27 ms·

The desperate hustle as a way of life

177 points by timr 13y ago

jmzbond 13y ago
This is a really interesting perspective thanks for sharing. I don't think anyone intended to create this shadow economy. The founders of AirBnB, TaskRabbit, Lyft, and the like did not create those services with the intention that people hustle full-time. More that it was a stopover to get some cash in an economy where you might need it and a place where cost of living is high. But I very much agree that this piece demonstrates perverse incentives. As someone else posted on here, it's not right if people hustle to the extent of crashing with their friend's parent's cousins every day just so they can list their places on AirBnB. The other point though, is that I don't think we'll have decades of hustle anyways, because the point of many of these services is to catalyze a culture of sharing that we've lost. Once we gain it back, then Lyft, Uber, and the like (as one example) can shift from drivers that drive around looking for rides (which is hardly sharing so much as a homegrown taxi), into truly picking up people when convenient for their usual routes. Of course, this depends on these organizations not being swayed by perverse incentives themselves. We'll see!
- epicureanideal 13y ago
  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.
  - phreeza 13y ago
    I believe that is what inflation means.
    - dllthomas 13y ago
      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.
    - tormeh 13y ago
      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. It doesn't look very good.
      - fennecfoxen 13y ago
        > 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.
  - mason55 13y ago
    Similar to how once you started having both parents working you quickly needed to have both parents working.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    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). Counterfactual argument is counterfactual.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  > the point of many of these services is to catalyze a culture of sharing that we've lost. Once we gain it back, then Lyft, Uber, and the like (as one example) can shift from drivers that drive around looking for rides (which is hardly sharing so much as a homegrown taxi), into truly picking up people when convenient for their usual routes You say this as if it would be a step forward instead of a huge step back. The whole idea of a market economy is that you can trade what you have for what you want, even if the person who has what you want doesn't want what you have. Money is used to facilitate this kind of indirect trade. This system is superior to the system you advocate, wherein, if I have ten pounds of corn and want a painting, I need to find a painter who wants corn. If the only place Lyft will take me is the football stadium, Lyft isn't a useful app, or a useful anything else. I won't bother to use it even on the rare occasion when the football stadium is where I want to go. The point of a transportation service is that it takes me where I want to go, not that it takes me to a random location depending on which driver I happened to contact, and not that if I want to go someplace out-of-the-way I need to wait for possibly a period of months.
  - tsotha 13y ago
    >This system is superior to the system you advocate, wherein, if I have ten pounds of corn and want a painting, I need to find a painter who wants corn. That's a good point. The question is how likely it is for new technology to connect you and the painter such that you don't need money. The question I have is what's the utility of avoiding money beyond tax dodging?
  - cornholio 13y ago
    I don't think the GP advocates a barter economy, rather he defines what sharing really is. If 50.000 people go to the stadium, there's a large chance close neighbors go there so there's no point using four cars when they can use a single one. No economic product is generated but our lives are suddenly better, less congestion, less resources wasted, etc. So the sharing platforms should find these synergies, when they exist, and you should purchase a transportation service otherwise. What they actually end-up doing is competing the incumbent services in a fly bellow the radar illegal operation which actually makes the taxi drivers themselves poorer while diverting most of the extra cash to the ring masters.
- exit 13y ago
  i don't think we'll have decades of cars being driven by people. will people who hustle on lyft/uber now own any share of the autonomobile industry?
  - fennecfoxen 13y ago
    Supposing we have robot cars in a few decades, it wouldn't be unimaginable to think of a family getting a robot car for their own routine use on a commute, then hooking it up to the new Uber-R robo-car pickup network with a snazzy piece of software. Then it could be used on the network while the family is away on vacations, or asleep at night, or whatever.
    - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
      Why not send the car ahead when you are on vacation, so you can use it in Florida when you get there?
      - fennecfoxen 13y ago
        Eh. I was thinking Europe.
        JoeAltmaier 13y ago
        Smart robo-car can catch a ferry!
      - PeterisP 13y ago
        Why send a car ahead (wasting lots of energy on moving it) when simply getting an identical one when getting out of the plane should be much cheaper? I mean, you pay $X for getting that car, and you get $X minus a fee percentage for your own car that gets rented for the same time. And you can get a much different kind (or number) of vehicles than you have at home, which would suit the vacation needs.
- dingaling 13y ago
  I realised that AirBnB and its ilk had reached the mainstream when I saw an article in my wife's copy of Woman's Weekly, a UK mag targeting middle-aged and older demographic. Alongside recipe for strawberry flan and knitting patterns: how to use AirBnB to make supplementary income or find a companion.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Submarine: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  I don't think anyone intended to create this shadow economy. That's one of the conclusions I'm reaching about the economic system in general: much of it isn't so much planned as it just happened (though there have most definitely been very long-lived efforts to influence both how people think about the system and how it functions -- going back to Smith and before). But I also feel that much of what "just happened" is also less than beneficial through both perverse incentives and externalities. Your "truly picking up people when convenient for their usual routes" existed for a time in the form of hitchhiking, and survives today in limited forms such as casual carpool arrangements.
  - jmzbond 13y ago
    Yes I completely agree with you! We plant the seeds of systems, be it legal, educational, political, economic, etc., and then they evolve, grow, and spiral (fueled by their own momentum and interesting side effects) to a state where we often lose control of the system completely, and then have to submit to it, instead of the other way around.
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      You might enjoy some of Kim Stanley Robinson's talks on YouTube and elsewhere. One point he brings up is the idea that as human systems evolve, they tend to have the elements of the precursor, present, and successor systems in them. So presently, capitalism has elements of its precursor, feudalism, and whatever its successor will be. I've collected some of the videos here: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/23rbpb/video_roundup_thom_harman_kim_stanley_robinson/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/23rbpb/video_ro... The bit on successor systems is in the 3rd KSR video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqSrMSbqXfk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqSrMSbqXfk More here: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/04/in-300-years-kim-stanley-robinsons-science-fiction-may-not-be-fiction/274392/ http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/04/in-... With capitalism, we can say that it has very strong residual elements of feudalism. It's as if feudalism liquefied and the basis of power moved from land to money, but with the injustice of the huge hierarchical feudal differences between rich and poor still intact. What is emergent in capitalism is harder to identify, but there may be something to the idea of the global village, also the education of the entire world population, so that everyone knows the world situation and wants justice, that may be leading the way to a more just global society. Seeing and exaggerating these emergent elements is something utopian science fiction tries to do. So the dichotomy is a sort of x/y graph in a thought experiment.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
scythe 13y ago
AirBnB, Lyft, etc certainly take advantage of the underemployment boom -- but did they cause it? It seems unfair to blame two relatively small companies for the result of multiple regulatory failures across multiple industries, especially considering that neither existed in its current form when the crash happened.
- neumann 13y ago
  I don't think the article is blaming these companies for the current employment situation. It highlights that these business models are deemed clever and entrepreneurial while in fact supporting a wage model whereby everybody is responsible for the hustle, working on commission... employment as a service if you will. This in of itself isn't bad, but the article makes the point that this approach leads to an employment where nobody can just work for a fair wage, everybody is hustling. I thought it was a very thoughtful and interesting piece that revealed one of the long term consequence of something that everybody seems to be celebrating, this 'liberation' of service (and employment).
