
The sharing economy has succeeded because the real economy has been struggling - richsinn
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/sharing-economy-is-about-desperation.html
======
jrochkind1
Actual headline of the article: "The Sharing Economy Isn’t About Trust, It’s
About Desperation"

Many of the commenters seem to be arguing with the HN title, without having
actually read the article. (As usual, of course). But in this case it wasn't
even the article's own title.

Yes, the sharing economy is 'part of the real economy', as another commenter
said. It's just a part based on desperation and precarity.

Another essay from my local paper in Baltimore: "The Desperate Hustle as a Way
of Life" [http://blogs.citypaper.com/index.php/the-news-
hole/desperate...](http://blogs.citypaper.com/index.php/the-news-
hole/desperate-hustle-way-life/)

~~~
pessimizer
Baltimore certainly didn't need Uber to have gypsy cabs when I lived there:)
I'd see people putting down their arms when they noticed a real cab
approaching, lest they accidentally hail one.

That fact supports the article though; Baltimore is a sad, sad place. Everyone
is very nice there, though. One of the nicest towns I've ever lived in. I
never really heard about any gypsy cab related crime when I lived there,
either. People become more trusting by necessity when they're desperate, but
they also seem to become more trustworthy for mutual benefit.

The first time I got off of the Greyhound in Baltimore, the woman who picked
me up hailed a gypsy cab for us to ride to her apartment in. It was a first
for me.

~~~
jrochkind1
Yeah, they call gypsy cabs 'hacks' here. There's plenty of hack related crime,
but it's mostly passengers robbing drivers.

So, yeah, see, that's fucked up thing -- Uber and Lyft are in bmore too,
although in a legal 'grey area' \-- wait, 'grey area', how come the hacks are
just plain illegal and they are a 'grey area'? How come there is significant
support for legalizing uber and lyft, but not hacks? Put a white guy getting
rich at the top, and it's different now?

------
thaddeusmt
Long term I see the "sharing economy" being driven by resource scarcity (i.e.
it's not practical for every human on earth to have a car), but I totally
agree that right now it's often driven by job scarcity.

In my limited experiences with AirBnB people on the supply side either
approach "sharing" as a fun hobby (e.g. "stay in our cute guest house!"), or
they are truly trying to make ends meet.

True story: I AirBnB'd once and the guy rented out his own bed to us, and
slept on the couch (and his girlfriend stayed over! on the couch!). Another
roommate was AirBnB'ing a room in the same house, too. I think they were both
trying to pay their rent share via AirBnB. Nice guys - we felt welcome and had
a good time - but money was not "secondary" to them.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
"I think they were both trying to pay their rent share via AirBnB" ... "but
money was not 'secondary' to them" \- conjecture. Counter example: If I can
rent my room out once a week for $50, consistently for 10 years, and invest
that money at 10% (any typical Australian bluechip stock) represents a $44,383
gain over ten years. Why am I _not_ doing this? (edit for clarity)

------
bhauer
The sharing economy _is part of_ the real economy. The economy is us.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
"The economy" is the part of us that uses money. If you have children, you'll
exchange much value with them in a non-monetary way - indeed, a way which
money doesn't help.

Money is what we use when more personal exchange fails.

If anything, the "sharing" economy is about substituting other information
flows for things we'd have used money for <x> years earlier.

