Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

the kreuger paper is uber marketing and an uber employee is listed as an author.

alan krueger is one of the most credible & nonpartisan (if anything left-leaning, he co-authored the famous NJ-PENN fast food min wage study with david card) empirical economists though. they just gave him the data & there was a stipulation that they wouldn't have a final say on what gets in. if you wanna go full conspiracy you could say they gave him garbage data, but i don't doubt he reported the facts straight.

the drivers' stated hourly wages don't include expenses, and we know that expenses for uber drivers (insurance, repairs, cleaning, etc) aren't congruent to the expenses of the taxi and chauffeur companies, which are more heavily (and justly?) regulated and which pay for more expenses on behalf of their drivers.

good point. wage differentials in that table are pretty big though

If working on behalf of uber was a sweet deal, I don't think there'd be such a high turnover among drivers (which the kreuger paper also tells us about).

this prob has more to do with it being way easier to become an uber driver. people can just try it out as pt thing to make some spare cash. same applies for the white college thing.

I know who Krueger is and I also know uber gave him the data. They're buying his credibility.

I think what you're saying about motivations for starting with uber are true, but I also think it's structured both deliberately and not deliberately to be a socially exclusive transportation network. The two-way rating system makes that tendency seem inevitable and that's the non-deliberate part. The deliberate parts are the libertarian ideals and the marketing.

If uber instigated a reform of the medallion system, that'd be cool.

I also think it's structured both deliberately and not deliberately to be a socially exclusive transportation network. The two-way rating system makes that tendency seem inevitable and that's the non-deliberate part. The deliberate parts are the libertarian ideals and the marketing.

not sure what you mean by this

fwiw despite all i've said itt i think this is a good (though politically infeasible) idea http://m.thenation.com/article/192545-socialize-uber (although my friend brought up a good pt that risk of being socialized could distort incentive to create future start-ups)

I think a worker-owned Uber alternative could be very interesting, though I'd still have many of the same concerns as above, and the worker-owned entrant would face some serious challenges. Uber has deep pockets and no commitment to a fair playing field; it seems plausible they'd be willing to cut their own prices impossibly low in the short-term, to squeeze that competition out of the market. Not sure why it's "politically infeasible" though - I mean there are other worker-owned businesses in the US that get along fine, no?

What I would actually love to see is a political discussion about whether to retain the limited-medallion taxi system, or to open up the field to anybody --- provided they meet X, Y, and Z requirements. Defining X Y and Z would be an enormous headache, but it would mean a chance for the public and policymakers to articulate what they're looking for the taxicab infrastructure to do, and what standards it has to meet for its customers and its drivers. If Uber can actually meet those expectations rather than sneaking into the market through a hole in the fence, fine. I suspect the driver-owned Uber alternative, if someone's finished the technology and business plan by then, would have a lot to offer.

I meant that by having drivers rate riders and vice versa, hidden considerations for ratings will be race, class, language, etc. I think the outcome (an elitist transportation network) of these motivations for rating is unintentional, especially since, for techno-utopian libertarian bros, these rating systems typically imply democracy and meritocracy, where everyone has a voice and an equal chance. However, the elitism is implicit in their marketing and ethos and flouting of the law, and I think in that respect the elitism is intentional.

Putting aside the feasibility of socializing uber, I do believe all standard products and services should be heavily socialized, so I could get behind a national quasi-decentralized transportation network.

The entire idea of meritocracy is a farce, from the origin of the word to now, and it basically means "I value the people who I think are doing /real work/".

It's completely compatible with the libertarian bros idea that most people will get left behind in the dust when they jet off to libertarian tech island some day

these guys really think all manual labor, including driving cars, will be done by robots. as the idea leaders, they will be living in luxury, and the underclass will be the necessary but ostracized robot repairmen

https://d12vb6dvkz909q.cloudfront.net/uploads/galleries/35319/deniro_tuttle.jpg

alan krueger is one of the most credible & nonpartisan (if anything left-leaning, he co-authored the famous NJ-PENN fast food min wage study with david card) empirical economists though. they just gave him the data & there was a stipulation that they wouldn't have a final say on what gets in. if you wanna go full conspiracy you could say they gave him garbage data, but i don't doubt he reported the facts straight.

I am sure the data is fine, but it's just a distraction - there's nothing inherent in uber's model that ensures that drivers will be paid well forever, let alone in 2 years. drivers are now operating in a market w/ zero barriers to entry + uber is currently burning a lot of money. and part of the money it's burning is in hiring hundreds of people to develop driverless cars.

if only there was a solution to getting people from place to place that didn't involve thousands of autonomous vehicles

The entire idea of meritocracy is a farce, from the origin of the word to now, and it basically means "I value the people who I think are doing /real work/".

word. Everyone shd read Michael Young's 'Rise of the Meritocracy'.