dkarapetyan 13y ago
Those services are making certain market transactions more efficient and that is a good thing. Whether people realize that not all things should be viewed as markets and transactions is another matter altogether.
QuantumChaos 13y ago
The author is operating under the strange notion that doing a transaction outside the context of full-time work, or operating a business, is illegal. Maybe businesses like Lyft, Uber and AirBnB facilitate people working in legal grey areas, but they also facilitate direct individual-customer relationships. These open up markets, and are therefore bad for incumbents (e.g. people already in the taxi industry) but good for people who for whatever weren't able to work in that industry before. And what's with referring to people as "kids"? Is this how you assert your status as alpha male?
- GauntletWizard 13y ago
  No, they don't think it's illegal; They just think it's immoral. Everyone should want to be tied down to a 9-5 full time job, for some crazy idea of middle-class "Stability". They fundamentally misattribute the death of the middle class on rise of the sharing economy, not the other way around; Nor as a function of the increasing automation, and by-the-by the increasing gap between the value of true knowledge-workers and automaton persons.
  - _broody 13y ago
    The author isn't blaming the sharing economy for the death of the middle class, but describing it as a symptom (and as a patchwork solution that doesn't actually solve any problem -having to work more for subsistency isn't going to restore your quality of life, it's just going to knock you a level down Maslow's pyramid of needs, and make you more miserable and actually less likely to cut it professionally in the long term).
- QuantumChaos 13y ago
  Just to clarify for the downvoters: >Today there are people all over Baltimore subleasing places they don’t own, peddling without a license, hacking. This is a criminal offense. The law does not recognize the right of the people to earn enough to eat. >All these entrepreneurs, most of them running little scams to get by, all of them held in contempt by the law and by most of society. Lyft and Uber and Air BnB face legal sanction too—but it’s just a civil matter. The author clearly conflates the two issues of (A) not working for an employer or company, and (B) transactions that are illegal. I already said how these may be linked in some cases. But it is unreasonable to imply that any work that is not done for an employer (preferable while working full time) must be some kind of scam. EDIT: I'm not sure I like the new HN where I can't say something that is manifestly true (as proven by my quotes) without getting massively downvoted.
joelrunyon 13y ago
What's with all the hit pieces on the sharing economy as of late? There's another piece on the front page here too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7651968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7651968 I'm struggling to figure out what the big problem is with more people becoming entrepreneurs?
- eropple 13y ago
  Aside from the "sharing economy"'s brightest lights being designed to enrich everybody but the people doing the work, while offloading all of the risk onto the people doing the work? Nothing, I guess.
  - joelrunyon 13y ago
    I don't think uber drivers would be volunteering to drive if they were making more money doing typical limosuine or taxi services. Same with AirBnb. If they're not making money - why would they be doing it?
    - rjd 13y ago
      Because in the short term it sounds good, like eating takeaways. But in the long run its pathogenic. If you can't see the whole system and need a quick buck why not. Theres a reason most of these industries have existed unregulated through out history, exploitation occurs, become regulated, and are now reappearing with a new tact and hitting up existing laws... and hence all the court cases where they are desperately trying to claim the services aren't illegal. Theres a lot of consumer safety to be considered you rarely hear of, let alone what is technically stealing by reselling things you don't own. Theres a reason regulation happens, and its usually because exploitation occurs.
- danielharan 13y ago
  It's not sharing: it's renting.
  - 001sky 13y ago
neilk 13y ago
The argument has an emotional resonance, but does it really make sense? It's not like working for big employers (and entrusting Wall Street with one's retirement) worked out really well in the past decade either. Every company is out there "hustling", as they compete with one another. So is it so much better to delegate the hustling aspect of life to one's CEO? Or are we all just turning over power and rewards to those people, in exchange for a quieter life? It does get at the question - what are companies even for? According to free market theories, we should all be selling our labor freelance. The standard answer for a long while was that transaction costs would be too high. So possibly AirBnB and Uber are solving that, and more of us can jettison the dead weight of having bosses who specialize in hustling. The only problem is that they are completely artificial "markets", and they're taking a tremendous percentage. You're not hustling on the free market, you're hustling on the totally-controlled-by-AirBnB market. And the company has no long-term responsibility to any individual operator, and there's probably never going to be anything like an AirBnB hosts' union. Right now, the sharing economy companies will try hard to make life good for the sharers, but they may not always be so aligned.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  According to free market theories, we should all be selling our labor freelance. This is incorrect. If the disutility to an employer of absorbing short term risk is lower than the disutility to the employee, it makes perfect sense. And similarly, if an employer has a comparative advantage over the employee for hustling, specialization makes sense. There are also large tax incentives (most notably relating to medical spending) for full time employment. "Free market theories" don't generally oppose risk mitigation strategies, specialization or exploiting economies of scale.
  - neilk 13y ago
    Those are good points. I should have clarified, I meant a naive interpretation of free market theory. I'm only a dabbler when it comes to economics, but I think the field of the "theory of the firm" is interesting. And one of their primary topics the question of why all labor isn't sold on a free market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
gojomo 13y ago
Another similarly-bleak take on the 'sharing' economy: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/ (Forwarded as an interesting set of thoughts, not endorsement.)
ilaksh 13y ago
Interesting perspective. I think the sharing economy is more of a symptom than a cause though. The economy as a whole is squeezing society. I believe that there are fundamental structural problems that require core aspects of our system to be re-engineered. I don't think its as simple as giving everyone money or more regulation or less regulation. I think we need to make improvements to the underlying paradigm. That requires testing changes that are very different from what has been tried before. And changing fundamental assumptions.
cube_yellow 13y ago
If your marginal freetime is worth less than driving for Lyft, then it probably was before Lyft. Either own the code and machines that these services run on, or prepare for either A) Basic income, leading towards crime and social isolation and the end of civilization for your class, or B) Slavery (WPA style), in order to prevent A. If you use your power of selective history the right way, you'll get B and enjoy it. I, as someone of non-genius IQ, will use my still-existent income to enjoy the metaverse and avoid major cities.
cconcepts 13y ago
"Wonder, for just a second, if we’re sharing the wrong things with the wrong people." What wrong people? As the economy is globalized people who get paid yet don't make a contribution to the economy will be dug out - whats wrong with that? The only people who should be afraid are the ones who make money by not contributing. If you're observant enough to provide something useful that people want there will always be a place for you. If you want to coast and get paid for it then, yeah, this is gonna hurt.
- djillionsmix 13y ago
  >The only people who should be afraid are the ones who make money by not contributing. Should be? sure. Are? No, those people are mostly at the top of the economy.
  - cconcepts 13y ago
    haha, nice point. At least some of them are at the top
derwiki 13y ago
This article focuses on shareconomy services that operate in legal gray areas, particularly Uber/Lyft and AirBnB. Can the same arguments be made for shareconomy services that are perfectly legal? Such as: tool sharing, camera lending, bike sharing?
- nnq 13y ago
