Why the Sharing Economy Is About Desperation, Not Trust

An anonymous reader writes "Wired recently ran a cover story about the sharing economy — shorthand for the rise of peer-to-peer rental services like Lyft and Airbnb — which they call a cultural and economic breakthrough. They say it has ushered in a 'new era of Internet-enabled intimacy.' An article at New York Magazine has another theory: that it arose because of the weakness in the real economy. Quoting: 'A huge precondition for the sharing economy has been a depressed labor market, in which lots of people are trying to fill holes in their income by monetizing their stuff and their labor in creative ways. In many cases, people join the sharing economy because they've recently lost a full-time job and are piecing together income from several part-time gigs to replace it. In a few cases, it's because the pricing structure of the sharing economy made their old jobs less profitable. (Like full-time taxi drivers who have switched to Lyft or Uber.) In almost every case, what compels people to open up their homes and cars to complete strangers is money, not trust.'"

Comments

Re:Growth is not necessity

[Immerman]

An excellent point, I hadn't really considered the investment angle, but I think you're right. Perhaps that's a good reason to consider moving heavily back toward dividend-paying stocks. If the value of the stock is purely in how fast its value is increasing then obviously the shareholders will pressure the company to steadily grow, probably to the long-term detriment of both the company and the larger market. If however you could typically get an N% per year return in dividends while the stock value remains relatively constant, then holding the stock is far more in line with the original vision of distributed ownership of the company.

[1] an excellent point, with one caveat: as the production quality improves in a modern heavily-automated factory the cost of labor tends to become an ever-smaller factor in the overall manufacturing cost. Since China's primary advantage is low labor costs they thus have an incentive to focus their production capacity on the quality range in which their advantage is most profitable - to wit the lower end of the market. As such I imagine the number of Chinese factories capable of creating cheap junk is far greater than the number capable of creating top-quality merchandise.