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i agree with the general trend that new platforms drive new growth, which is great. but they don't necessarily work out for the participants in the platforms, a

i agree with the general trend that new platforms drive new growth, which is great. but they don't necessarily work out for the participants in the platforms, and in fact the very platforms themselves can be highly exploitative depending on how people engage with them. example: uber is a marketplace for transferring illiquid wealth assets from drivers to uber itself, along with a fraction of the revenues from each ride. put differently, uber may be making its drivers poorer in an abstract way which they may not understand because they are being paid for the labor required to extract value from their vehicle. another example: freelancing platforms. everyone knows that these platforms depress wages for the freelancers and are a race to the bottom. businesses can grow more because labor costs less on the platform than off of the platform, and they can expect the platform to handle the infrastructure of paying and managing the labor to an extent. but freelancers on the platform could almost certainly make more money if they weren't on the platform because then they wouldn't be competing with as many others for a given opportunity. sure, some people make it work. but on average, people earn far less and expectations are much higher.

Scoundreller 8y ago
> uber is a marketplace for transferring illiquid wealth assets from drivers to uber itself, along with a fraction of the revenues from each ride The same could be said of the taxi medallion system. Low-income drivers with illiquid value for their time, with most of the value going to medallion owners, car owners and dispatchers.
wutbrodo 8y ago
> uber is a marketplace for transferring illiquid wealth assets from drivers to uber itself, along with a fraction of the revenues from each ride. I feel like I'm of two minds about this, as all of the pieces from rags like the NYT use analyses that assign 100% of the depreciation of the car to driving, which is obviously absurd: your car loses something like half it's value the minute you drive it off the lot. For some reason, none of the analyses I've seen attempt to address this (in fairness, it's probably pretty difficult). The upshot is the difference between unlocking wealth that was going to be unlocked anyway, and unlocking wealth that was going to be wasted. A person's car is a criminally underutilized asset (from both a personal finance and a societal perspective), and increasing its utilization so you get more value out of it during its trip from full value to $0 is a concrete gain for both society and the Uber driver (and along the way, passengers and Uber itself). The dynamic you describe is certainly a factor too; It seems to me to be an open question how big a component of an Uber ride's value each of these is. At any rate, I don't think your confident assertion that being an Uber driver is simply giving up your liquid asset value is warranted.
- UncleEntity 8y ago
  Realistically, the things I've seen focus on the trade-in value of said car -- ceteris paribus a car with 80k miles is simply not worth as much as one with 200k miles. Plus the increased maintenance associated with all the extra miles. I'm also pretty sure the used car market is penalizing people for their ride share activities. So they may be "unlocking wealth" today but in the long run who really knows how much of that "wealth" they're really benefiting from if any at all.
  - wutbrodo 8y ago
    Would you happen to have a link to any of these analyses? As I mentioned, I've been unable to find and and would appreciate seeing one that calculates asset depreciation reasonably like this.
- AngryData 8y ago
  I have to disagree with your assessment of vehicle utilization. Maybe where you live cars are underutilized, but in my (poor) part of the country, vehicles get drove until they are scrap heaps, I don't see how you can expect more utilization out of a car that gets drove for 400,000 miles. Yeah sure, more passengers could help, but only if you were going to drive to the same location without them anyways, and only if the timing matches up. People do ride share to work if it is far enough away and we even have mini parking lots for that purpose, but unless you work at the same place or next door with the exact same schedule it would be an even bigger waste of time for poor individuals who are already constrained by time to slit it up even more. And it's not like a car rots away because you don't drive it 24/7 with full passengers either.
sdfin 8y ago
> but freelancers on the platform could almost certainly make more money if they weren't on the platform because then they wouldn't be competing with as many others for a given opportunity. Why don't they do that then?

Scoundreller 8y ago

> uber is a marketplace for transferring illiquid wealth assets from drivers to uber itself, along with a fraction of the revenues from each ride The same could be said of the taxi medallion system. Low-income drivers with illiquid value for their time, with most of the value going to medallion owners, car owners and dispatchers.

wutbrodo 8y ago

> uber is a marketplace for transferring illiquid wealth assets from drivers to uber itself, along with a fraction of the revenues from each ride. I feel like I'm of two minds about this, as all of the pieces from rags like the NYT use analyses that assign 100% of the depreciation of the car to driving, which is obviously absurd: your car loses something like half it's value the minute you drive it off the lot. For some reason, none of the analyses I've seen attempt to address this (in fairness, it's probably pretty difficult). The upshot is the difference between unlocking wealth that was going to be unlocked anyway, and unlocking wealth that was going to be wasted. A person's car is a criminally underutilized asset (from both a personal finance and a societal perspective), and increasing its utilization so you get more value out of it during its trip from full value to $0 is a concrete gain for both society and the Uber driver (and along the way, passengers and Uber itself). The dynamic you describe is certainly a factor too; It seems to me to be an open question how big a component of an Uber ride's value each of these is. At any rate, I don't think your confident assertion that being an Uber driver is simply giving up your liquid asset value is warranted.

UncleEntity 8y ago
Realistically, the things I've seen focus on the trade-in value of said car -- ceteris paribus a car with 80k miles is simply not worth as much as one with 200k miles. Plus the increased maintenance associated with all the extra miles. I'm also pretty sure the used car market is penalizing people for their ride share activities. So they may be "unlocking wealth" today but in the long run who really knows how much of that "wealth" they're really benefiting from if any at all.
- wutbrodo 8y ago
  Would you happen to have a link to any of these analyses? As I mentioned, I've been unable to find and and would appreciate seeing one that calculates asset depreciation reasonably like this.
AngryData 8y ago
I have to disagree with your assessment of vehicle utilization. Maybe where you live cars are underutilized, but in my (poor) part of the country, vehicles get drove until they are scrap heaps, I don't see how you can expect more utilization out of a car that gets drove for 400,000 miles. Yeah sure, more passengers could help, but only if you were going to drive to the same location without them anyways, and only if the timing matches up. People do ride share to work if it is far enough away and we even have mini parking lots for that purpose, but unless you work at the same place or next door with the exact same schedule it would be an even bigger waste of time for poor individuals who are already constrained by time to slit it up even more. And it's not like a car rots away because you don't drive it 24/7 with full passengers either.

sdfin 8y ago

> but freelancers on the platform could almost certainly make more money if they weren't on the platform because then they wouldn't be competing with as many others for a given opportunity. Why don't they do that then?