Rideshare services - Uber, Lyft, Hailo, etc.

I take it all back

xp- nah i like social initiatives, i just also like industrialisation and technology. crazy i know

I don't think they've "cooked the books," but I think their avowed investment in the free market and very large, literal, financial investment in developing countries can lead to a less than "objective" methodology. It's like psychometricians and g or IQ. They don't necessarily fudge their data, but their entire livelihood is based on the belief that g is a real thing. And just like in psychometrics, you're not going to see a lot of visible pushback in the literature!

Powell and Skarbek (2004) in defense of sweatshops:

The 60 and 70 hour estimates are more likely to be accurate since these employees often work long hours and six days per week.

The less speculative Garnaut and Song (2006) shows that migrant workers in semi-developed China work "extremely" long hours (about 300 a month) in exchange for crossing that $1.25 a day poverty threshold:

[...] migrant poverty as typically measured is considerably reduced. Once the difference in hours worked between migrants and urban residents is taken into account, we find that migrants would have suffered considerably more from poverty had they worked the same house as their urban counterparts. Our findings raise many questions as to the relationships between poverty measures, hourly income and total work hours that have not received much attention in poverty literature.

Urban workers in China on average work only about 20 hours more per month beyond the typical 40 hour work week, while self-employed workers work about what migrant workers do (somewhere near 300 hours a month on average).

I don't think it's very easy to calculate quality of life, happiness and working hours across the developing world, and I don't think we can unequivocally say that global markets and technological advancements improve or deteriorate these measures. On the other hand, when there's an immediate human cost associated with a technology - say that machines put workers out of business in car factories - that human cost doesn't disappear just because on aggregate people in the world or in a nation appear to be wealthier.

Like I'm not going to ignore the number, however small, of uberx drivers who get sued to oblivion because they don't have (and could scarcely afford) the right insurance.

I don't think it's very easy to calculate quality of life, happiness and working hours across the developing world, and I don't think we can unequivocally say that global markets and technological advancements improve or deteriorate these measures. On the other hand, when there's an immediate human cost associated with a technology - say that machines put workers out of business in car factories - that human cost doesn't disappear just because on aggregate people in the world or in a nation appear to be wealthier.

most things that improve aggregate welfare will have some losers. weavers lose their jobs to the loom, everyone else pays less for their clothes. one of the main roles for governments in trade policy is to redistribute towards losers. that's right there in gains from trade theorem #1, that there exists a transfer system that makes everyone else better off. working hours through the process of industrialization are inverse-u shaped. there are ways to make it less brutal & that's worth talking about, but whether or not to reverse the aggregate welfare improving process shouldn't be up for discussion

So how is that working out for Detroit? People aren't theoretical and the deindustrialization of the US obviously had consequences that blindsided economic planners. And how can you use the phrase "trade theorem no 1" and still be confused by "neoliberalism"?

People's complaints about uber et al are pretty concrete:

1 the transportation network is a public good and should be regulated as such
2 consumers deserve uniform consumer protections
3 employees should have the employee protections of their state. Contractors should have the leeway to negotiate their own contracts
4 commercial drivers need commercial classes of licensing and insurance

The less concrete complaints might be

1 robot taxis are scary
2 libertarian tech bros pls stop lobbying my elected officials

So how is that working out for Detroit? People aren't theoretical and the deindustrialization of the US obviously had consequences that blindsided economic planners.

deindustrialization of the US -> industrialization somewhere else. people in detroit still live in a rich country, many of them left and got jobs elsewhere. i don't think US redistributed enough to compensate losers from deindustrialization (in particular because it affected local economies even in industries other than manufacturing) but there's no a priori reason why people in detroit should have manuf jobs & not ppl in china, unless you're, like, nationalistic

how can you use the phrase "trade theorem no 1" and still be confused by "neoliberalism"?