  In a way anything that lowers the minimum cost of living can be bad, because employers will exploit this to justify paying less and society will label the ones that don't want to lower their baseline as "overspenders" (even if it may overall encourage you to spend more on other unneeded luxuries...). By sharing your bike or any other thing you make the cost of making use of a bike lower. A more appropriate example would be for a family to own a second or a third car. If you own a second car, you have one more item that you own but don't absolutely need, therefore an item that provides financial security and independence because you can sell it when in need of money (even if at a lower value, it's still a way to get instant cash for an emergency). This is the kind of financial security that will allow you to show your boss the middle finger or ask for a bigger wage, because you know that that if you get fired you can still get by until you find another job, or you have enough stuff to sell and move to another place even if you bank accounts get frozen etc. This is good because: 1. it make people less likely to accept a lower wage, driving wages up 2. it makes people with very risky but innovative ideas willing to start a business from their garage, because they know they still have enough savings to not end up homeless if everything goes south (note: I'm referring to the kind of ideas no sane VC would throw a penny at, but might very well change the world) 3. it makes people give more to charity, in two ways: (a) most people donate at some time the things that they buy but not use and (b) the fact that you "own stuff" gives you a sense of security that makes you worry less about your future and care more about the needs of others (dunno how healthy this way of thinking is, but this is how our minds work) I know it's not a fashionable mindset, but I think that owning more, sharing less and giving (away) more (or reselling at way-below-market prices, which is close enough to it and doesn't hurt anyone's pride :)... ) is a much healthier, financially secure and more freedom promoting way of living than what we seem to encourage today! (because when you "share" you must create restrictions and limit people's freedoms, whereas when you give away something you also give away the freedom to use however they see it fit, and when you own something you don't have to limit freedom by imposing "fair use" policies because you are the single user)
facepalm 13y ago
I don't see a future for Lyft and things like that. I don't see how semi-private people are supposed to manage their cars and apartments more efficiently than professionals. So if anything, those services will be transitional (until nobody owns their own car anymore). That said, I really don't agree with the sense of entitlement from that post. The real world actually is tough. Just because we managed at times to build a small layer of security on top of it, doesn't mean everybody is entitled to it. I don't think there is a conspiracy to deprive people of their job security, it is just a developing reality. And quite frankly, I think everybody should take responsibility for their own life. People might actually be better off if they do that.
- marvin 13y ago
  This doesn't make sense. What you're saying is that the world is a shitty place, for a while it was less shitty and now it's going to shit again. We've never been more technologically sophisticated. It's never been cheaper to stay alive. It's never been easier to produce cheap, valuable goods to ensure that people can have a good life. It's not about job security, it's about making sure that everyone can afford a bare minimum of dignity and living standard. If you read between the lines, the author of this story calls for sensible regulation to ensure that this continues to be the case, and that regular people aren't exploited for economic gain. While this might be a controversial topic in some circles, I don't think your average middle-class family would object. It is obvious that the continued technological developments, including automation, will cause an amount of pain and strife. This is why we should meet these problems head-on. Increased automation should mean more wealth and a better life for everyone. The status quo, at least in the US, has meant a poorer median and vastly increased wealth differences between the top and the median. The latter of these points is not in itself a problem, but the first is. That's where the problem lies.
  - facepalm 13y ago
    If the means are there to make life nice for everyone, I am all for it. However, I am not convinced it is actually the case. If we had some good years, it might also just have been luck: for example using up oil, which is like a lottery win for society (free energy, but limited), or exploiting people in other countries (cheap washing machines and clothes). Do you think there is actually no risk in our modern world? Otherwise, why should some people (company owners) be forced to shoulder the risk for other people? If there ever was a period where life was easy for everyone, how long did it actually last? WW2 ended 1945. I think it must have been between then and now. In between there was the Vietnam war, cold war, various economic crises, and so on. Maybe that classic "be a factory worker with lots of benefits and pay for your family and home" only ever lasted a couple of years? I guess it is mostly known from movies from the 50ies? I am not actually as hardcore as it sounds. I think people should look out for each other, and society should strive to make everybody have a good life. I'm just not convinced that employee entitlement is the correct way to go about it. Note that job security is also something society pays a price for (it's factored into the prices of products - if a company has to stick to brewing horses and musn't switch to car manufacturing, because they employ a lot of horse breeders, society pays by having to do with less efficiency). As a freelancer, I don't understand why I should pay for somebody else's job security?
rstevenson542 13y ago
My guess is that his misguided opinions stem from Edward never having made a dollar on his own. That and/or a worthless liberal-arts degree that has filled him full of statist philosophy. This quote succinctly articulates the failure of the entire premise: "turning jobs into hobbies and salaries into piecework and commission" Great idea, Edward! Let's use government to legally prevent all forms of technological progress so that we can maintain the profit margins of archaic instustries. TurboTax, let's ban that. I'm sure it has put a lot of accountants out of work. The internet has sure shaken up the radio, newspaper, and film industries - let's ban that as well. I'm sure the airlines put a lot of train conductors out of an honest job. The point is technological advancements raise all of our standards of living. The irony is that you he's writing this article using his own PERSONAL PRINTING PRESS. Yet he's complaining that technology is eliminating "honest work". Intelligent people learn the skills necessary to adapt to changing times. Those that don't adapt, get left behind. This is how the world works, son. Adapt or perish.
ryanmarsh 13y ago
Hustling has been the ONLY way of life until very recently, perhaps the past few hundred years. This is really only since yesterday as far as the history of humanity is concerned. Things could be better in the U.S. for the middle class but we are still wealthy as far as most of the planet's population is concerned. I'm sorry I have no sympathy for the author's chief complaint. You can still find a nice quiet well paying job at a place like Exxon or Goodyear where you can in fact work until retirement. You could also choose to live in a place that isn't so expensive that the only way to survive is to hustle. Then you could save a little money, purchase some income producing assets, and become a capitalist yourself. Given all that, some of us do enjoy the hustle. For us, the only true safety is that which we provide for ourselves through the hustle.
- sanderjd 13y ago
  I think the concern is not that hustling-based work exists, but that other types of work will increasingly struggle to compete with it. It's true that a stable middle class with a high standard of living is a recent innovation, but that's no argument for letting it slip away. It was a good innovation, and it makes sense for people to fight to hang onto that way of life.
- alwillis 13y ago
  The hustle isn’t anything new; anyone who’s lived in what’s termed the inner-city knows about people selling bootleg CDs and DVDs on the street and people offering rides for money--they’re called 'gypsy cabs' in Boston. Most of the people who participate in this underground economy are desperate to keep a roof over their heads and to know they’ll have a next meal. The author is pointing out that companies like AirBnB ($776.40 million in funding: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/airbnb http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/airbnb) and Lyft ($332.50 million in funding: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lyft http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lyft) are monetizing this desperation and asking: are we as a society okay with this? When you take this point of view, you can kind of see why they (the companies and investors) use the warm and fuzzy term ‘the sharing economy’, which puts a nice spin on it. Sharing is good, right? It’s a slippery slope issue too: what else will get monetized in the name of the sharing economy? People often share prescription drugs with each other now; you could totally see an app that lets you see everyone around you who’s willing to share their Prozac or whatever.
rfrey 13y ago
> I did not yet understand then that those having or wanting just a job—just a job with decent pay—would be disparaged as “takers.” Where is this true? I haven't seen this even in SV, much less on The Outside.
- rtpg 13y ago
