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I don't think idle driver time shows up much in productivity statistics. The productivity per car increases, but I don't think we collect enough data to be able

by natrius 11y ago

I don't think idle driver time shows up much in productivity statistics. The productivity per car increases, but I don't think we collect enough data to be able to amortize those existing limos over the time that UberBlack has existed. We'd only see fewer limos purchased over the years or lower prices of limo rides. Probably the latter, because the labor is most of the cost of a ride. Productivity goes up when customers pay the same price for the same value that can now be produced with less labor, but technology has been driving prices down. Technologies used to take much longer to spread. Cotton gin early adopters made way more money than people who did it the old fashioned way, and it took a while for everyone to get on board and drive the cotton prices down with competition. These days, technology gets adopted so fast that adoption is the cost of survival: prices will drop instantly and you won't be able to keep up. My hypothesis is that the speed of adoption these days hides productivity increases. Productivity growth only measures profit from temporary advantages over competitors, and those advantages have become so temporary that people don't take profit from them. Another hypothesis is that business strategies have just changed. Instead of using technology to increase profit, we now use it to lower prices and increase market share. Our productivity statistics aren't measuring how much abstract value labor can provide. It's measuring our business practices.

SilasX 11y ago
But this has (or properly should have) shown up in productivity stats, and people raved about it from day one: UberBlack (then just "UberCab") made it fantastically cheaper -- in both dollars and effort -- to hire a black car on short notice. That cost savings is a productivity gain, achieved from better employment of a resource (the car and driver time) that had to be purchased anyway; an appropriate metric ("cost to hire black car on X minutes notice and Y minutes of invested labor by requester") would have captured it. Ditto for UberX: it made greater use of a resource whose fixed costs had already been paid for other reasons, and allowed labor to be "kicked into gear" for very short shifts that labor-employers otherwise aren't able to make use of. That's also a productivity increase, and should rightly appear as such.
- natrius 11y ago
  We agree! Our productivity statistics don't seem to be measuring what we think of as productivity. We're getting better at producing things, but since it's not making us more profitable, we can't see it in numbers.

by natrius 11y ago

SilasX 11y ago

But this has (or properly should have) shown up in productivity stats, and people raved about it from day one: UberBlack (then just "UberCab") made it fantastically cheaper -- in both dollars and effort -- to hire a black car on short notice. That cost savings is a productivity gain, achieved from better employment of a resource (the car and driver time) that had to be purchased anyway; an appropriate metric ("cost to hire black car on X minutes notice and Y minutes of invested labor by requester") would have captured it. Ditto for UberX: it made greater use of a resource whose fixed costs had already been paid for other reasons, and allowed labor to be "kicked into gear" for very short shifts that labor-employers otherwise aren't able to make use of. That's also a productivity increase, and should rightly appear as such.

natrius 11y ago
We agree! Our productivity statistics don't seem to be measuring what we think of as productivity. We're getting better at producing things, but since it's not making us more profitable, we can't see it in numbers.