people use it to mean different things and no one really identifies as it? just seems like a vague word leftists use to throw at things to the right of them? like if neoliberal means fiscal policies of reagan & thatcher i know what it means. you used it in the context of trade policy, i don't know what it means in that context, free trade increased throughout new deal which is not neoliberal (right?) i once read this old washington monthly pamphlet called A Neoliberal Manifesto and it had some good stuff in it and some bad but not a lot that i recognized as what people refer to as neoliberal today

i'm not sure what all 4 of the first complaints mean either. are non-uber taxi companies regulated like a public good iyo? in what way is uber unique in how it deals with contractors? i don't know the answer to those questions

the breaking the law and lobbying stuff is a concern for sure, but taxis are already a huge lobby. does it take a lobby to fight a lobby? idk. the mayor where i live has sided with the taxi lobbies & it doesn't seem particularly cool

Why are we limiting this to 200 years? We are just ignoring all years before the invention of plumbing/sewage.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, June 30, 2015 3:28 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw remotely adequate urban sewerage is basically the last 100-150 years, max. this is complicated though b/c the need for sewers as opposed to privies and cesspools etc. is driven not only by rising urban densities but by the adoption of a particular form of water provision and other uses/practices that go along with it which generate way way more waste, none of which can be effectively or economically separated out for fertilizer (as had previously been the practice).

regarding tech and the 19th century --- sure. other people have been enthused about technology and claimed it would have benefits. i'm referring more narrowly to a particular attitude emerging at a particular moment which specifically has to do with ideas about how technology and management would align to solve the obvious social problems of capitalism in america, eliminating waste and inefficiency and more properly linking up supply to demand.

but yeah like even within the history of americans enthusiastic about technology this kind of attitude doesn't emerge (indeed, wouldn't make sense) until after the civil war. the antebellum period, in most of the conventional histories (john kasson, alan trachtenberg, leo marx, david nye --- to be fair there's a lot of cross-pollination there), is characterized by wayy more ambivalence, people fretting over whether there's something fundamentally un-american or un-democratic about the direction of technology, people looking over at england and going oh god the satanic mills, i hope we never have factories here! etc. at a certain point the mainstream bourgeois opinion flips over to progress, progress, progress, and specifically: trust the engineers and the other stuff i'm babbling about above. and maybe it is a strained analogy but i do feel like there's more of a connection between the bellamyite enthusiasm and the libertarian tech-bro strawman than there is between either of those and the seventeenth century alchemist. i mean then the concern is macro-scale supply/demand, this awareness that the economy, more decades than not, was completely fouled up by crises brought on by overcapitalization and overproduction (particularly by the railroads). that's not at all what the app people are promising to solve! i dunno i guess none of this is really crucial to understanding uber, i'm just trying to find new ways to dislike libertarian tech bro strawmen. carry on, everyone.

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.

others are dealing with the "solves more problems than it creates" but i do feel obliged to defend the truism about social control of technology. decades of scholarship have basically established that this happens all the time and we just take it for granted that the forms of technologies that are familiar to us, that established an early edge for example and get locked in, are the inevitable/natural results of innovation. but this isn't really the case.

like, edison didn't just sit down and tinker with things and figure out the light bulb, he sat down to invent something that specifically would be viable competition for the existing gas light companies, and would basically work along the same business model, which meant his inventing activity would be driven by ways of reducing the transmission medium (copper wire), so he needed not just a light bulb, but a light bulb that would produce adequate light with an amount of current suited to an economically viable amount of wire. (see the work of thomas hughes here.) or, later on, maybe more clearly: the development of electrical appliances from the 1920s on is basically in the hands of westinghouse and general electric. they have all the relevant patents and they are so huge they can buy up anybody else's. so the appliances we got are the ones they found it worth their time to develop, which are a combination of the ones that seemed marketable at whatever time, and the ones that would generate the most usage of electric power, since that was what those companies made their money on. being a national duopoly, they were also more unified than gas companies, thus able to drive gas-driven refrigerator compressors off the market even though the latter are arguably technologically superior (no loud obnoxious motor, no moving parts to suffer breakdowns). (see the work of ruth cowan here.)