  There is an implicit attitude I've felt in the dev community that you're supposed to spend every waking moment of your life absorbing information about your work. Seeing how I'm commenting at 11 PM on a Sunday on this I guess I'm among those that do spend every waking moment on this stuff, but a lot of developers don't because its just a job. Being up to date is one thing, doing it on your off time is another.
  - rfrey 13y ago
    Sure, I agree there's lots of professional pressure on our outside-work time. But I haven't seen the attitude that if you're not self-employed, or aspire to be an entrepreneur, then you're a parasite, a "taker". (My read on the "just a job" in the linked article is that it was referring to people not wanting to freelance, rather than people who wanted to work-for-the-weekend.)
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
Ouch. More bitter privileged snarkiness posing as commentary. Over the years, I have come to understand that some people just want to punch a clock. They don't want to challenge themselves during their work hours, they don't want to think too much or take too much risk. They just want to punch a clock and get a paycheck. I am not like this, but people tell me there are many that are. I am a risk-taking person looking to challenge myself to create systems that help people. Most of the folks who think like me fail. That's fine. That's part of our lifestyle. The smart ones have a side job and manage to continue failing until something works out. I am beginning to feel really sorry for the other folks. The world has always been the way it is now. It's just that before you guys were helping some of the rest of us out. Now we don't need as many of you as we did before. So there are a lot of little opportunities making less money instead of just one large opportunity where you didn't have to think about it any more. If I understand the irrationality of the human species, the next step will be to call for a minimum hour law, or some such construction. We seem to be really good at spotting problems and not so good at understanding how the problems came about in the first place. (or even whether they are problems or not. Most of the time, what passes for problem-spotting is just emoting)
- infosample 13y ago
  So because people who would rather be an employee than an entrepreneur "don't want to challenge themselves" and "don't want to think too much"? I believe you've contributed to more bitter privileged snarkiness posing as commentary. Job creators like yourself don't need as many workers to do the same jobs as before but true innovators realize many people do want a challenge and to think. You failed to incentivize your employees. Those who utilize capital, technology, AND labor in this post industrial age will win.
dpatru 13y ago
It's fine to want to earn more money as long as you don't do this by taking away other people's freedoms. No one has the right to use force on others for their own ends. No one has the right to take away other people's right to contract in order to maintain an above-market price. So for example: the minimum wage takes away the rights of employers and would-be employees to contract at low wages in order to allow some workers to charge above-market wages. Taxi medallions take away the rights of passengers and drivers to contract for cheap fares in order to allow taxi companies to charge above-market fares. Not only are such laws economically wasteful, but they are immoral in the same sense that slavery is immoral: they take away one's freedom to contract.
- Karellen 13y ago
  Are you also against big government taking away our freedom to keep the entire proceeds of those contracts, in the form of taxes, which it then redistributes to the poor? You know, so that despite having a job paying $0.50/hr, people can still afford to buy enough food to eat for themselves, and so they can afford to live somewhere heated in the winter? Or are you fully behind an individual's right to die of starvation and/or hypothermia, because if they really cared about living, they'd... uh... ummm... shit - what is it they'd do again? Out of curiosity, are you and 99% of the people you know relatively well off, and not in forseeable danger of running out of food or warmth any time in the next decade or so? Do you, as the saying goes, got yours? I got mine, but I am somewhat concerned about the other people in my community who don't. I don't want to step over their bodies, rather, I'd like to help them get out of the pit they're in - however they got there. Be that being born into poverty, or falling into a career 20 years ago which has since been automated away, or through illness, or just bad bloody luck. So I'll give to charity and food banks, but I'd rather that people could get jobs which pay well enough that they don't need to use 'em. As for the people that got theirs but are content to say "fuck you Jack" to those that don't, they're not the kind of people I want to share my community, or country, with. With thanks to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf013ID8lCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf013ID8lCE
  - dpatru 13y ago
    > I am somewhat concerned about the other people in my community who don't [have theirs]. If you're concerned about people in your community who are poor, why do you oppose letting them make employment contracts which will make them better off? The minimum wage makes it illegal for them to contract for jobs that they are actually qualified for, i.e., very low-paying jobs. Very low-paying jobs are for employment what remedial courses are for college education. Eliminating remedial courses in college which would mean that people with very low levels of education could not get started with college. The minimum wage, by eliminating low-paying jobs, prevents low-skilled people from getting started with employment. > As for the people that got theirs but are content to say "fuck you Jack" to those that don't, they're not the kind of people I want to share my community, or country, with. Not only are you against allowing people to contract, you also want to deport people who exercise their right to speak. This is not a cheap shot. When you are willing to violate a basic human right like the freedom to contract, you're likely morally blind enough to be willing to violate other human rights. The choice of violating the right to contract and trade or letting someone starve is a false one. In fact, a major cause (though not the only cause) of poverty is restrictions on contracts and trade, mostly by governments. There are examples of this everywhere. The article mentioned taxis. Driving a car safely is a basic skill that many otherwise unskilled people can do. Taxis should be very cheap, plentiful, and temporary job for people who need something to do while they work on doing something more useful. Instead, government restricts the supply of taxis making taxis expensive and relatively scarce. This hurts people who need transportation, it hurts people who would like to provide transportation but cannot, and it hurts people who could be doing something more useful for society but don't because they are earning more than they should as taxi drivers.
dnautics 13y ago
Now, I drive for lyft (full-time) while I'm waiting for the IRS to approve my nonprofit's 501(c)3 status. It pays better than being a postdoc (about 20% better, also I had the 'foresight' to buy a hybrid car back in 2010). That says something about how the academic science industry has been captured to the point where labor costs are depressed to where it's better for me to have a job that doesn't require my PhD. The article writer should keep in mind that the leaders of academia are very much neoliberals often claiming to try to emulate the "profit-free" incentive structure "of europe" - and they're doing way, way worse than corporate america. Back to Lyft: Some of my 'coworkers' can't even do math (I met up with one to try to help him figure out the tax situation, deep down it was painful for me to see the blank stares he gave me when I tried to show him how to convert miles per gallon to dollars per mile). But he's making by, and probably better than he would be without Lyft. The author writes, "think for just a minute about what this means for the prospect of honest work". I don't know what his definition of honest work is, but to me it's this: Provide a service or good to someone that wants it. Go back and watch "school ties", where the dad tells his son about the scrappers picking valuables out of the dump, that at least that's "honest work". Lyft is "honest work". When I'm out there, I'm giving someone something they want, at a fair price, and having a social byproduct of keeping drunk people off the streets and giving vulnerable people a way to get home without worrying about getting stiffed for money, groped by an unscrupulous driver, or harrassed for being gay. The kicker? I can't say that anything I did in my last postdoc has any real social or individual value that compares. Yeah, there was a 401k plan and healthcare coverage, and all the trappings of a 'real job' except poor compensation. But it wasn't honest work.
brongondwana 13y ago
I see a lot of this as a logical extension of your toxic tipping culture. For many jobs, a large part of income is already based on the hustle for tips. Every interaction is a transaction. Australia is partially along the same path, though our strong anti-tipping culture (we have a reputation as poor tippers overseas) helps resist it. Still, living in Norway was a great alternative perspective - where everyone in a regular job was paid a living wage, and the hustle was really only on the very outskirts of society rather than sewn right through it.

