Taxis have always been a gig economy, it's just that you used to have a big sticker on the side of your car. Taxi drivers have never been paid a wage.
If you look at the UK or US during the Industrial Revolution (or China today) you will see poor people doing hard jobs and its all part of a huge economic build-up that makes everyone richer -- even if some people at the top could skim off fortunes.
But if you look at even broader history, such as Medieval Europe, or China and India for most of their history, you will still see industrious poor people. But there's little build-up -- just skimming by the people at the top.
I think modern India is somewhere in between those two modes. And sometimes I fear that western democracies are converging on the same in-between place, but from the other side.
It’s similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the opioid crisis taking the place of people drinking themselves to death.
You also see the same high-levels of corruption, especially in tech, where former Obama officials are given high-level jobs at the big firms or gig unicorns. Hell, even Obama himself just got a Netflix deal.
Indeed it is. What's new is that companies have never been this successful to sell what is basically modern day labour as cool and hip and "good for you!".
I guess it only a matter of time until we see a resurgence of night lodgers as this revolutionary new alternative way of housing.
Overhead for managing repetitive and time intensive labor work is high, so when a program can do it, that overhead drops, efficiency increases, and it becomes profitable.
I'm talking about the gig economy from a workers perspective.
Much of the marketing for Uber drivers implies this fantasy.
Maybe BI will make this fantasy a reality.
Another step to enable self reliance would be the popularisation of new technologies such as open source software, 3d printing, solar power, cheap medical sensors, AI and DIY robotics (including agro-bots). Also, replacing banks with lending co-ops.
A small community on the size of a village or town could provide construction, schooling, medical services, servicing tools and machines and of course, agriculture - based on an internal marketplace of gigs or jobs. On the total the community could become more and more independent from the outside. Later on, when automation reaches maturity, the self supporting community could solve most of its needs without much human work and still be independent from the state (UBI) and large-corporation jobs.
Because companies are greedy and the state is corrupt, we need to take power back into our hands to prepare for the future.
Too bad every time one interacts with someone else people with guns and prisons demand about 50% of the transaction. Set income and sales tax to zero and this could easily happen everywhere. It would be cool if some decent sized country would try it and use a land tax to fund the government.
The US before 1913 was a largely agricultural nation with strong equality due to fair capital allocation, free land distributed to homesteaders, manifest destiny and all that. Dispensing current means of income redistribution would mean reverting to a much more feudal, almost primitive state. The vast majority of people would have no agricultural property and no capital, just wages paid by immensely wealthy global capitalists that wouldn't owe any taxes.
Land taxes are one of the only ways to tax non-productive, rentier style wealth that has lots of fixed assets, and merely sits on them extacting money with very little positive economic input. Since it is they who are typically the most responsible for soaring housing and real estate prices (they buy properties and then do nothing with them, often times not even renting them out), to suggest such taxes are "strongly regressive" is pretty much exactly the opposite of reality.
Under a system with strong land taxes, such parties are incentivised strongly to either sell to people who want the land more (can make more money off of it by increasing density, thus pay more taxes) or to do so themselves. In a world without property tax, they are incentivised to just sit on the property forever, and do nothing to it, waiting for a huge payday far into the future.
A large land tax in such an ECON101 postcard-perfect market will immediately increase the costs of inputs to the point where production no longer makes economic sense. Either through decreased production or tariff protectionism the food prices will rise, passing the tax to consumers.
That's not say taxes are always passed down to consumers, that's a pure straw-man you conjure to hurl insults. But in these two cases, they are, to an overwhelming degree.
In effect it would probably be a one off hit to real estate prices. I think the distortions of a land tax are better than others and support it.
I own real estate but it's only 5x my wage, the current system sucks - taxing human effort and creativity is about the worst thing you can tax.
As for income taxes, they don't really tax creativity and human effort, except if you think of the world as a perfect meritocratic utopia where everyone has infinite positive liberties. But in that case, you wouldn't really need to tax anybody.