tons of other examples, and honestly i'm just kinda recapping articles i've read in recent times; this isn't my field but i've been kinda geeking out on it. the development of computer-controlled machine tools being driven by management's interest in reducing the power of skilled machine-tool operators. the shitty, defective first-generation M-16s being basically the result of sabotage by the army in order to win an obscure and confusing turf war over weapons development. (weapons in general present a vast field of technologies developed because just ungodly sums of money were thrown at them by a few, easily enumerated agencies. there's nothing inevitable about humans arriving at the atomic bomb or the joint strike fighter or whatever.) or, going back to sewers --- the choice of whether to get more clean water by the technology of filtering, or the technology of damming another river and flooding out more hamlets, would seem to favor the former, but historically, boston chose the latter again and again because it was what they'd already done once, and it enabled them to get more water without having to make adjustments to the system they were already used to, or to implement metering to reduce demand, which some of the engineers would have said was more rational.

these are social choices, these are political choices: what technology to develop, what it's for, who gets to use it, etc. etc. that's not to say that sinister super-powers decide all our fates and manipulate the technological chessboard etc... just that to treat "technology" like it's some kind of protean and willful force wending its way through history, beyond our ken or control, is not maybe the most useful model. not to say we need to "thwart" it either -- just that we shouldn't confuse ourselves about the inevitability of this or that technology, or this or that use of a technology.

sorry i've also been drinking a bit btw

others are dealing with the "solves more problems than it creates"

they didn't do a particularly good job besides calling me dumb tbh ;-)

i like your examples, it's a very interesting history. one of my favourite economics blogs is by a guy working in a field that's basically trying to understand invention, he writes papers about like the early airplane industry and stuff. i agree that the direction of invention isn't inevitable and is highly path dependent. some people with a lot of power may have been able to turn the tides are certain moments as your gas-driven refrigerator example beautifully illustrates, but i think the technologies that succeed and get adopted are highly sensitive to demand, and that the gains largely accrue to consumers (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=820309)

i have joel mokyr gifts of athena out from the library but haven't read yet. have you read anything by him?

but it's hard to model or tell anything more than isolated anecdotes about because while yes there is some social political economic stuff we may understand every invention is not only different, but kind of by definition a surprise? seems like an inherently difficult thing to generalize about.

lol @ pretending not to know what neoliberalism means A+ troll

re the deindustrialization of the US, as I said before, real jobs, families, and communities can't be waved away because of global economic changes (or presumed "progress"). People in Detroit live in a rich country, but the murder rate there is higher than Malaysia, Pakistan, Somalia, Rwanda, South Africa, El Salvador, Mexico, and Guatemala. If you believe Todd Clear, mass incarceration drives up poverty and crime rates, which further compound problems in the region.

Jobs aren't exported for the sake of the global economy, anyway, and that's a totally baffling way of looking at what has been a catastrophe for people living in the Rust Belt.

Re uberx, cities, states, and counties can regulate prices, maintenance, driver background checks and licensing, the number of cabs on the road, the ability to refuse a destination or a passenger, and a general code of conduct for drivers. Yes, taxis are regulated like a public good in these respects.

Uber's drivers are treated like contractors but Uberx drivers don't have the ability to negotiate their contracts and their code of conduct is determined by Uber as if Uber were their employer.

I don't really have an opinion on tech in general bc of this lack of 'pure' technology divorced from the market and its social implementation. I do think the combined effect has often exacerbated inequality as well as increased global wealth. just as there's no a priori reason why industry is in east asia rather than boston (though of course the economic reasons are crucial), there's no a priori, or purely-market derived (neoliberal if you like) reason for redistribution, and without that it seems hard to have faith. I can imagine some people from detroit not being too thrilled to be told they still live in a rich country. relative wealth is crucial. the idea that in some absolute terms an unemployed person in the west in 2015 is richer than a sumerian noble or whatever is not really meaningful

haven't read any joel mokyr, will take a look though! my bibliography has this "theories of technology grab-bag" section, trying to arm myself with different lenses but don't want to end up accidentally pursuing too much of the one S-T-S/"social shaping of technology" way of looking at things.