177 points by timr 13y ago

This is a really interesting perspective thanks for sharing. I don't think anyone intended to create this shadow economy. The founders of AirBnB, TaskRabbit, Lyft, and the like did not create those services with the intention that people hustle full-time. More that it was a stopover to get some cash in an economy where you might need it and a place where cost of living is high. But I very much agree that this piece demonstrates perverse incentives. As someone else posted on here, it's not right if people hustle to the extent of crashing with their friend's parent's cousins every day just so they can list their places on AirBnB. The other point though, is that I don't think we'll have decades of hustle anyways, because the point of many of these services is to catalyze a culture of sharing that we've lost. Once we gain it back, then Lyft, Uber, and the like (as one example) can shift from drivers that drive around looking for rides (which is hardly sharing so much as a homegrown taxi), into truly picking up people when convenient for their usual routes. Of course, this depends on these organizations not being swayed by perverse incentives themselves. We'll see!

epicureanideal 13y ago
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.
- phreeza 13y ago
  I believe that is what inflation means.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    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.
  - tormeh 13y ago
    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. It doesn't look very good.
    - fennecfoxen 13y ago
      > 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.
- mason55 13y ago
  Similar to how once you started having both parents working you quickly needed to have both parents working.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  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). Counterfactual argument is counterfactual.
thaumasiotes 13y ago
> the point of many of these services is to catalyze a culture of sharing that we've lost. Once we gain it back, then Lyft, Uber, and the like (as one example) can shift from drivers that drive around looking for rides (which is hardly sharing so much as a homegrown taxi), into truly picking up people when convenient for their usual routes You say this as if it would be a step forward instead of a huge step back. The whole idea of a market economy is that you can trade what you have for what you want, even if the person who has what you want doesn't want what you have. Money is used to facilitate this kind of indirect trade. This system is superior to the system you advocate, wherein, if I have ten pounds of corn and want a painting, I need to find a painter who wants corn. If the only place Lyft will take me is the football stadium, Lyft isn't a useful app, or a useful anything else. I won't bother to use it even on the rare occasion when the football stadium is where I want to go. The point of a transportation service is that it takes me where I want to go, not that it takes me to a random location depending on which driver I happened to contact, and not that if I want to go someplace out-of-the-way I need to wait for possibly a period of months.
- tsotha 13y ago
  >This system is superior to the system you advocate, wherein, if I have ten pounds of corn and want a painting, I need to find a painter who wants corn. That's a good point. The question is how likely it is for new technology to connect you and the painter such that you don't need money. The question I have is what's the utility of avoiding money beyond tax dodging?
- cornholio 13y ago
  I don't think the GP advocates a barter economy, rather he defines what sharing really is. If 50.000 people go to the stadium, there's a large chance close neighbors go there so there's no point using four cars when they can use a single one. No economic product is generated but our lives are suddenly better, less congestion, less resources wasted, etc. So the sharing platforms should find these synergies, when they exist, and you should purchase a transportation service otherwise. What they actually end-up doing is competing the incumbent services in a fly bellow the radar illegal operation which actually makes the taxi drivers themselves poorer while diverting most of the extra cash to the ring masters.
exit 13y ago
i don't think we'll have decades of cars being driven by people. will people who hustle on lyft/uber now own any share of the autonomobile industry?
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  Supposing we have robot cars in a few decades, it wouldn't be unimaginable to think of a family getting a robot car for their own routine use on a commute, then hooking it up to the new Uber-R robo-car pickup network with a snazzy piece of software. Then it could be used on the network while the family is away on vacations, or asleep at night, or whatever.
  - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
    Why not send the car ahead when you are on vacation, so you can use it in Florida when you get there?
    - fennecfoxen 13y ago
      Eh. I was thinking Europe.
      - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
        Smart robo-car can catch a ferry!
    - PeterisP 13y ago
      Why send a car ahead (wasting lots of energy on moving it) when simply getting an identical one when getting out of the plane should be much cheaper? I mean, you pay $X for getting that car, and you get $X minus a fee percentage for your own car that gets rented for the same time. And you can get a much different kind (or number) of vehicles than you have at home, which would suit the vacation needs.
dingaling 13y ago
I realised that AirBnB and its ilk had reached the mainstream when I saw an article in my wife's copy of Woman's Weekly, a UK mag targeting middle-aged and older demographic. Alongside recipe for strawberry flan and knitting patterns: how to use AirBnB to make supplementary income or find a companion.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Submarine: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
dredmorbius 13y ago
I don't think anyone intended to create this shadow economy. That's one of the conclusions I'm reaching about the economic system in general: much of it isn't so much planned as it just happened (though there have most definitely been very long-lived efforts to influence both how people think about the system and how it functions -- going back to Smith and before). But I also feel that much of what "just happened" is also less than beneficial through both perverse incentives and externalities. Your "truly picking up people when convenient for their usual routes" existed for a time in the form of hitchhiking, and survives today in limited forms such as casual carpool arrangements.
- jmzbond 13y ago
  Yes I completely agree with you! We plant the seeds of systems, be it legal, educational, political, economic, etc., and then they evolve, grow, and spiral (fueled by their own momentum and interesting side effects) to a state where we often lose control of the system completely, and then have to submit to it, instead of the other way around.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    You might enjoy some of Kim Stanley Robinson's talks on YouTube and elsewhere. One point he brings up is the idea that as human systems evolve, they tend to have the elements of the precursor, present, and successor systems in them. So presently, capitalism has elements of its precursor, feudalism, and whatever its successor will be. I've collected some of the videos here: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/23rbpb/video_roundup_thom_harman_kim_stanley_robinson/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/23rbpb/video_ro... The bit on successor systems is in the 3rd KSR video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqSrMSbqXfk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqSrMSbqXfk More here: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/04/in-300-years-kim-stanley-robinsons-science-fiction-may-not-be-fiction/274392/ http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/04/in-... With capitalism, we can say that it has very strong residual elements of feudalism. It's as if feudalism liquefied and the basis of power moved from land to money, but with the injustice of the huge hierarchical feudal differences between rich and poor still intact. What is emergent in capitalism is harder to identify, but there may be something to the idea of the global village, also the education of the entire world population, so that everyone knows the world situation and wants justice, that may be leading the way to a more just global society. Seeing and exaggerating these emergent elements is something utopian science fiction tries to do. So the dichotomy is a sort of x/y graph in a thought experiment.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

scythe 13y ago

AirBnB, Lyft, etc certainly take advantage of the underemployment boom -- but did they cause it? It seems unfair to blame two relatively small companies for the result of multiple regulatory failures across multiple industries, especially considering that neither existed in its current form when the crash happened.

