Uber vs. Piketty | Hacker News Reader

Uber vs. Piketty

cafehayek.com

1 pointhga7 comments

> While working together earlier this week on a business trip to California, my Mercatus Center colleague Ashley Schiller and I were chatting about Uber and the assaults that governments are now launching on this amazing innovation

Calling Uber amazing innovation means you have no idea what you are talking. It is neither amazing nor innovation.

And if the government was really assaulting Uber they would have used RICO.

Well, in the context of the thesis that companies like Uber are allowing people to partly convert consumption assets into production ones, to an economist it strikes me as not unreasonable he'd describe it as both "amazing" and an innovation.

That's certainly a very interesting concept, and new in the modern era, I think. Closest I can think of right now is selling surplus solar power your home is generating back to the utility, a somewhat different thing.

You know about the many self thought programmers that learned on their own PC-s ... since the late 70s.

I don't think education is this sort of consumption or production, in fact, when did people start buying PCs more for consumption? E.g. games and telecom/the Internet?

Comparable might be buying more PC that you need, and selling the extra cycles. There have been for some time schemes that do that for non-profit uses, e.g. math (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_...) and science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home), I now notice a huge list of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_... But I think I would have heard of any "make money at home!" schemes....

It is both amazing and an innovation to me. Why would you dispute this? Uber is totally disrupting the way people travel within congested cities. Where I live in Panama, it has been amazingly innovative. Taxis here, while cheap, are dirty, unsafe and unreliable. Uber is remaking how people travel here and elsewhere.

I have been using taxis for 20 years now - it usually goes like this - I order the car to come to my departure address and take me to my destination. And then I pay. Just like Uber. Taxi services (which uber is) are a century old. So - no innovation.

And if that is the bar to clear for amazing - this is just an simple app backed by insane amount of money. Well having unlimited resources makes solving the chicken and egg problem easy.

That's not what uber is. I open an app - never having to talk to a human. I start a request. I see the driver that will be coming. I see where he is. He see's where I am. No cash ever changes hands. There are reviews on each side of the transaction. Anyone can see how groundbreaking this is.

Not to mention you get a very clean, newer car, great service, etc.

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