For Britishers there is also exquisite irony that coiner of the word 'meritocracy' is Toby Young's dad.

let's be real here: fuck 'merit'.

it's cool, because even if you are sick or currently unemployed you can claim you would be doing /real work/ if you were able so you still have more merit than ppl doing manual labor

if only there was a solution to getting people from place to place that didn't involve thousands of autonomous vehicles
--Upright Mammal (mh)

um...there isn't? unless we massively centralized society. the heterogeneity in "places people want to be driven at places in time" is beyond what any centralized service could do

i used to have the smug attitude towards "libertarian bros" and "technology" that you guys have. while it's good to be critical of everything, i don't think it's a particularly healthy bias in thinking about the future & work and all this stuff.

I am occasionally surrounded by hordes of these people and they are the worst fucking people ever btw

everyone knows the problems with meritocracy. being able to rate your cab driver is still a good thing (what if he was a creep?) also driverless cars are a good thing

being able to provide feedback on service is important. rating a driver on a nebulous five star scale where anything less than a 5 means they are going to lose service means a weird negotiation of what "good service" really means

I am occasionally surrounded by hordes of these people and they are the worst fucking people ever btw
--Οὖτις

maybe so! i just think becoming cantankerous & vaguely self-righteous shaking our fists at every instance of the future is prob not the way

while it's good to be critical of everything, i don't think it's a particularly healthy bias in thinking about the future & work and all this stuff.

imo it pays to be critical and think about how and why things are useful and whether they are filling the right niche.

tbh I am straight-up dismissive of things I think are bad and I'm not going to debate what they're doing wrong

like I was just in yr city not long ago, flopson, and I did all my transport via train/bus/walking but if I did need on-demand transport I was sure as hell going to try uber

uber works really well for on-demand transport, I just think they're approaching the market from the angle of shitlords

these guys really think all manual labor, including driving cars, will be done by robots. as the idea leaders, they will be living in luxury, and the underclass will be the necessary but ostracized robot repairmen

― Upright Mammal (mh), Tuesday, June 30, 2015 10:07 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

kind of amazing how old-school this all is really. like this is basically how the forward-thinking bourgeois reassured themselves in the 1890s... reading bellamy, idealizing engineers as the clear-sighted makers of tomorrow's world. the national technocracy is just around the corner! no manual labor will be necessary, social strife will be resolved by my lifestyle actually getting more comfortable!

no manual labor will be necessary, social strife will be resolved by my lifestyle actually getting more comfortable!

i mean, they were kind of right? there is def less social strife and manual labour now than in 1890

Also eugenics.

there is definitely more manual labour now than in 1890

?

well there's more poor people that's for sure

http://worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu/images/Popn_Graph2.jpg

the extra few billion are not predominantly working white collar jobs

they are all adorable layabout moppets

I wonder if we have the technology to all live infinitely more creative and comfortable lives if we fully embraced wealth redistribution. Technocratic promises are real and we are all living cleaner healthier better lives than medieval kings but there's no real reason for most people to work other than some at the top want to be obscenely rich. We should be colonizing space and extending our lives to hundreds of years long.

i used to have the smug attitude towards "libertarian bros" and "technology" that you guys have.

I don't have a smug attitude towards them. In fact, I find the intersection of the two pretty terrifying in ways that preclude smugness fyi

only if it was distributed worldwide

if it was the US we'd all buy three phones and bigger cars
xp

Technocratic promises are real and we are all living cleaner healthier better lives than medieval kings but there's no real reason for most people to work other than some at the top want to be obscenely rich.

second part of this is not true

i mean, they were kind of right? there is def less social strife and manual labour now than in 1890

― flopson, Tuesday, June 30, 2015 12:07 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they were "right" only in that the labor was moved overseas and that automation and electric motors eliminated tons of jobs that existed in 1890. pretty much nothing else about this scenario played out as expected - they really imagined the technocrats would displace the trusts and the cronyist government to run the economy directly, directing production and labor around in some "optimal" way. the closest we got was the new deal maybe - there's a pretty continuous line through hoover (who fits this persona to a T, right down to being a mining engineer -- super heroic turn of the century profession) to rexford tugwell and ultimately to all the postwar big-science, big-statistics, big-social-planning type agents. none of whom actually had as their real project the elimination of drudgery or the fundamental restructuring of society.

so what actually happened was the trusts stayed in power and resisted all but periodically-corrective planning of the economy. they just did some back of the envelope calculations and realized that with immigration capped, wages were going to be forced up anyway, and it made strategic sense to collaborate with unions, and shift increasingly to a consumerist model, to stabilize consumption and flatten out boom/bust jolts. the models were henry ford and henry kaiser, not bellamy or the visitor from altruria. so social strife went down and the unions ended up not permanently contesting the automation of jobs, but the surplus brought by new technology was not manifested as three-day work weeks and leisure for all. one might also refer to e.g. ruth cowan on household labor and automation -- it's a cliche to report it now, but the fact that time spent on household labor did not actually go down with all the new gadgets for sale, by itself, really destabilizes the conjecture that surely with this next go-round, technology will make everything so smooth and effortless that life will be better than ever! but ogmor is correct that the real shadow to this story (and integral to it) is the abused labor overseas. the smooth plane of existence enjoyed by the libertarian bro app designer is not just juxtaposed with the proletarianization of the global south, it's fundamentally made possible by it.