Puts me to mind of legendary hobo symbols written in chalk...

~~~
fennecfoxen
No.

If you measure the economy in purely financial terms, such that it looks
bigger when you spend more time in the office and less time with the love of
your life, you're doing it wrong.

Granted, that's really hard to measure, so lots of big measures (e.g. the GDP)
exclude that. It's a well-known limitation of the measure. But any
Introduction-to-Economics course you might have taken in your life _should
have_ exposed you the notion of _utility_ \- the measure not only of bare
usefulness but all the goodness and happiness and hope and love and joy of the
human experience, the ultimate goal of all human economic activity.

They should have also described "economics" as the study of how people make
decisions about what to do with their limited resources - including one of the
most-finite resources, our Time here on this world.

Actual money-related matters are just sub-fields of economic study, and if you
look at monetary phenomena (like exchange rates and inflation and such) and
hope to understand them, you will do so using the underlying actual goods and
services and human interactions that comprise the _actual economy_.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
I believe I covered most of your complaint with the "if you have children..."
part. I personally spent more time at the office at times so their Mom could
be a full time Mom. Then at other times, I didn't.

I don't think economics has any hope of covering anything like joy.
Microeconomics _can_ show little sociological vignettes of the ...
"Freakonomics" variety.

Utility is a roughly ... shadow variable which is inferred to explain certain
things. There's no real agreement on whether or not it's even ordinal. Econ is
fascinating, but it's a crippled discipline relative to many other more
liberal arts and even sociology proper.

But back to "the sharing economy" \- how is this not substituting electronic
means to replace (roughly) telephone-based systems like hotels/motels or taxi
service?

My personal heresy is that monetary policy has been abused ( towards deflation
) , and that this is what is driving this substitution. In the US, there's
been a 2% growth target and we've failed to meet even that.

[http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3212.html](http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3212.html)

Nobody seems to actually understand inflation.

------
jowiar
I think they miss the boat in some ways... Ownership is nothing but having the
right to deprive others of using something combined with responsibility for
it's upkeep. It can be convenient, but in many cases, for me, it's irrelevant,
or suboptimal. I don't care about having the ability to prevent other people
from using a particular vehicle. It's not worth the maintenance time for me -
forgetting about the cost altogether. What I really care about is having
access to a vehicle when I need one once-or-twice a week - ideally one best
suited to the task at hand. Communication technology has improved such that I
can get what I want/need without the actual benefits and drawbacks of
"ownership".

~~~
001sky
Maybe, but you are the buyside. its not about you. its about the sell side,
and why they bother. the thesis is that the cost of carry on the assets is too
high (eg, expensive real-estate).

to make the sell side work, its a hassle. people overcome the hassle, because
the need the money. and in turn, the sell to people like you who want to lose
the hassle by not owning.

So, the sell side is long hassle-factor. The buy side is short hassle factor.
One side has cash, and one side needs it. If the allocation in the last
sentence was reversed, there would be a busted market. But since it's not--
presto the market works.

Its a worthwhile bit of understanding. And its generally true in other eras.
EG many large victorian homes in SF were too expensive to be single family
homes, so they became flats in the 20th century. Same deal--the house is too
valuable to carry as a single-use asset, so sub-divide it and capitalize to
other peopel who didn't want the "hassle" of a massively expensive house.
Basicaly the upkeep became a problem when servants became too expensive.

That kind of thing--ie, a form of economic infeasibility--is what people are
facing. Then, as now, even in higher price points. And thus you see decent
listings for nightly and weekedn rentals in good neighborhoods where rents
have shot up and people who could have afforede a private space now have "temp
roomates" or what not a couple times a month to net a couple hundred dollars.

~~~
jowiar
Roll back further in history though and the notion of "owning things" was an
invention - it wasn't that people wanted to "own a horse" \- it's that the
entire notion of ownership was invented to determine who got to "ride a horse
when they wanted it".

For me, I don't want "to own a house with a lawn". I want "a convenient piece
of grass to throw a football around, sit outside and eat lunch, and walk my
dog". I don't want "to own a car" \- rather, I want "A few times a month,
access to a vehicle within a few blocks of my apartment for a few hours".

I think we're saying the same thing here, but the "sharing economy", is, more
than anything else, about using communication technology to create finer
grained matching between supply and demand - about matching access to goods
with people who want to use them, about providing an opportunity to turn time
into money and money into time to the extent that one needs and desires.

~~~
randomflavor
this sounds utopian. but if you didn't need the money would you go thru the
hassle of sharing your car or house? the only reason people do it is to
recover money because they didn't make enough to cover their lifestyle. others
make it a business, renting multiple apartments in walkups and sell on airbnb
creating private mini hotels. i do not know one person that has a savings and
or a decent salary that would let a stranger into their home, or drive a
stranger to a destination because they just love to share what they have and
participate. they do it because they are fucked or close to it.

the concept of the timeshare vacation rental is closer to reality of what you
speak about. shared leases, mortgages, etc etc.

a startup that divides the credit potential of multiple people into a mortgage
would be a real sharing, and be able to purchase into it for a time period.

i know i need to raise a family and need a 3 bedroom house for X time. Can I
effectively purchase someones mortgage for 18 years at a premium on the base
apr?