i like your examples, it's a very interesting history. one of my favourite economics blogs is by a guy working in a field that's basically trying to understand invention, he writes papers about like the early airplane industry and stuff. i agree that the direction of invention isn't inevitable and is highly path dependent. some people with a lot of power may have been able to turn the tides are certain moments as your gas-driven refrigerator example beautifully illustrates, but i think the technologies that succeed and get adopted are highly sensitive to demand, and that the gains largely accrue to consumers (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=820309)

well, the thing about technology's success being "sensitive to demand" is that demand is also socially constructed, and what constitutes a "gain" to consumers is basically subjective and up for debate (as in this thread). i'm thinking here of something like superhighways in the US - many or even most consumers saw them as a definite "gain" at the time and they made possible the adoption or expansion of many other technologies, most obviously the rapid proliferation of the detached single-family house (itself plugged into, driving, and being driven by, other technological systems like the plywood industry). but of course as i think we all realize, the adoption of superhighway infrastructure was not just a response to a neutral and innate "demand" for automobile-ready transportation to the boonies; it was more or less a free gift from the federal government, bonded out and financed by the general tax purse, while other alternative transportation and residential technologies were left adrift. thanks to racial red-lining, technocratic assumptions about the evils of the city, and other socially-driven biases, the FHA/GI Bill cash and financing-guarantee options were not available for building or renovating in the inner city, and mass transit was effectively abandoned as a capital spending priority. from 1921 to 1971, the federal government spent $72 billion on highways versus $65 million on rail. armed with the one technology (or really, technological system: the highways, the plywood, the means of accounting and other logistical techniques for efficiently putting the builders on the sites etc.) we built a suburban country.

to some people looking back it's pretty straightforward: americans Just Wanted suburbia and that is what they consumed - the technologies and infrastructure responded to their demands. but other people who wanted other things didn't get them, and now if we survey the state of the country's land use, transportation infrastructure, economic mobility, housing stock, etc. etc. it becomes apparent that automobile suburbia can't be read as simply a "gain." at best, a really mixed bag. the way we used the technologies we chose had some consequences that were probably pretty nice for some people and a lot of others that may have been really destructive and shitty and not easily reversible. see also pollution and global warming as others have pointed out. the planet's ecology has already been dramatically, perhaps catastrophically altered. dunno how or whether i would begin to determine whether on balance that was "worth it" for all the technologies and applications that brought that about.

was thinking about the atom bomb in the shower, too. i mean there's nothing inevitable about that one by any means --- the idea was thought up before the implementation, and it was decided to spend years and an absolutely ungodly amount of money and logistical force to develop it. los alamos, oak ridge, everything, and this is a blank check made to order deal: "at the end of this, give us an atomic bomb." but there's so many alternate universe scenarios. a country that wasn't facing war might have read the einstein/szilárd letter and said "gtfo with this crackpot idea." or if we'd won the war earlier, budget-cutters might have shut down the lab and we'd now know the bomb only as an item in a funny list of "ten crazy superweapons the government actually tried to build in WW2!" or if it so happened that the US didn't actually have easy access to any quantities of uranium, it would have just sat in a file collecting dust. or different leadership might have built one bomb, tested it, and decided not to use it. or in peacetime with a less developed Pentagon, this might have been a decision subject to public debate, like reagan's SDI, and some hypothetical publics would have voted for it, and others would have said "a weapon suited only for genocide? count me out!" or maybe it would have been first developed in the context of peaceful uses, like the (hopeless) plowshares program, bombs for digging canals, and only a century later someone said "hey we could use this super-dynamite as a weapon of war!" who knows. the way it happened is the way it happened and so it just seems like a game of Civilization where yup, after you develop the rocket and mass production, the next thing you're going to discover is the atom bomb. sorry if i'm beating a dead horse here -- partly just talking myself through my own notes as a way of reinforcing my memory of the stuff i've been reading! obviously, uber is much worse than the atom bomb but maybe we can extrapolate.

"inevitability" is one of silicon valley's great ideological cudgels

http://ariamythe.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/inevitability1.jpg

the way it happened is the way it happened and so it just seems like a game of Civilization where yup, after you develop the rocket and mass production, the next thing you're going to discover is the atom bomb.

haha pretty sure i fucked up the tech tree though, don't you need something kind of off-topic like mechanized infantry units or something?

looked it up, you need Electronics

bummer that it cancels out isaac newton's college though

my favorites are how discovering electronics means shakespeare no longer impresses anybody, and communism cancels out both the pyramids and michelangelo. i mean i can see what they were going for but what a wonderfully arbitrary and schematic model of world history. great game obv.