probably preaching an undergrad lecture to the choir here, sorry - just been thinking about this stuff a lot lately.

the extra few billion are not predominantly working white collar jobs
--ogmor

everything increases if you don't control for population. is your argument that things engineers invented didn't substitute for manual labor and the decrease is just from outsourcing manual labor to the convenient extra billions? cause that's wrong. also the increase in pop happened because of increases in agricultural productivity which is a technology that substitutes manual labor

Doctor Casino, my man

^heh yes

yup get that guy on Jeopardy or something

I could argue that tech has allowed an enormous increase of manual labour through population explosion or talk about cases where inefficient manual labour jobs are created for excess population but my point is just that the latter part of this - there is def less social strife and manual labour now than in 1890 - is really obviously untrue

but the surplus brought by new technology was not manifested as three-day work weeks and leisure for all.

people don't want to only substitute money for leisure though, they also want to use the extra money to consume more stuff. not all of this is conspicuous consumption by the rich. we also do work a lot less. you chose 3 day work week seemingly arbitrarily, but average weekly work hours in USA decreased by ~ 1/3

https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5-x1snHWGCnZ150FU-w_2Rw6Rw4=/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2475084/hoursworked_per_engaged_person.0.png

couldn't find a graph going back the whole century, but look at table 2 in here https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/

in 1900 the three indexed have 59.6, 55.0 and 58.5 hours per week. in 1988 the census has 39.2. i think it's now 33 (http://www.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx)

tbh I think we are talking global here, unless all of your purchases come from yr own country

xpost to self, i think i kinda derailed a few times there but basically the echo i was picking up on, i think, is the idea that if only supply and demand were more precisely matched through technology/technologists, there would be this general benefit to everybody. this was a conservative and a 'progressive' position (witness the embrace of taylorism by the european left -- they figured that achieving efficiency would mean working less to achieve the same output, rather than working just as much to achieve a greater output, then arguing over how to distribute the surplus. or on the conservative side, the 1930s fantasies of frank lloyd wright - we'll all work a couple days in the factory but mostly be tending our virtuous farms.). from ~1890 forward, this was to be negotiated by the engineer. at some point it became the 'planner,' later armed with mainframe computers.

my gut feeling is that a version of the same sentiment is now present in a lot of 'app talk,' especially _____-on-demand stuff: connecting buyer and seller directly eliminates waste, and everybody wins! the implied benefit to society is different, obviously - no one is talking about reducing hours worked in the factory, or peacefully resolving the workers' uprisings. but there's still this faith that a magic technology, properly adminstered, will resolve society's problems. that's been debunked so many times it hardly bears reiterating but the main point must be held: technologies are shaped by society as much as the other way around, and powerful actors choose which kinds of technology to develop, what they're "for" and how to deploy them. blah blah blah, tl;dr sorry.

the "three day" thing was basically pulled out of the aforementioned 19th century discourse, can't give you a specific source i'm afraid, but this kind of thing was in the water.

also just to be clear, not just talking about 'conspicuous consumption' but your more classic, shopworn examples of how supply and demand get stabilized by encouraging more demand - getting this year's fridge, getting the government-backed mortgage for the cheap new house in levittown etc. this isn't to demonize anybody specific in the process -- i'm making really a kind of narrow and probably esoteric/pedantic point about the specific fantasies of certain people a hundred years ago, and i'm just saying that whatever did happen it wasn't what they thought would happen.

I could argue that tech has allowed an enormous increase of manual labour through population explosion or talk about cases where inefficient manual labour jobs are created for excess population but my point is just that the latter part of this - there is def less social strife and manual labour now than in 1890 - is really obviously untrue

― ogmor, Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:01 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you think it's still true adjusted for population? unadjusted it's trivial, but do you think manual labor as a % of population has increased since 1890? for the whole world, rich world, USA, whatever

I'm not sure anyone knows, the data for 1890 is going to be incredibly patchy. Unadjusted isn't trivial at all, there are vastly more people now working huge hours doing low paid manual labour than ever before, if that changes it will involve enormous worldwide economic upheaval

Thinking technology will fix human suffering is much older than the 19th century though. Alchemists, occult scientists, and early globalists believed that too. Some of their wildest fantasies (speech travelling through the air as fire for instant communication) have come true to the point of ubiquitous banality.

2006: twitter invented
2008: black president

there's still this faith that a magic technology, properly adminstered, will resolve society's problems. that's been debunked so many times it hardly bears reiterating but the main point must be held: technologies are shaped by society as much as the other way around, and powerful actors choose which kinds of technology to develop, what they're "for" and how to deploy them. blah blah blah, tl;dr sorry.

idk i tend to think technology solves more problems than it creates and that ultimately no one person or group of people are powerful enough to control it, and that general attempts to thwart it are misguided. maybe some people are too optimistic, maybe rich people 100 years ago were too optimistic. so what?