Counterintuitive Effects of Minimum Prices

Tale as old as time. Politicians can change any laws they want, but not the law of supply and demand.

This is why what sounds good when written in public policy very often does not produce the hoped-for result.

I'm not sure if I missed something in the article, but it appears to me that the article does not take in to account the change in supply due to change in effective wage caused by decreased utilization. The supply of drivers available would be based on what money drivers actually take home, not just the nominal price, so any decrease in the money taken home would result in a decrease in supply, meaning the positive impact on drivers wages would be larger than that computed in the article.

I think this blog post conveniently ignored the part where drivers do not provide their services directly to customers and instead go through a middle man that decides how much they get paid via an arbitrary algorithm.

I've noticed a general pattern in mainstream economics where the assumptions and scenarios are always carefully chosen to be equivalent to some communist utopia.

If every worker at a company owned equal amounts of shares in the company, they wouldn't give a crap if their salary is lowered to pay out more dividends to shareholders, because they are the shareholders, but the moment the two diverge the analysis doesn't seem to have much relation to the real world, since now the company can stiff the workers.

Everyone knows that companies don't exist to provide equilibrium price vectors, they exist to make profit and profit can only exist out of equilibrium.

> Riders pay around $2.33 per ride and drivers earn around $2.33 per hour.

This isn't how it works. It's more like riders pay $2.33 per ride, app platform takes $2, drivers earn $.33.