I'd say "socializing losses, privatizing gains" is the name of the game. Those popular disruptive startups dump plenty of externalities on everyone around them. Don't think for a moment that anyone there is increasing efficiency for the sake of increasing efficiency globally; it's just disrupting the society and hoping money pours through the cracks.
Never seen this formulated as such but I really like it. I was reading a book which tangentially dealt with that [0]. It changed my perspective on how new businesses are increasingly externalizing their costs to the consumers.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Work-Unpaid-Unseen-Jobs/dp/161...
I also have never head it put quite this way, and realize how true it is. One example is American Football stadiums. Get the people to pay for it and charge them to go there.
In an idealized market, costs should be passed onto the consumer. From what I can tell, the book you reference is just complaining that this cost changed from money to labor.
It is also worth noting that, in many cases, this results in a net win for the consumer. Eg, whwn I buy from a full service gas station, I am paying someone to pump my gas, and paying the to sit idle waiting for customers, and paying (in time) to wait for them to finish.
In contrast, in self service, the only cost from above I have is 1 person pumping gas (which switched from being paid with money, to being paid with labor)
E.g. a perfect market would notice the increased quality variance of goods and services and would require the price to go down proportionally so the total cost is the same. But consumers don't all see it at the same time, so every company has a chance to hoodwink every consumer by pushing additional costs onto them without their initial knowledge.
The key innovation of money is the ability to accurately evaluate the value of goods and services; by pushing all of these extra external costs onto the consumer we're basically going back to bartering.
Every additional variable that the consumer is required to consider during a purchase decision is additional cognitive load. That's why people pay so much for free/fixed shipping costs: it reduces the number of variables you have to keep in your head by 1. It's also why I think that adding tax after the listed price (like the US does it) is terrible: it puts more cognitive load on the consumer. Consumers today are attacked with dozens of potential hidden external costs around every corner, it's like a DOS attack on the consumer's brain and inhibits their decision making ability.
--Upton Sinclair
Welcome to The Jungle, baby.
If it's a private entity capturing the state's revenues, that's anything but social. It's the opposite. It should be called what it is: lemon corporatism.
And it's sadly nothing new.
By the same token, but much harder to substantiate, why are people buying property just to rent it out with airbnb?
The negative externalities are there. You just have to know where to look.
the heart and core of each company is just more efficient matching with less regulation and more technology between renters and owners of capital
For one, consider that we attempt to constrain the price of labor upward to cover the cost of living. By having a large workforce that is not necessarily subject to these constraints (minimum wage, employer health plan, payroll taxes, etc.) Uber fails to meet the CoL for a large slice of its workforce, which then has to lean on society to make up the balance.
Pretty lame analysis. There are lots of companies that are in it to do good or actually improve society.
I'd even argue that society is net better off with Lyft (not sure about Uber) even though working there as an employee isn't great. Taxis were awful.
I don't disagree. They rarely get media attention though, and I don't mention them here, because their disruption is a quite different thing from Uber/AirBnB disruption.
For that "lame analysis" part, I'll give you a task: given that you wrote there are lots of such companies, name three. ;).
> I'd even argue that society is net better off with Lyft (not sure about Uber) even though working there as an employee isn't great. Taxis were awful.
Taxis were awful in many places, not everywhere. I'm usually taking people's word for it when they describe how Uber service is better than taxi (though I'm increasingly noticing stories about Uber quality declining). But there are cities, including my home town and the current town I live in, where taxis are almost universally good. And yet, Uber came and attacked taxis everywhere, whether good or bad. You can do things like that when you can freely break the law[0] and get away with it[1], and when you can lose money for longer than all your competitors can stay solvent.
Honestly, Uber story looks pretty much like a typical story of a corporation entering international market and displacing all little local players, except with more disregard for law, and some weird belief people still have that Uber is a startup.
Still, I'll grant Uber that some of the disruption came out for the better, because it allowed more ethical and legal competitors to emerge in this space. And yet:
> working there as an employee isn't great
Here's a thing: do we consider pushing more and more people into wage slavery to be "improving society"?
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[0] - Not just general "taxi regulations", but also traffic safety (a common story to hear was Uber without valid insurance) and tax laws (in my country, I remember our equivalent of IRS being the most active in hunting down Uber drivers).
[1] - Half of the blame here goes to the municipal governments, who should've punished Uber immediately for breaking local laws. AFAIR only Germany behaved correctly, and started issuing service bans quickly.
Don't forget mandatory rest periods, enforced by technical means. My ex-girlfriend used to drive taxis and if you got caught breaking your mandatory rest period the fines were sky-high. Repeat offenders lose their taxi license.
Contrast that to the nice Uber driver, who has no restrictions on driving you around after a double shift at the widget factory and a couple of double whiskies to drown his sorrows, before picking up passengers as an "independent contractor"
What really seems lost on some of the more libertarian inclined, regulation hating chaps here is that most regulation is actually there for a reason. Among other things like protecting your life and health.
When people here start to delve into the "evil hotel lobby that is so mean to this scrappy AirBnb start-up, which sends all their communication 'with love'" then I usually want to start to gag.
Like who?