War economy has been around for thousands of years, its one of the most sustained economies on the planet. Weapons since the dawn of man have gotten more and more devastating in response to heavy spending on war R&D.

Crooked warlords have spent thousands of years trying to make a planet-destroying ultra weapon. The only thing that made it inevitable was technology/physics going WE THINK WE CAN TECHNICALLY DO THIS and the war market reacting in kind by protecting their futures betting on a runaway train of supply and demand.

but, like, sweden didn't undertake the manhattan project. and really, how many crooked warlords, if any, ever made a planet-destroying ultra weapon their goal? it's really nit an innate feature of the human condition... and that kind of industrially-scaled r&d effort had barely been around for fifty years at that time. another legacy of gilded-age attitudes about the relationship between 'science' and 'technology.' even the idea of the dedicated, product/results-oriented research lab was pretty new. the paradigm up until the civil war or so was 'the inventor' (as flawed and incomplete an understanding of invention as that gives us).

the point though is that the money could have just as easily been spent on something else, and ta-da, no bomb. or a bomb that comes around at a time in history when nobody feels it's pressing to use it, hence no fear of the bomb and no sense of urgency around developing the h-bomb. anyway it was, i think, the biggest research effor ever undertaken for anything in history, so it's not hard to imagine circumstances or tiny shifts that would have made that seem like a less compelling use of the government's resources than -- even sticking within the military-- funneling the same resources into ongoing projects for submarines, jet propulsion, electromechanical computers. lots of these things feed each other obv. or if things hadn't looked so dire in europe or einstein's letter had gotten lost in the mail, maybe it would have all gone into the TVA. who knows?

thanks for your posts itt doctor casino, and i would say this but it needs more STS not less, which you're happily doing. these forces aren't arbitrary, demand isn't a black box, we have a choice, etc.

ugh, inevitable, not arbitrary

shucks, thanks.

to bring it back to uber i would just say, forget the 1890s tech bros, just remember we can resist the 2010s tech bros and that no invention is a "genie that's out of the bottle" or a horse that's left the stable. lots of arguably good ideas die on the vine, lots of bad ones don't "take" in the market, lots of both can be controlled in many ways. uber and their ilk, i think, count on us seeing all technologies as idea-goods on a free consumer marketplace, in which case they will win out with the people who want to buy them, whatever the consequences that poses for them or anybody else. but we have plenty of models for other ways we might receive new technologies or new ways of using technology, from los angeles banning the jitney buses, to our accepting canned meat but requiring FDA inspectors in the plants.

andrew feenberg pushes this a little further, arguing for a democratization of technological decisions (though being perhaps fatally vague about how we'd get to that point), arguing by analogy to other once-"free" areas that have become subject to some forms of public decision-making, like education. for technology, he gives the example of steam boilers on riverboats: they used to explode, kind of frightfully often, killing people left and right. that, the manufacturers would have said, was just the nature of the technology. don't want your decapitated head landing a mile away from your riverboat poker game? don't ride a steamboat! it's just what the technology does. but in fact this became subject to regulation and standards, and eventually, for all practical purposes, a steamboat boiler of insufficient thickness and reliability wasn't just a normal boiler, or even a bad boiler - it was definitionally not a steamboat boiler because you couldn't use it to power a steamboat. we don't have to assume from the get go that the particular form that taxi-coordination software currently takes is going to be its final form and that everything else has to get out of the way.

Yeah inevitable sort of a bad word to use here anyways. Something a Bond villain would say. Or out of a Herzog commentary.

I think the thought that humanity is at root a violent animal is mostly pro-war propaganda. We have tools at our disposal and it is up to each person to use them with respect.

how many crooked warlords, if any, ever made a planet-destroying ultra weapon their goal?

