standing. They will be taught that sable stoles should never be stored in a cedar closet (it dries them out), and that Bentleys should never, ever be run through the car wash," the Wall Street Journal says.

# If anyone requires evidence of the strength of the U.S. economy, then this is it.

# Butlers, after all, earn a salary of $70,000 to $120,000 a year, according to the Journal.

# Moreover, this is a kind of trickle down, self-perpetuating profession.

# All you have to do is work for a few years as a butler, save your money, then take your wealth and move into your own mansion and hire your own butler!

# See, this creates new job opportunities for future butlers who will, thanks to their high salary as butlers, one day become wealthy and go on to hire butlers themselves; a never-ending stream of former butlers hiring butlers hiring butlers."