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:tl;dr

[AlphaWolf_HK]

The problem is not over-production, it is that for some odd reason we see production as the goal of economy. Problem is, the goal is not production, it's selling.

No, the goal of an economy is to sort out who gets what scarce resources. That involves both producing the resources and selling them, though the selling part is optional. For example, if you build a computer, you didn't sell anything, meanwhile you have produced (the whole product is worth more than the sum of its parts, generally speaking. E.g. a graphics card is somewhat worthless unless it is inside of a working computer.)

The goal is cheaper, cheaper, CHEAPER! We have to produce cheaper. Cheaper than the competitor, and even if there is no competitor, we have to produce cheaper. Not to sell it cheaper, as the market theory would demand, but to increase the profit margin. But hell, even if we WERE selling it cheaper, it would not make a difference. Because whether you sell something for 100 or 50 does not matter if the prospective buyer has NOTHING.

That hasn't always been the case, and it still isn't in certain cases. Lean manufacturing is where the concept of cheaper being better largely comes from (it also simultaneously results in a more reliable product in most cases...there's the stereotype of "things just aren't made the way they used to be" but that largely isn't true...today we often throw out or sell perfectly good things, not because they break, but because we want to replace it with the latest and greatest. Concepts like six sigma and ISO9000 didn't exist in the 60's.)

Cheap simultaneously means the poor have greater purchasing power, which means they become weathier without the need for higher income.

However not all products are defined by how much bang for your buck they are, rather they are defined by their sticker price and strict distribution controls to prevent underselling. Such products are e.g. anything Apple sells, certain luxury cars, Bose speakers, certain high-fashion clothing, etc. Products like these are where "cheap" is generally thrown out the window. And you know what? This is the way things always have been for items that traditionally rich people buy. Once upon a time, for example, only really rich people had cars. This model started to end in the early 1800's, and it's what the Luddites were making a fit over: Now that the poor could have access to high quality goods, it suddenly made being an artisan not as lucrative as it once was. But, there still is room for luddites in niche markets, like paintings, pottery, etc.

It is a fact that the worlds poorest are now wealthier than they've ever been. That doesn't mean that they have more money, but things like world hunger have largely ended (still exists in a few pockets of areas, but that is mainly due to politics rather than economics in those cases) and quote-unquote "nice things" are much easier to afford. A common example I like to make is to compare the 80's with today...Remember how only the filthy rich could have 50" TVs, car phones, personal computers, and laser disc players? Now even the poor have much better TVs than the ones rich had in the 80's, cell phones that aren't tied to a car and have unlimited talk time for a flat rate, and blu-ray players, and I've seen more than one homeless person walking around with a working laptop. Used to be the homeless were lucky if they eat more than one meal in a day; now they're often overweight.

Today's poor make the rich of the 30's look like paupers, and the middle class of the 80's look like welfare recipients. I'm tired of this rhetoric of the occupy types who make a stink about being poor just because the goalpost for "poor" keeps moving higher and higher on some spreadsheet, meanwhile they ask for "fixes" that will just end up making things worse.

Re:tl;dr

[udachny]

Obviously you say 'good bye' because there is not one single argument that you can present to fight against the simple truth:

people buy consumer goods with credit cards, so they pay more today than they would if they waited a year and paid less a year from now, so they are clearly not deterred by higher costs of goods they are buying if they need those goods. The only 'good' that people wouldn't buy today if it fell in price in a year from now would be an investment, and the gov't is using inflation (money printing) to prop up fake economy growth numbers, which in fact only measure the level of DESTRUCTION of value, destruction of the value of dollar and of savings, not any economic growth, because there is no economic growth. Inflation is destruction of the economy and the gov't needs it to feed the fake numbers and to feed itself at the expense of the current and of the future economy by destroying the value of savings and preventing restructuring and preventing economic reconstruction.

You are in fact brain dead, because even as you read my comment, you are still completely convinced in the ideology that was beaten into your head over the decades by the gov't that exists at this point only at the expense of the economy and society itself. You can't grasp simplest of things, you are dumber than a cave man when it comes to economics, you haven't progressed, you have regressed into some pre-amoebial state when it comes to economic understanding.

This here is not for you, it's for those who read your retarded comment and thought it had any value in it whatsoever beyond a clear example of somebody that has no pulse.