> Sure but this is a prisoner's dilemma situation. Who is choosing to defect rather than cooperate in this scenario? > This price increase allows drivers to e

> Sure but this is a prisoner's dilemma situation. Who is choosing to defect rather than cooperate in this scenario? > This price increase allows drivers to earn a living wage which in turn decreases the number of people at the lower end of today's income scale. This is unclear. If we find there are 5x low-income people who benefits from Uber for every Uber driver, and the increased Uber costs reduce the real income of those poor people by 25% per month, then it's making poor people quite a bit poorer. Adjust those variables and you might get different outcomes. Or maybe the demand for Uber rides is quite elastic, in which case Uber drivers will lose income because so many fewer people are riding that it doesn't offset the price. You'd have to actually measure and find out. But overcoming deadweight loss problems due to artificial price increases is quite hard. I'd put money on this making low-income people worse off. > Do this over and over, and ultimately, nobody's left at the bottom. Sorry, this is abominable economics. If you "do this over and over" you're just transferring money around between groups in an extremely inefficient and arbitrary way. Also there will always be a bottom, unless we had exact equality of outcomes, which is for various reasons impossible (variation in life expectancy, for example, has all sorts of strange effects). But let's assume that this means the people at the bottom still have a very comfortable lifestyle, which I think we all agree would be a desirable goal. The only way to actually produce that outcome is to produce more goods with fewer resources. Simply increasing prices here and there does none of that - it may actually produce less with the same amount of resources. In short, additional technology is required. Simply resorting to distributional tricks will not get you there, even first order. (Second-order and beyond effects would probably result in catastrophic economic damage, since many people would have strong incentives to produce less and no additional technology would exist that increases productivity. Again, the goal should be for people to produce more in less time and/or using fewer inputs.)