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I'll provide a counter example: We are a Couchsurfing host _because_ we have
resources beyond out needs. Our house has four bedrooms, occupied by four rent
paying tenants. We have couches and a single bed available in Northern
Tasmania, if you're ever in the area look us up (email in profile). I have a
well paid full time job, cash investments, as well as investments in precious
metals and shares. I even pick up hitchhikers. If you're in to rock climbing,
bicycle polo, music, camping, food (I'm a certified nutritionist), and
building things (I'm a structural steel engineer and fabricator), we might
even get along.

~~~
coldtea
Couchsurfing is about projecting an "open" lifestyle, travelling etc. And it's
done either by young people (to meet and "know better" other people) or by
stable/upper middle class people.

Sharing in the sense of TFA, for money, is not the same.

------
Sanddancer
My gods, the full-time/part-time graph is one of the most misleading graphs
I've seen in a while. Not only are the numbers different orders of magnitude,
they're not even the same /scale/. It's hard to take any of the rest of the
article seriously when the authors are willing to stoop so low in presenting
their data.

~~~
sp332
That graph was taken from a different paper. It looks like the original was
just pointing out that part-time jobs went up at the same _time_ as full-time
jobs went down. But the author of this article thought that it showed how
full-time jobs were being _replaced_ by part-time jobs, which isn't quite the
same thing.

------
chrisgd
It is a renting economy not a sharing economy

------
tim333
> The Sharing Economy Isn’t About Trust, It’s About Desperation

Not in my experience. It's more about common sense and convenience. If your
place is empty for a while why not let someone stay there and get some money.
It used to be too much hassle before AirBNB and the like, now it's easier. I
know a few people who've AirBNB'd and they are not desperate, it's just an
easier system. I'm sure some people who use such services are desperate for
money but it there will always be some percentage of the population is. It's
not fundamental to the sharing economy and it would still have succeeded no
matter how strong the economy.

~~~
jaxn
There will always be some percentage of the population that are desperate for
money, but that percentage has been rising. The rise of desperation has
correlated with the rise of the sharing economy. How can you say the sharing
economy would still have succeeded without that correlation?

~~~
tim333
I think they are largely unrelated. The rise of desperation has been mostly
due to factors like the 2008 financial crash, deflationary monetary conditions
and the globalisation of the the labor market. Airbnb on the other hand is
kind of cool and I'd use it anyway. The 'sharing economy' companies may be
doing a bit better than they would under easier economic conditions I'll give
you.

------
greghinch
> But what's getting them to the threshold in the first place is a damaged
> economy, and harmful public policy that has forced millions of people to
> look to odd jobs for sustenance.

Would be nice to qualify that statement a bit more. Articles like this seem to
think that we've hit some minor blip in the history of Western economies,
ignoring the vast amounts of evidence to the contrary. Unlike previous
industrial revolutions, technology-driven solutions are now rapidly replacing
human-capital across every industry, leaving little to no options for those
being displaced. This trend doesn't show any sign of slowing.

Ideally, the sharing economy can evolve into the larger economy as a whole,
shifting the nature of how compensation and payment take place between people,
and shift the idea of what is a "job". Combined with technological advances,
and a society can emerge where we don't require every single member to spend
the majority of their time producing economic output in order to generate a
sustainable amount of resources. That may sound naively optimistic, but no
more so than the quaintly nostalgic dream this article professes, along the
lines of "why can't things be like they were back in the good old days?!"

~~~
randomflavor
i know someone that pays the homeless to wait on line for him.

------
monochr
The funny thing about articles like this is that the same articles were
popping up a century or two ago for farmers forced of their land and made into
"salaried slaves" where they had no choice but to hire out your labor in ways
they had no control over, as opposed how they worked on the farm where they
were masters of themselves.

Given that it took 50 years of constant strikes and close to 1,000 killed to
get people acclimatized to salaried work I'd say the sharing economy is doing
a marvelous job so far.

~~~
jrochkind1
"To get people acclimitized to salaried work", really?

