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Comment by Symmetry | Hacker News Reader

Here's a pretty good explanation of exactly how the study calculated the number it did, it's pretty embarassing:

https://medium.com/uber-under-the-hood/an-analysis-of-ceeprs...

I'd previously read a paper by an economist using Uber pay data to analyze gender wage gaps. The numbers they had for both men and women were way higher than this study and it's usually best to trust administrative data over self reports.

https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf

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That is flat-out embarrassing to report an hourly pre-tax income of $3.37, which implies accuracy down to the cent, when the actual reporting methodology is bucketing within ranges of powers of two. And then on top of that to completely screw up the accounting methodology anyway.

Much more accurate would be to actually get real data from drivers, by giving them instructions to extract desired monthly data from the app itself showing income and hours online (I presume the driver-side apps include this data?).

Thanks for the link. Those questions are worded in a pretty ambiguous way, making this survey pretty much useless. Who knows how the respondents really interpreted those questions?

This has some interesting numbers in it, but I live in a high rent part of the country and these statistics that throw around national averages leave me cold.

In similar conversations you can encounter rhetoric about how we should tax people worth a million dollars. This logic doesn’t consider that a $million for a 40 year old dentist in rural Ohio is very different than for someone who just retired in New York. That’s all they have for the rest of their life.

Financial policy decions need to consider money in terms of cost of living and also age of the people. Especially in a world where pensions are barely a thing now. Going after numbers without context ends up attacking the middle class.

So for instance the $20 an hour would make more sense to Reason if it were restated as a multiple of minimum wage or the poverty line. Because if Ubuntu is concentrated in metropolitan areas that could mean most of their drivers are near the poverty line. Not as incendiary as $3.50/hr but still quite damning.

Hi guys, I made a number of comments on that piece. Please let me know if there are any that you would like to be revised/looked more closely at.

Also you can find me on Twitter where I have over 150 tweets about this from the weekend. Would love to hear your POV.

http://Twitter.com/DaveCraige

Am I the only one that think's it's weird that Uber's Chief Economist is posting on their official Medium account with an article that sources data from a blogger to refute the MIT study? Like this guy has way more information at his fingertips, so I think it's a little suspicious that they aren't using their own internal data to make a public statement.

To be fair to him, the worst move he could make is put an official figure out there.

Wait, Uber could figure out how much their drivers make, then apply standard rates for depreciation and a good local gas estimate to figure out profits? What magic could they use to do that???

i thought they were using the blog data because thats what the MIT study was using.

bingo

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