One thought that occurred to me while reading this was the similarity to how tuition increases by however much the government provides in subsidies.
Perhaps the reason we'll all need to "hustle as a way of life" is because by making it easy enough for everyone to do, everyone's earning potential is increased, and our entire earning potential gets soaked up by higher rents and other limited-quantity commodities we all compete for.
how tuition increases by however much the government provides in subsidies.
Problem with that theory is that much of the increase on college tuitions and fees has come about as the government has withdrawn subsidies (though it's continued guaranteeing loans, and more recently, making them non-dischargable).
Money is a leaky abstraction. What epicureanideal was really saying is that everyone's potential to create things or services of value to other people increase. Assuming people act on this potential and the monetary base stays constant we will get deflation. Of course, Uber and AirBnB are partly replacing taxi rides and hotel rooms - the total amount of rides and rooms for hire will stay more or less constant. So deflation for that reason is unlikely. It's not about the value of money overall.
But what are taxi drivers or hotel staff going to do? They can lower their prices (and thereby limit Uber/ArBnB) or they can do something else. Probably something less enjoyable and/or lower paying, or they would already be doing it. So money moves from professionals to hobbyists and the firms that organize the hobbyist movements. But who are the hobbyists really? Not millionaires, I would bet. The Uber drivers may be hotel staff and the AirBnB hoteliers may be taxi drivers. People who need money, in other words. So lower-class services get less expensive, low-class people get less purchasing potential and the potential go to the middle-upper class people at Uber/AirBnB directly, and to other trades not suited for hobbyisation indirectly.
> They can lower their prices (and thereby limit Uber/ArBnB) or they can do something else. Probably something less enjoyable and/or lower paying, or they would already be doing it.
I'm not really sure that the money-flow works the way you think it does. When I stayed in London last week at AirBnB instead of the hotel which was literally next door, the savings wasn't just hotel labor (which I mostly didn't need). It also meant money that could have gone to the hotel owners (capitalists with multi-million pound investments) instead went to a family which was spending time abroad on a cycle-tour through Germany.
> It also meant money that could have gone to the hotel owners (capitalists with multi-million pound investments) instead went to a family which was spending time abroad on a cycle-tour through Germany.
The money you would have paid to a hotel would have been split between the employees and the owners. For your Airbnb stay, a 6-12% guest service fee [0] and a 3% host service fee [1] was paid to Airbnb, who are analogous to the owners in the hotel situation.
You are perfectly right that you made savings by not paying for services you didn't want, but the "sharing" model hasn't eliminated the role of the capitalist class, which is implied by your post.
To take a much broader view, although our global production capacity has increased markedly, so has our consumption, which ultimately causes prices of these goods to remain relatively high to people on locally average incomes. One might hypothecate that we could maintain our higher production with a significantly smaller global population (and correspondingly lower consumption), which would make real inroads into lowering prices for common goods, but I really have no idea as to whether or not that is true.
Not mostly. Inflation is the rise in price of all goods, because there is (physically or effectively - see Velocity Of Money) more money in circulation. In this case, "increasing our earnings potential" means making people better at making stuff, and that stuff should see a fall in prices, with rises restricted to things we can't effectively (for whatever reason) make more of.
Perhaps the reason we'll all need to "hustle as a way of life" is because by making it easy enough for everyone to do, everyone's earning potential is increased, and our entire earning potential gets soaked up by higher rents and other limited-quantity commodities we all compete for.