Considering the world-view at the time, much of humanity has not had a full view of the planet as a globe in space. Even discounting ancient cosmologies the simple fact that travelling was slow and out of reach for 99.9% of the population, most people not knowing more than their village and the surrounding woods. To destroy everything they knew would not require a globe-demolishing nuclear bomb, it would have been smaller in scale, because the world was smaller to the pre-industrial mind.

anyway it was, i think, the biggest research effor ever undertaken for anything in history, so it's not hard to imagine circumstances or tiny shifts that would have made that seem like a less compelling use of the government's resources than -- even sticking within the military-- funneling the same resources into ongoing projects for submarines, jet propulsion, electromechanical computers.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/SpaceRace.jpg

yeah i meant to throw in a "as of that date" in there, sorry

okay, saw this cover on the newsstand on my way home and, after this thread, had to chuckle a bit

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/issues/2015/06/09/0715_Cover/large.jpg

oh man

that's economist-level "will this do?" cover artwork

Got an Uber-X ride home the other week and the driver looks at me when he picks me up and says, "Do you know you only have a passenger rating of 4.5 stars? I would have expected higher from you." I'm like, I don't know dude, I just get the rides, never had any issues. Then he says, "Well some drivers are just assholes. I give everyone 5 stars. Everyone! Unless they slam my door."

A few weeks ago an out of town friend really wanted me to come hang out with him and his sister down in sunset park (where he was staying), and the subways were massively fucked up plus it's already hard as hell to get there from queens, so I wound up taking the train like 3/4 of the way there, then taking an Uber for the last leg, which was only $8.

This struck me as kind of remarkable, I got out of the subway in some neighborhood of brooklyn that I don't know at all and where I certainly would not easily have found a cab, hit the button on my phone and the guy was there in 2-3 minutes.

OTOH that's a pretty unusual use, and I still rarely use Uber (or cabs).

I used one in Fort Wayne last week because it started raining after dinner, I felt bad for the guy who picked me up because it was only a $5 fare, I didn't have any cash and Uber doesn't even give the option of tipping extra. That's some bullshit.

As awful as I find Uber the company, I think the drivers are quite valuable in non-mass transit heavy cities for curbing drunk driving if nothing else. In the DFW area everyone plans a $20+ Uber at the end of the night into their drinking budget.

yeah my brother in LA has been using them for way longer than me and says it's been a standard part of LA nightlife for a long time now.

the amount of drunk driving i witnessed/was privy to in pre-rideshare LA was ghastly

and Miami. I've noticed my hangovers increasing again.

Same in pretty much every non-major city I've ever lived.

I went to a wedding in Milwaukee over Labor Day weekend and my companions called an Uber driver who showed up in a fancy ass BMW SUV. Presumably Uber was working out well for her. Or she's in deep financial shit rn.

fuck uber

apparently one of my college roommates drives for uber now

Did I already mention that my Uber driver for a school run the other week was HORRID?? He was so bad I actually gave him a terrible review and I never bother with that kind of thing or want to mark anyone down usually.

Among other things he insisted on opening his and my front windows because the smell of fresh bagels, including some onion bagels, was going to "ruin" the car.

I had an uber driver who smelled pretty bad once, but I gave him five stars because I figured there was a good chance he smelled bad from working a really long shift and/or multiple jobs.

the only time i gave a driver less than 5 stars was when he made me late for a date after bragging about how he'd been a professional limo driver for decades and knew the city like the back of his hand and then proceeded to take me on the slowest, dumbest, most cumbersome route, literally avoiding an overpass designed to skip a busy intersection, to then go wait at a red light to make a right turn (where there was no signage prohibiting a right on red)

i gave him 3 stars

how many stars did you give the date

I've enjoyed the few times I've used Lyft.

My Lyft driver has played nothing but The Wailers' "Burnin' and Looting" on loop for my whole drive.

Just finished the third go-round...

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2015/12/01/shooting-draws-attention-downtown-police-presence/76565344/

weird trickle-down effect from uber? taxi stand used to have two off-duty cops in the entertainment district. uber becomes popular, they abolish the practice of having a standing queue of cabs. shooting happens right next to where the security used to be

yep I'll buy that as another aspect of uber's contribution to increased antisocial insularity

Uber's just been declared as operating illegally in Melbourne. They've been ignoring the govt on it up til now.

Making the rounds, here for future reference: http://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemcneal/uber-hangover#.fq0jbeDVa NYE surge multipliers of up to 9.9x. sad lol.