I don't know what to say. My ex-roommate used to be a door to door salesman for comcast contractor, selling comcast's services on commission. He gave up that gig, as it was not paying enough to live in Hayward, CA.
Now he drives for Uber, uses his Scion xb 2006 car, makes around $6k a month. Yes, he needs to deduct expenses like gas, insurance, etc. But he is happy even after those expenses.
Uber has destroyed the taxi industry. And it has also made easy for others to become Uber drivers. So, one group has lost, another group has won.
Taxi industry has gone hitech; so, the companies like Uber get 100 multiples for their stock prices, if they go IPO. Even if Taxi industry had gone IPO 20 years ago, it would not have helped taxi drivers.
The losers are those who bought SF taxi permits, and those who used to drive for yellowcab, but can't become Uber drivers.
Inequality is an unavoidable consequence of economic growth. Economic growth always destroys incumbent industries and benefits new upstarts. It is up to government to provide a set of transfers that allows a more equal distribution of the gains and loses from economic growth.
> With nothing more technologically advanced than a phone, you can arrange to have delivered to your doorstep, often in less than an hour, takeaway food, your weekly groceries, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs (over-the-counter, prescription, proscribed), books, newspapers, a dozen eggs, half a dozen eggs, a single egg. I once had a single bottle of Coke sent to my home at the same price I would have paid had I gone to shop myself.
I never understand these anti-uber rants. The author points out the ubiquitous nature of on-demand services, their affordability and convenience. He even admits that the market has to be large enough to warrant such a service. And then he goes on about how this is fueled by inequality when I see it as doing the opposite, providing services to large portions of the US that were never able to indulge in such conveniences.
> Another distinction, just as telling, lies in the opportunities the local economy affords to the army of on-demand delivery people it supports. In Mumbai, the man who delivers a bottle of rum to my doorstep can learn the ins and outs of the booze business from spending his days in a liquor store. If he scrapes together enough capital, he may one day be able to open his own shop and hire his own delivery boys.
This to me just romanticizes manual labor. I'm not sure how the author defines "local economy", but he provides no rationale why someone working for a "local" business would be better off in the long run than someone working for an Uber-like business. My impression of on-demand services is they allow for flexibility in hours as well as utilization of capital (e.g. a car).
The fact is that growth mainly occurs through specialization and trade. I'm sure if the author were writing 100 years ago, he would bemoan the fact that fewer people are making their own clothing. Micro-services such as cabs, laundry, delivery, cleaning, etc, are the natural extension of a wealthy society.
My NYC friends like to point out that they've had all these on demand services available for decades. The key is having enough people who value their time more than their money at some ratio where the service had enough volume to support itself.
NYC naturally had a high concentration of such people. Sf bay area has Leveraged phones to make things work with a lower density of such people.
Those arguments is pretty similar to the candle industry extinction. Some may argue that electricity has killed thousands of jobs in the candle industry, including those who had to light the candles every night in the streets.
In Sao Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, is facing a boom in the Uber offer. Many people who used to drive particular car are selling them and using Uber has main transportation. This is particular good for the traffic and a good alternative in a city where there is a lack of Subway lines.
Pretty much every labor transaction is based on "wealth inequality" - the person paying has money, the person doing the work wants that money. Programming pays better than driving, but the principle is the same. I certainly wouldn't be working on your project if I was independently wealthy...
I actually noticed something when I was living in Argentina, South America (I'm from the US). It was more common for people to have maids, nannies, etc, than in the US. Not super rich people either, just upper middle class people. It made me wonder if there was some kind of "maid index" - an indicator of the percentage of people who have a maid. I suspect it could be used as some kind of indicator for wealth equality (or inequality).
gini coefficient is probably pretty close to what you are looking for. it shows the delate in inqequality between high and low earners in [country/region]. haven't looked at that stuff for a while but, traditionally, much of S America had high gini coefficents
It's the same for Asia. If USA had no mimimum wage and it wasn't a faux pas to have a working relation that involved somebody working nearby without acknowledging them, I'm sure many many people would also have maids. (The weirdest part is going to a home and seeing your host confused as to why you thank or interact with their maid!)
What Uber did is reduce the overhead of being the middleman. Which is what lets these services expand to smaller markets.
The people who get screwed are the previous middlemen, not the worker bees. If anything, the job of middleman will be a race to the bottom where the next Uber find a way to do it a little cheaper (or take a little less profit to hit a larger scale).
The way in which this Uber stuff is about wealth inequality is that there is no "Uber for getting on your feet after serving time for a felony" or an "Uber for teaching high school kids how to get on a path to a good job" but there are three "Uber for cupcakes"'s.
There's nothing wrong with Uber for cupcakes[1], and people can argue that we should start there because it's just easier to make money off of rich people. But what's the plan for Uberizing the stuff poor people need? Is there one? I don't accept that it's just too hard. Margins are margins.
[1] I have no idea whether there is an Uber for cupcakes
At least it is another work option. Flexible enough for students and people with a day job that want to supplement their main income.
That's the reality we live in. Some people have multiple jobs, some people have no benefits, some people work on a 100% commission basis and in slow months they need to continue to function. "Uber-style" jobs can help you work in a more flexible schedule.
But to be honest, I do not think that being an Uber driver full-time is a very good option. Then, I do not see Uber at the moment being at the same evil scale than Walmart, for instance... a company that has a anti-union training, anti-union team and standard operating procedures, and makes billions of dollars in revenue while having their entire workforce on welfare.
Their drivers (majority of the workforce) have no welfare to speak of. Wait until Uber becomes really big like 90s' Microsoft then you'd see the rest of the Walmart deeds. It's the expected inherent big Corp SOP, nothing new.
According to the graphic linked in the article, Mumbai has a Gini of 35. That's not very high - it's comparable to Italy, Spain or Sierra Leone - and only marginally higher than India, France or Bosnia (33) as a whole.
It contradicts the author's thesis to note that a country with so little inequality as India was (and still is) way ahead of the US (Gini 41) in terms of providing domestic services.
> It contradicts the author's thesis to note that a country with so little inequality as India was (and still is) way ahead of the US (Gini 41) in terms of providing domestic services.
Think of the Gini coefficient as a cumulated histogram of income. The actual values of high and low income are not represented in the Gini chart.
So India has less differential in population than the US but the absolute value of max and min are much lower than the US's (actually the max in India is pretty big but the curve is quite steep).
Also the Gini coefficient is a single number, the geometric mean of the curve. The shape of the curve is quite different: India has a massive unemployment problem and a reasonably large middle class that can pay for service (income is low so the time value of money is low => hiring a servant is worth it).
I don't know what percentage of the median household income an Uber driver typically earns so it's hard to see if it is a good analogy or not. All the studies I've seen on this matter have been biased (high or low, depending on the point to be made) and have been methodologically suspect. It's not clear if it's even possible to calculate it since many / most Uber drivers enter and exit the "work force" casually based on available time and desired compensation.
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