Comment by johnnyg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnnyg | Hacker News Reader

This article looks at supply side but ignores the demand side benefits to the sharing economy model. It works from an assumption that someone else other than the business offering a service and the contractor willing to work it knows best.

Boiled down - full time jobs good, contract jobs bad. Reasoning? We talked to this guy who has a cute kid he is struggling to protect. We also talked to a regulator who gets ink for saying it is awful, just awful.

If contract is undesirable then apply for work at a traditional cleaning service. He now has the experience through HomeJoy, seems doable.

Should he be making what the coders and web devs who built HomeJoy make? No. He doesn't have those skills yet.

Society owes him:

1. The opportunity to learn the skills to compete in our economy. (With our education system, I fear he's not received what he is owed here...and if so, injustice.)

2. A free market to "find your wage" or "start your own" based on the extent to which you can build things others want.

This guy is a hard worker. Software is eating the world and changing the rules. When that happens, many opportunities and new niches are created. I hope that the regulators realize this and let it continue. I hope that this guy finds a profitable place in the changes.

Hope is nice, but it doesn't get the guy housing or food or health insurance.

As a society, we're moving toward a new economic model. One that's superior in terms of creating output and wealth, but strikingly materially inferior for lots of people: it requires a different and much less broad-based skill set than the old economy required. It's possible for an individual to find the odd piecemeal job that requires those old-style skills, but extremely difficult to make a real living off of it.

Short of turning people into soylent green or magically educating everyone to above the current median skill level, I see the only real solution to this problem to be a basic income or a job guarantee. (I don't, however, see any way for US political institutions to create those solutions.)

> educating everyone to above the current median skill level

I see improving education as the best solution here. There is plenty of room for innovation and improvement.

The issue is that we've been pointing to education as the solution for decades. Despite that, we still have no real clue as to how to improve education, and this is particularly true for the bottom 20% of performers--throwing more teachers or different curriculum at them has resolutely failed, experimentation by charter and independent schools hasn't given us any plausibly paradigm-changing leads, and initiatives like Khan Academy and Coursera are focused on self-directed learners, who that bottom 20% definitely are not.

Obviously better education would be the dream solution for taxpayers, society, and students, but so far as I can tell it's just a dream that never translates to reality.

Education also finds itself on the chopping block before anything else in this country. This leads to things like Universities hiring researchers over instructors so they can somehow justify themselves before the politicians who want to remove funding whenever they can.

We point at education, but we don't exactly supply it with the capability to perform what we want it to.

It's not about the abstract regulators, it's about the voters. I imagine we're not too far away from the uber-ization (really, the contracter-ization) of the economy becoming a political issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com