It makes sense. Why pay someone $20 for a job they would have done for $10. There needs to be some logic to guess what this value is so AI would be useful. Trying to make this illegal would make the economy less efficient than it could be.
Companies have very little pricing power. The workers and the customers have all the power.
The problem is that while the workforce is the most important part of the whole enterprise, each individual worker has very little bargaining power.
Workers should be able to form some sort of group, so they can negotiate on something resembling an even footing with huge corporations.
This sort of shit has negative economic and societal consequences.
I’m sick to death of naive tech bros thinking that every other field is so easy that their sheltered intuition is enough to understand it.
Your claim that wages being below someone else's is "societally harmful" requires some proof beyond your intuition.
This is not a method of cutting all wages in the country, it is a method of directing wages to higher productivity workers.
It only shifts relative amounts.
Just as we expect a cleaner to be paid less than the software engineer whose cubicle is being cleaned, there is no "societal" objection to the 3x engineer being paid more than the 2x engineer.
This might be controversial in the private sector, but wage transparency is the norm in the public sector in my area of the world... and many people are employed in those positions.
And we're not changing the number of transactions here with these wage calculations.
you absolutely are, that's the whole point of it being more efficient. the pie grows and everyone wins.
you are also starting the story in the middle. there is no two parties haggling value. there is a market of providers and a market of sellers. Uber/Lyft/DiDi all compete for drivers by offering bids to drivers. Drivers pick the highest bid. What's the inefficiency here?
the value from gig work and ride sharing, like nearly every single normal economic act is not fucking zero sum.
> Uber/Lyft/DiDi all compete for drivers by offering bids to drivers. Drivers pick the highest bid. What's the inefficiency here?
The inefficiency is when there aren't plentiful rides from multiple platforms, so the competition part goes away.
> the value from gig work and ride sharing, like nearly every single normal economic act is not fucking zero sum.
The value of the work isn't zero sum but the way the surplus is distributed is often zero sum.
Though if a worker is aiming for a specific amount of profit, and you manage to cut their pay to get more hours out of them, it's not zero sum but the effect on the worker is even worse.
There are two problems here:
1. People learn the simplest toy models in some subject area - here, the economics of perfect competition markets - and then apply the results of it to real world scenarios that don't even remotely satisfy the assumptions of the toy model.
2. The ethics in some subject area is almost always a separate theory from the mathematical theory. Introduction to economics assumes humans are utilitarian because it makes the maths easy. But then, people use the metrics derived from that "utilitarian" econ theory, and again apply it to the real world scenarios, not realizing the humans not utility maximizing agents. Hence, what is "right" or "just" can't be derived from the simple econ theories.
explain who teaches this, explain why it is wrong, and explain the correct way to describe it.
> not realizing the humans not utility
then ubers algorithm will not work at all. and no pricing system would work either.
List negative economic outcomes in terms of consumer/producer welfare, deadweight loss, supply and demand.
I'm not saying that I think you're wrong or right compared to the parent comment that responded to you; I just don't think it's obvious that something being more efficient inherently implies that it should be legal. Maybe I'm incorrectly inferring that you're stating that "trying to make this illegal would make the economy less efficient than it could be" is implying that this means that it would be bad to make it illegal, but it definitely sounds like that to me.