neumann 13y ago
I don't think the article is blaming these companies for the current employment situation. It highlights that these business models are deemed clever and entrepreneurial while in fact supporting a wage model whereby everybody is responsible for the hustle, working on commission... employment as a service if you will. This in of itself isn't bad, but the article makes the point that this approach leads to an employment where nobody can just work for a fair wage, everybody is hustling. I thought it was a very thoughtful and interesting piece that revealed one of the long term consequence of something that everybody seems to be celebrating, this 'liberation' of service (and employment).

dkarapetyan 13y ago

Those services are making certain market transactions more efficient and that is a good thing. Whether people realize that not all things should be viewed as markets and transactions is another matter altogether.

QuantumChaos 13y ago

The author is operating under the strange notion that doing a transaction outside the context of full-time work, or operating a business, is illegal. Maybe businesses like Lyft, Uber and AirBnB facilitate people working in legal grey areas, but they also facilitate direct individual-customer relationships. These open up markets, and are therefore bad for incumbents (e.g. people already in the taxi industry) but good for people who for whatever weren't able to work in that industry before. And what's with referring to people as "kids"? Is this how you assert your status as alpha male?

GauntletWizard 13y ago
No, they don't think it's illegal; They just think it's immoral. Everyone should want to be tied down to a 9-5 full time job, for some crazy idea of middle-class "Stability". They fundamentally misattribute the death of the middle class on rise of the sharing economy, not the other way around; Nor as a function of the increasing automation, and by-the-by the increasing gap between the value of true knowledge-workers and automaton persons.
- _broody 13y ago
  The author isn't blaming the sharing economy for the death of the middle class, but describing it as a symptom (and as a patchwork solution that doesn't actually solve any problem -having to work more for subsistency isn't going to restore your quality of life, it's just going to knock you a level down Maslow's pyramid of needs, and make you more miserable and actually less likely to cut it professionally in the long term).
QuantumChaos 13y ago
Just to clarify for the downvoters: >Today there are people all over Baltimore subleasing places they don’t own, peddling without a license, hacking. This is a criminal offense. The law does not recognize the right of the people to earn enough to eat. >All these entrepreneurs, most of them running little scams to get by, all of them held in contempt by the law and by most of society. Lyft and Uber and Air BnB face legal sanction too—but it’s just a civil matter. The author clearly conflates the two issues of (A) not working for an employer or company, and (B) transactions that are illegal. I already said how these may be linked in some cases. But it is unreasonable to imply that any work that is not done for an employer (preferable while working full time) must be some kind of scam. EDIT: I'm not sure I like the new HN where I can't say something that is manifestly true (as proven by my quotes) without getting massively downvoted.

joelrunyon 13y ago

What's with all the hit pieces on the sharing economy as of late? There's another piece on the front page here too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7651968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7651968 I'm struggling to figure out what the big problem is with more people becoming entrepreneurs?

eropple 13y ago
Aside from the "sharing economy"'s brightest lights being designed to enrich everybody but the people doing the work, while offloading all of the risk onto the people doing the work? Nothing, I guess.
- joelrunyon 13y ago
  I don't think uber drivers would be volunteering to drive if they were making more money doing typical limosuine or taxi services. Same with AirBnb. If they're not making money - why would they be doing it?
  - rjd 13y ago
    Because in the short term it sounds good, like eating takeaways. But in the long run its pathogenic. If you can't see the whole system and need a quick buck why not. Theres a reason most of these industries have existed unregulated through out history, exploitation occurs, become regulated, and are now reappearing with a new tact and hitting up existing laws... and hence all the court cases where they are desperately trying to claim the services aren't illegal. Theres a lot of consumer safety to be considered you rarely hear of, let alone what is technically stealing by reselling things you don't own. Theres a reason regulation happens, and its usually because exploitation occurs.
danielharan 13y ago
It's not sharing: it's renting.
- 001sky 13y ago

neilk 13y ago

The argument has an emotional resonance, but does it really make sense? It's not like working for big employers (and entrusting Wall Street with one's retirement) worked out really well in the past decade either. Every company is out there "hustling", as they compete with one another. So is it so much better to delegate the hustling aspect of life to one's CEO? Or are we all just turning over power and rewards to those people, in exchange for a quieter life? It does get at the question - what are companies even for? According to free market theories, we should all be selling our labor freelance. The standard answer for a long while was that transaction costs would be too high. So possibly AirBnB and Uber are solving that, and more of us can jettison the dead weight of having bosses who specialize in hustling. The only problem is that they are completely artificial "markets", and they're taking a tremendous percentage. You're not hustling on the free market, you're hustling on the totally-controlled-by-AirBnB market. And the company has no long-term responsibility to any individual operator, and there's probably never going to be anything like an AirBnB hosts' union. Right now, the sharing economy companies will try hard to make life good for the sharers, but they may not always be so aligned.

yummyfajitas 13y ago
According to free market theories, we should all be selling our labor freelance. This is incorrect. If the disutility to an employer of absorbing short term risk is lower than the disutility to the employee, it makes perfect sense. And similarly, if an employer has a comparative advantage over the employee for hustling, specialization makes sense. There are also large tax incentives (most notably relating to medical spending) for full time employment. "Free market theories" don't generally oppose risk mitigation strategies, specialization or exploiting economies of scale.
- neilk 13y ago
  Those are good points. I should have clarified, I meant a naive interpretation of free market theory. I'm only a dabbler when it comes to economics, but I think the field of the "theory of the firm" is interesting. And one of their primary topics the question of why all labor isn't sold on a free market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

gojomo 13y ago

Another similarly-bleak take on the 'sharing' economy: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/ (Forwarded as an interesting set of thoughts, not endorsement.)

ilaksh 13y ago

Interesting perspective. I think the sharing economy is more of a symptom than a cause though. The economy as a whole is squeezing society. I believe that there are fundamental structural problems that require core aspects of our system to be re-engineered. I don't think its as simple as giving everyone money or more regulation or less regulation. I think we need to make improvements to the underlying paradigm. That requires testing changes that are very different from what has been tried before. And changing fundamental assumptions.