Most people would say it took 50 years of constant strikes to force
owners/employers to _change working conditions_ enough so people people in
waged work (most of those people striking weren't 'salaried') had sufficient
dignity and basic needs being met, resulting in some degree of social calm.

But you're suggesting they were striking simply because waged work was
unfamiliar to them, and eventually they got 'acclimatized' (I think you mean
'acclimated'?), got used to it, and stopped striking? Rather than because
their strikes actually succeeded in changing conditions?

~~~
zacharypinter
Not sure exactly which way the author meant it, but the phrase "get people
acclimatized to salaried work" could be interpreted as including society at
large (both the owners/employers and the employees).

------
johnrob
Is the glass half empty, or is it half full? In other words, is the sharing
economy "taking advantage" of job seekers or is it giving them temporary
relief?

~~~
smacktoward
The fear is precisely that the "relief" is _not_ temporary - that the jobs
these people used to have are gone for good, and won't be replaced by
equivalent full-time opportunities. So economic insecurity becomes a permanent
thing for a (large) class of people.

~~~
dsr_
I was explaining this to my kids last night.

They know what current experimental robots can do. I asked them to imagine
what a supermarket would look like when we have good physical automation to
match the information automation. The cashiers up front have already been
replaced by self-scan checkouts and a single supervisor. The stocking can be
done by a robot forklift about the size of a human... so can the unloading of
trucks. The trucks will be driven by software. There's really no need to keep
anything except fresh produce out on display in bulk; keep one sample item on
the shelves and when a shopper selects it, load it on to a cart in the back.
That makes the supermarket much smaller: a warehouse, a display area, and the
fresh produce area. If there's an in-store bakery, it's half automated
already. The jobs for thirty to fifty people become jobs for five to ten
people...

Then I asked my kids what sort of jobs people would have after that. They came
up with pretty good ideas: programming robots, designing robots, and repairing
them. They asked if there would be jobs for paleontologists, and I suggested
that the auxiliary jobs would go away. Would a robot drive the truck? Yes.
They offered that a robot with seismic sensors and ground radar would do the
initial searching, and maybe there would be specialized digging robots that
could be both faster and more careful than a human.

So, yeah. We won't have as many jobs in the future, so either our standards
are going to have to rise and our expectations that people are defined by
their jobs will have to be replaced.

~~~
Patrick_Devine
You can push the supermarket thought exercise further and maybe bricks and
mortar stores go away all together and we end up with some kind of Webvan /
Amazon Fresh service delivered by autonomous vehicles. Those vehicles would be
dispatched from autonomous distribution centers, and goods would be created in
autonomous factories or picked in fields by autonomous workers.

If you think of people as essentially automatons (well, maybe highly capable
meat robots), the only thing really different than the way distribution works
today is we still go to the supermarket. If someone can crack the online
grocery shopping experience nut, there's no reason why that couldn't change.

------
trhway
it is a fundamental principle of socialism - clear separation between 2
classes of property - one for personal use only and one for business, and
people are prohibited from using their personal property for business.
Somewhere during the 20th century this principle (being one of a tools to
control people) invaded, like weed, capitalist economy as well. "Sharing"
economy strikes directly back at it.

>the sharing economy has succeeded in large part because the real economy has
been struggling.

There is no surprise in the direct correlation between people's willingness to
put up (or not) with oppression, be it economical or political, and the
economical prosperity (or lack of it). After all, Soviet Union went down
together with oil prices, and Arab Spring happened once price of bread went
up.

