<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">peter waterman</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:peterwaterman1936@gmail.com">peterwaterman1936@gmail.com</a>></span><br><div dir="ltr"><div><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><ol><li><div style="text-align:left"><br></div></li></ol></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="gmail_quote">From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Brian K. Murphy</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:brian@radicalroad.com" target="_blank">brian@radicalroad.com</a>></span><br>Date: Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 12:47 PM<br>Subject: [WSF-Discuss] The Uber economy: taking advantage of wealth inequality<br>To: <a href="mailto:worldsocialforum-discuss@openspaceforum.net" target="_blank">worldsocialforum-discuss@openspaceforum.net</a><br><br><br><u></u>
<div>
<div><a href="http://qz.com/312537/the-secret-to-the-uber-economy-is-wealth-inequa" target="_blank">http://qz.com/312537/the-secret-to-the-uber-economy-is-wealth-inequa</a><span></span>lity/</div>
<div><font size="-1"><b>UBER + PIKETTY = 2014</b></font></div>
<div><font color="#0000FF" size="+1"><b>The secret to the Uber economy
is wealth inequality</b></font></div>
<div><i><b>There's no Uber for this.</b></i></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>by Leo Mirani, New American Economy, December 16, 2014<i> |
Quartz</i></div>
<div><br>
Of the many attractions offered by my hometown, a west coast peninsula
famed for its deep natural harbor, perhaps the most striking is that
you never have to leave the house. With nothing more technologically
advanced than a phone, you can arrange to have delivered to your
doorstep, often in less than an hour, takeaway food, your weekly
groceries, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs (over-the-counter, prescription,
proscribed), books, newspapers, a dozen eggs, half a dozen eggs, a
single egg. I once had a single bottle of Coke sent to my home at the
same price I would have paid had I gone to shop myself.<br>
<br>
The same goes for services. When I lived there, a man came around
every morning to collect my clothes and bring them back crisply ironed
the next day; he would have washed them, too, but I had a washing
machine.<br>
<br>
These luxuries are not new. I took advantage of them long before Uber
became a verb, before the world saw the first iPhone in 2007, even
before the first submarine fibre-optic cable landed on our shores in
1997. In my hometown of Mumbai, we have had many of these conveniences
for at least as long as we have had landlines-and some even earlier
than that.<br>
<br>
It did not take technology to spur the on-demand economy. It took
masses of poor people.<br>
</div>
<div><b>Silicon Valley catches on</b><br>
In San Francisco, another peninsular city on another west coast on the
other side of the world, a similar revolution of convenience is
underway, spurred by the unstoppable rise of Uber, the on-demand taxi
service, which went from offering services in 60 cities around the
world at the end of last year to more than 200 today.</div>
<div><br>
Uber's success has sparked a revolution, covered in great detail
this summer by Re/code, a tech blog, which ran a special series about
"the new instant gratification economy." As Re/code pointed out,
after Uber showed how it's done, nearly every pitch made by
starry-eyed technologists "in Silicon Valley seemed to morph
overnight into an 'Uber for X' startup."<br>
<br>
Various companies are described now as "Uber for massages,"
"Uber for alcohol," and "Uber for laundry and dry cleaning,"
among many, many other things ("Uber for city permits"). So
profound has been their cultural influence in 2014, one man wrote a
poem about them for Quartz. (Nobody has yet written a poem dedicated
to the other big cultural touchstone of 2014 for the business and
economics crowd, French economist Thomas Piketty's smash hit,
Capital in the Twenty-First Century.)<br>
<br>
The conventional narrative is this: enabled by smartphones, with their
GPS chips and internet connections, enterprising young businesses are
using technology to connect a vast market willing to pay for
convenience with small businesses or people seeking flexible work.<br>
<br>
This narrative ignores another vital ingredient, without which this
new economy would fall apart: inequality.<br>
</div>
<div><b>The new middlemen</b><br>
There are only two requirements for an on-demand service economy to
work, and neither is an iPhone. First, the market being addressed
needs to be big enough to scale-food, laundry, taxi rides. Without
that, it's just a concierge service for the rich rather than a
disruptive paradigm shift, as a venture capitalist might say. Second,
and perhaps more importantly, there needs to be a large enough labor
class willing to work at wages that customers consider affordable and
that the middlemen consider worthwhile for their profit margins.<br>
<br>
Uber was founded in 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the worst
financial crisis in a generation. As the ride-sharing app has risen,
so too have income disparity and wealth inequality in the United
States as a whole and in San Francisco in particular. Recent research
by the Brookings Institution found that of any US city, San Francisco
had the largest increase in inequality between 2007 and 2012. The
disparity in San Francisco as of 2012, as measured (pdf) by a city
agency, was in fact more pronounced than inequality in Mumbai
(pdf).</div>
<div><br>
Of course, there are huge differences between the two cities. Mumbai
is a significantly poorer, dirtier, more miserable place to live and
work. Half of its citizens lack access to sanitation or formal
housing.<br>
<br>
Another distinction, just as telling, lies in the opportunities the
local economy affords to the army of on-demand delivery people it
supports. In Mumbai, the man who delivers a bottle of rum to my
doorstep can learn the ins and outs of the booze business from
spending his days in a liquor store. If he scrapes together enough
capital, he may one day be able to open his own shop and hire his own
delivery boys.<br>
<br>
His counterpart in San Francisco has no such access. The person who
cleans your home in SoMa has little interaction with the mysterious
forces behind the app that sends him or her to your door. The Uber
driver who wants an audience with management can't go to Uber
headquarters; he or she must visit a separate "driver center."<br>
<br>
There is no denying the seductive nature of convenience-or the cold
logic of businesses that create new jobs, whatever quality they may
be. But the notion that brilliant young programmers are forging a
newfangled "instant gratification" economy is a falsehood.
Instead, it is a rerun of the oldest sort of business: middlemen
insinuating themselves between buyers and sellers.<br>
<br>
All that modern technology has done is make it easier, through
omnipresent smartphones, to amass a fleet of increasingly desperate
jobseekers eager to take whatever work they can get.</div>
<div><br></div>
</div>
<br>_______________________________________________<br>
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<br></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div>Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: <a href="http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan" target="_blank">http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan</a> </div><div><br></div>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a> - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br><br><a href="http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation" target="_blank"></a>Updates: <a href="http://twitter.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/mbauwens</a>; <a href="http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens</a><br><br>#82 on the (En)Rich list: <a href="http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/" target="_blank">http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/</a> <br></div></div>
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