cube_yellow 13y ago

If your marginal freetime is worth less than driving for Lyft, then it probably was before Lyft. Either own the code and machines that these services run on, or prepare for either A) Basic income, leading towards crime and social isolation and the end of civilization for your class, or B) Slavery (WPA style), in order to prevent A. If you use your power of selective history the right way, you'll get B and enjoy it. I, as someone of non-genius IQ, will use my still-existent income to enjoy the metaverse and avoid major cities.

cconcepts 13y ago

"Wonder, for just a second, if we’re sharing the wrong things with the wrong people." What wrong people? As the economy is globalized people who get paid yet don't make a contribution to the economy will be dug out - whats wrong with that? The only people who should be afraid are the ones who make money by not contributing. If you're observant enough to provide something useful that people want there will always be a place for you. If you want to coast and get paid for it then, yeah, this is gonna hurt.

djillionsmix 13y ago
>The only people who should be afraid are the ones who make money by not contributing. Should be? sure. Are? No, those people are mostly at the top of the economy.
- cconcepts 13y ago
  haha, nice point. At least some of them are at the top

derwiki 13y ago

This article focuses on shareconomy services that operate in legal gray areas, particularly Uber/Lyft and AirBnB. Can the same arguments be made for shareconomy services that are perfectly legal? Such as: tool sharing, camera lending, bike sharing?

nnq 13y ago
In a way anything that lowers the minimum cost of living can be bad, because employers will exploit this to justify paying less and society will label the ones that don't want to lower their baseline as "overspenders" (even if it may overall encourage you to spend more on other unneeded luxuries...). By sharing your bike or any other thing you make the cost of making use of a bike lower. A more appropriate example would be for a family to own a second or a third car. If you own a second car, you have one more item that you own but don't absolutely need, therefore an item that provides financial security and independence because you can sell it when in need of money (even if at a lower value, it's still a way to get instant cash for an emergency). This is the kind of financial security that will allow you to show your boss the middle finger or ask for a bigger wage, because you know that that if you get fired you can still get by until you find another job, or you have enough stuff to sell and move to another place even if you bank accounts get frozen etc. This is good because: 1. it make people less likely to accept a lower wage, driving wages up 2. it makes people with very risky but innovative ideas willing to start a business from their garage, because they know they still have enough savings to not end up homeless if everything goes south (note: I'm referring to the kind of ideas no sane VC would throw a penny at, but might very well change the world) 3. it makes people give more to charity, in two ways: (a) most people donate at some time the things that they buy but not use and (b) the fact that you "own stuff" gives you a sense of security that makes you worry less about your future and care more about the needs of others (dunno how healthy this way of thinking is, but this is how our minds work) I know it's not a fashionable mindset, but I think that owning more, sharing less and giving (away) more (or reselling at way-below-market prices, which is close enough to it and doesn't hurt anyone's pride :)... ) is a much healthier, financially secure and more freedom promoting way of living than what we seem to encourage today! (because when you "share" you must create restrictions and limit people's freedoms, whereas when you give away something you also give away the freedom to use however they see it fit, and when you own something you don't have to limit freedom by imposing "fair use" policies because you are the single user)

facepalm 13y ago

I don't see a future for Lyft and things like that. I don't see how semi-private people are supposed to manage their cars and apartments more efficiently than professionals. So if anything, those services will be transitional (until nobody owns their own car anymore). That said, I really don't agree with the sense of entitlement from that post. The real world actually is tough. Just because we managed at times to build a small layer of security on top of it, doesn't mean everybody is entitled to it. I don't think there is a conspiracy to deprive people of their job security, it is just a developing reality. And quite frankly, I think everybody should take responsibility for their own life. People might actually be better off if they do that.

marvin 13y ago
This doesn't make sense. What you're saying is that the world is a shitty place, for a while it was less shitty and now it's going to shit again. We've never been more technologically sophisticated. It's never been cheaper to stay alive. It's never been easier to produce cheap, valuable goods to ensure that people can have a good life. It's not about job security, it's about making sure that everyone can afford a bare minimum of dignity and living standard. If you read between the lines, the author of this story calls for sensible regulation to ensure that this continues to be the case, and that regular people aren't exploited for economic gain. While this might be a controversial topic in some circles, I don't think your average middle-class family would object. It is obvious that the continued technological developments, including automation, will cause an amount of pain and strife. This is why we should meet these problems head-on. Increased automation should mean more wealth and a better life for everyone. The status quo, at least in the US, has meant a poorer median and vastly increased wealth differences between the top and the median. The latter of these points is not in itself a problem, but the first is. That's where the problem lies.
- facepalm 13y ago
  If the means are there to make life nice for everyone, I am all for it. However, I am not convinced it is actually the case. If we had some good years, it might also just have been luck: for example using up oil, which is like a lottery win for society (free energy, but limited), or exploiting people in other countries (cheap washing machines and clothes). Do you think there is actually no risk in our modern world? Otherwise, why should some people (company owners) be forced to shoulder the risk for other people? If there ever was a period where life was easy for everyone, how long did it actually last? WW2 ended 1945. I think it must have been between then and now. In between there was the Vietnam war, cold war, various economic crises, and so on. Maybe that classic "be a factory worker with lots of benefits and pay for your family and home" only ever lasted a couple of years? I guess it is mostly known from movies from the 50ies? I am not actually as hardcore as it sounds. I think people should look out for each other, and society should strive to make everybody have a good life. I'm just not convinced that employee entitlement is the correct way to go about it. Note that job security is also something society pays a price for (it's factored into the prices of products - if a company has to stick to brewing horses and musn't switch to car manufacturing, because they employ a lot of horse breeders, society pays by having to do with less efficiency). As a freelancer, I don't understand why I should pay for somebody else's job security?

rstevenson542 13y ago

My guess is that his misguided opinions stem from Edward never having made a dollar on his own. That and/or a worthless liberal-arts degree that has filled him full of statist philosophy. This quote succinctly articulates the failure of the entire premise: "turning jobs into hobbies and salaries into piecework and commission" Great idea, Edward! Let's use government to legally prevent all forms of technological progress so that we can maintain the profit margins of archaic instustries. TurboTax, let's ban that. I'm sure it has put a lot of accountants out of work. The internet has sure shaken up the radio, newspaper, and film industries - let's ban that as well. I'm sure the airlines put a lot of train conductors out of an honest job. The point is technological advancements raise all of our standards of living. The irony is that you he's writing this article using his own PERSONAL PRINTING PRESS. Yet he's complaining that technology is eliminating "honest work". Intelligent people learn the skills necessary to adapt to changing times. Those that don't adapt, get left behind. This is how the world works, son. Adapt or perish.

ryanmarsh 13y ago

Hustling has been the ONLY way of life until very recently, perhaps the past few hundred years. This is really only since yesterday as far as the history of humanity is concerned. Things could be better in the U.S. for the middle class but we are still wealthy as far as most of the planet's population is concerned. I'm sorry I have no sympathy for the author's chief complaint. You can still find a nice quiet well paying job at a place like Exxon or Goodyear where you can in fact work until retirement. You could also choose to live in a place that isn't so expensive that the only way to survive is to hustle. Then you could save a little money, purchase some income producing assets, and become a capitalist yourself. Given all that, some of us do enjoy the hustle. For us, the only true safety is that which we provide for ourselves through the hustle.