------
richsinn
Submitter here. You know what's weird? I could've sworn I put the title of the
HN submission as the title of this article (I just Ctrl-V, Ctrl-P'd the
title... Is it possible that others can edit the submission's title?)

~~~
richsinn
... or maybe I'm just crazy/tired/forgetful...

------
lazylizard
eh. a joke among friends. efficient is the enemy of economic growth. if you
take 30min to write a script yourself to automate some file transfers, it
contributes ~$0 to the GDP. otoh, if you hired some consultants to do it for
$5k, taking a month to complete the project, thats economic growth..

------
MarkPNeyer
maybe in part - but is that a bad thing?

governments and large companies try to foster trust by being old, being around
for a long time, and being big. those things - age espeically - are really
only a _proxy_ for reputation, which is what uber, airbnb and lift thrive on.
if they are better at delivering trust because their reputation mechanism
works better than 'hey we've been around a long time' then they'll do better.

it doesn't mean the 'old economy' is lost - it's just that now they're being
given a chance to reinvent themselves. it's no longer enough to be big and
powerful to get people to trust you - now you need to establish a positive
reputation as well. we're seeing that happen already, as companies try to help
you if you bitch at them on twitter.

as of now, a celebrity complaining about bad service on twitter is far more
likely to be helped than some random nobody. again - this is because our
reputation systems are weak. most people know who ashton kutcher is, and if
he's pissed off at a brand, they're going to take his opinion much more
seriously than some guy they've never met.

so now imagine social networks all having something akin to linkedin's "how
are you connected to this person" \- you see someone with a bunch of bad
ratings by people two hops from you on your social graph. it doesn't matter
that you don't know them - you're going to put a bunch more weight on their
negative ratings than you will the thousands of positive ratings given by
people who are 8 hops from you, with most of those hops travelling through
someone who's labelled as a 'spammer' by a woman your brother's college
girlfriend used to play hockey with.

it's possible for us to know those kinds of things now, but it's very
difficult. when that becomes the norm, and easy, it won't matter if yelp moves
people's reviews up and down, and charges money for business to 'hide' bad
reviews - if i can see all the reviews and i know my relationships to those
people, i can assign the weights based upon who i know. right now, yelp is
assigning the weights as they see fit - but if i label yelp's weights as
"untrustworthy," people who trust me are also likely to do the same - so
everyone has the incentive to be as honest as possible. screwing over
strangers can screw you, because those strangers have relationships, too.

right now, and historically, we use all kinds of things as proxies for
trustworthiness. age, style of dress, language, education, diction, body
language, facial expressions - all of those things are easily gameable, but
throughout most of history i couldn't ask everybody i know to ask everyone
they know 'hey have you ever worked with this lawyer.' with all the tech we
have now, it's trivial to do that, and i can stay away from a lawyer that
several of my friend's friends friends have had bad dealings with. at present,
he can fight anyone who says something bad about him and force that
information to be removed from the public record. with a reputation network
secured by a blockchain, that isn't possible - and now the block chain has a
record of 'this guy tries to silence his critics.' contrast that to 'almost
everyone who has criticized him has been also criticized by someone on or near
your network, and many of the people who have criticized him later posted
records saying that he rectified the situation. all the bullshit, fake smiles,
nice suits and radio ads in the world can't make up for that information.

adopting a system like this also solves problems like voting and government
issues of 'who gets rights' \- instead of an 'official registry of people who
are real people' \- we get a graph of 'identities which i respect and value'.
someone who is pro-life can say he values everyone who is alleged to have been
concieved. if we can't find transactions from his node to most of hte nodes he
says he supports, some of us may find him suspsicious, some of us may not. the
beauty of this is that no one person owns it - it allows all of us to
associate with people who operate underprinciples we like. the more accepting
you are of other people, the wider the network you'll have to work with.
you're free to be closed minded with selective principles; if that works for
you, that's fine - but if you find that you need to interact daily with people
who you think are sinners and bad people, it might force you to reconsider
your perspective.

you even get rid of things like spam! some guy who owns thousands of computers
with fake accounts has to get someone to vouch for them being trustworthy
people, and anyone who does that risks permanent damage to their reputation.

~~~
jrochkind1
Did you actually read the article?

The suggestion is that it might be a bad thing... for the people trying to
make a living in the 'sharing economy'

> _As Sarah Kessler discovered in her Fast Company investigation, it 's hard
> to make it in the sharing economy. Many of the people renting out their
> labor and goods through these services will end up making a fraction of what
> they did at their full-time jobs, and having none of the benefits. _

~~~
cinquemb
I read the article and the suggestion I got from it is that there is no real
present alternatives…

> _But what 's getting them to the threshold in the first place is a damaged
> economy, and harmful public policy that has forced millions of people to
> look to odd jobs for sustenance._

Then again, it's hard to "make it" in general, and when one isn't the one
designing/building the systems that people live by, you're most likely not
going to be "making it".