The revenue of an individual is generally strongly dependent on the social infrastructure they use to generate it. The same person, transplanted into another area of the world with less functional social institutions will generate orders of magnitude less money. For example, an American or British medic moving to the peaceful and English speaking country of Ghana: same creativity and effort, 5-10x less revenue, purchasing parity adjusted. It's only natural then for him to pay for his access to the rich society, thus enabling the public investments that allow such a rich society to exist in the fist place.
The ideea that Americans or the British possess a hereditary, almost magical capacity to self organize in the absence of fiscal revenue, that other lesser civilised people lack, is deliciously naive.
That's not to say the governments of rich countries is the pinnacle of efficiency or forethought and shouldn't be kept strictly in check. But that much worse is possible, and that the failure of government has such drastic consequences to make 50% of your revenue the least of your concerns.
Today's currencies fail to drag along with them all the logistical details market participants are really interested in about an exchange; that's why we have crude hacks like review platforms, credit scoring, insurance claims reports, etc. They're extremely information lossy exchange mechanisms, and these logistical details only hazily emerge after a long time in a fast-moving market, always a rear-view mirror picture of the market.
This would be a form of scabbing: taking jobs away from people that don't have economic security, to give disposable income to people that do.
That world would have more to do with a Star Trek episode than with the current society.
Isn't the point of an imagined scenario not to be like current society in some way?
There are about 1.9 billion acres of land in the continental united states. That works out to 5.8 acres per person. If people could afford to purchase 100 acres of land per year, and even a tiny percent of people utilized this - land prices would skyrocket. And a similar story would end up being true of other resources and labor costs.
In describing fantasy scenarios you have to consider the implications on the allocation of limited resources such that everything isn't just completely overwritten by inflation.
While land is limited, wealth and capital are not. It's perfectly possible to posit a society where people own, say, shares of robotic mining companies that roam the solar system for resources. Or that values genuine human sexual intercourse to the tune of one million dollars per act, inflation adjusted. It's much harder to substantiate how such a society would actually look like.
The first would be where janitors would go and retail is another poorly paid job today.
The average house cost in 1960 [2] was $11,900.
So with a house price of around two times yearly income, we get to about $100k wage for a janitor or retail clerk in 1960. US post WWII was a pretty unique situation, but one would hope that you should be able to more than imagine such a situation. You can study the existence of such a culture in the recent past and still talk to people who actually lived it.
[1](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015021301612;vi...)
[2]https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/valu...
An inflation adjusted wage of $5000 in 1960 represents $42.500 in 2018, which is in line with the often repeated tidbit that real wages of blue collar workers have stagnated for decades.
Therefore, what you are describing is a world with similar real wages to those of today, and with real estate cheaper by a factor 2-3x, inflation and quality adjusted. That is indeed easy to imagine.
What I am describing is a world where real wages are 4-5 times larger. Yes, those wealth increases could be trapped by a ballooning real estate market, where a single bedroom semi is worth $2 million at current purchasing parity, making it very similar to your world. Or something else could happen entirely, that is almost impossible to predict.
These aren't gig jobs. They offer steady employment with predictable hours and wages. If everyone has a basic job contract (which is a right in some countries already), it is even more predictable. If the job itself isn't good enough for your basic economic needs, the safety net kicks in. If they lose their job, the safety net kicks in so they aren't struggling to get by with gigs. (Obviously idealized situation).
The point is that worker never is forced to piece together gigs to be able to pay for food, clothing, shelter, and other things society sees necessary to be a full citizen. The same employee might decide to save for a house, vacation, buy a newer vehicle, or something similar and then work gigs on top of his normal employment. It isn't that everyone will be paid well or that no one will clean toilets, but it may mean that companies like Uber would have to hire regular employees so they have the same sort of economic security as the janitor would.
Everyone’s experiences are different!
I'd say roughly 5% of my drivers have appeared under retirement age. I wonder what the age statistics look like nationwide.