sanderjd 13y ago
I think the concern is not that hustling-based work exists, but that other types of work will increasingly struggle to compete with it. It's true that a stable middle class with a high standard of living is a recent innovation, but that's no argument for letting it slip away. It was a good innovation, and it makes sense for people to fight to hang onto that way of life.
alwillis 13y ago
The hustle isn’t anything new; anyone who’s lived in what’s termed the inner-city knows about people selling bootleg CDs and DVDs on the street and people offering rides for money--they’re called 'gypsy cabs' in Boston. Most of the people who participate in this underground economy are desperate to keep a roof over their heads and to know they’ll have a next meal. The author is pointing out that companies like AirBnB ($776.40 million in funding: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/airbnb http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/airbnb) and Lyft ($332.50 million in funding: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lyft http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lyft) are monetizing this desperation and asking: are we as a society okay with this? When you take this point of view, you can kind of see why they (the companies and investors) use the warm and fuzzy term ‘the sharing economy’, which puts a nice spin on it. Sharing is good, right? It’s a slippery slope issue too: what else will get monetized in the name of the sharing economy? People often share prescription drugs with each other now; you could totally see an app that lets you see everyone around you who’s willing to share their Prozac or whatever.

rfrey 13y ago

> I did not yet understand then that those having or wanting just a job—just a job with decent pay—would be disparaged as “takers.” Where is this true? I haven't seen this even in SV, much less on The Outside.

rtpg 13y ago
There is an implicit attitude I've felt in the dev community that you're supposed to spend every waking moment of your life absorbing information about your work. Seeing how I'm commenting at 11 PM on a Sunday on this I guess I'm among those that do spend every waking moment on this stuff, but a lot of developers don't because its just a job. Being up to date is one thing, doing it on your off time is another.
- rfrey 13y ago
  Sure, I agree there's lots of professional pressure on our outside-work time. But I haven't seen the attitude that if you're not self-employed, or aspire to be an entrepreneur, then you're a parasite, a "taker". (My read on the "just a job" in the linked article is that it was referring to people not wanting to freelance, rather than people who wanted to work-for-the-weekend.)

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

Ouch. More bitter privileged snarkiness posing as commentary. Over the years, I have come to understand that some people just want to punch a clock. They don't want to challenge themselves during their work hours, they don't want to think too much or take too much risk. They just want to punch a clock and get a paycheck. I am not like this, but people tell me there are many that are. I am a risk-taking person looking to challenge myself to create systems that help people. Most of the folks who think like me fail. That's fine. That's part of our lifestyle. The smart ones have a side job and manage to continue failing until something works out. I am beginning to feel really sorry for the other folks. The world has always been the way it is now. It's just that before you guys were helping some of the rest of us out. Now we don't need as many of you as we did before. So there are a lot of little opportunities making less money instead of just one large opportunity where you didn't have to think about it any more. If I understand the irrationality of the human species, the next step will be to call for a minimum hour law, or some such construction. We seem to be really good at spotting problems and not so good at understanding how the problems came about in the first place. (or even whether they are problems or not. Most of the time, what passes for problem-spotting is just emoting)

infosample 13y ago
So because people who would rather be an employee than an entrepreneur "don't want to challenge themselves" and "don't want to think too much"? I believe you've contributed to more bitter privileged snarkiness posing as commentary. Job creators like yourself don't need as many workers to do the same jobs as before but true innovators realize many people do want a challenge and to think. You failed to incentivize your employees. Those who utilize capital, technology, AND labor in this post industrial age will win.

dpatru 13y ago

It's fine to want to earn more money as long as you don't do this by taking away other people's freedoms. No one has the right to use force on others for their own ends. No one has the right to take away other people's right to contract in order to maintain an above-market price. So for example: the minimum wage takes away the rights of employers and would-be employees to contract at low wages in order to allow some workers to charge above-market wages. Taxi medallions take away the rights of passengers and drivers to contract for cheap fares in order to allow taxi companies to charge above-market fares. Not only are such laws economically wasteful, but they are immoral in the same sense that slavery is immoral: they take away one's freedom to contract.

Karellen 13y ago
Are you also against big government taking away our freedom to keep the entire proceeds of those contracts, in the form of taxes, which it then redistributes to the poor? You know, so that despite having a job paying $0.50/hr, people can still afford to buy enough food to eat for themselves, and so they can afford to live somewhere heated in the winter? Or are you fully behind an individual's right to die of starvation and/or hypothermia, because if they really cared about living, they'd... uh... ummm... shit - what is it they'd do again? Out of curiosity, are you and 99% of the people you know relatively well off, and not in forseeable danger of running out of food or warmth any time in the next decade or so? Do you, as the saying goes, got yours? I got mine, but I am somewhat concerned about the other people in my community who don't. I don't want to step over their bodies, rather, I'd like to help them get out of the pit they're in - however they got there. Be that being born into poverty, or falling into a career 20 years ago which has since been automated away, or through illness, or just bad bloody luck. So I'll give to charity and food banks, but I'd rather that people could get jobs which pay well enough that they don't need to use 'em. As for the people that got theirs but are content to say "fuck you Jack" to those that don't, they're not the kind of people I want to share my community, or country, with. With thanks to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf013ID8lCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf013ID8lCE
- dpatru 13y ago
  > I am somewhat concerned about the other people in my community who don't [have theirs]. If you're concerned about people in your community who are poor, why do you oppose letting them make employment contracts which will make them better off? The minimum wage makes it illegal for them to contract for jobs that they are actually qualified for, i.e., very low-paying jobs. Very low-paying jobs are for employment what remedial courses are for college education. Eliminating remedial courses in college which would mean that people with very low levels of education could not get started with college. The minimum wage, by eliminating low-paying jobs, prevents low-skilled people from getting started with employment. > As for the people that got theirs but are content to say "fuck you Jack" to those that don't, they're not the kind of people I want to share my community, or country, with. Not only are you against allowing people to contract, you also want to deport people who exercise their right to speak. This is not a cheap shot. When you are willing to violate a basic human right like the freedom to contract, you're likely morally blind enough to be willing to violate other human rights. The choice of violating the right to contract and trade or letting someone starve is a false one. In fact, a major cause (though not the only cause) of poverty is restrictions on contracts and trade, mostly by governments. There are examples of this everywhere. The article mentioned taxis. Driving a car safely is a basic skill that many otherwise unskilled people can do. Taxis should be very cheap, plentiful, and temporary job for people who need something to do while they work on doing something more useful. Instead, government restricts the supply of taxis making taxis expensive and relatively scarce. This hurts people who need transportation, it hurts people who would like to provide transportation but cannot, and it hurts people who could be doing something more useful for society but don't because they are earning more than they should as taxi drivers.

dnautics 13y ago

Now, I drive for lyft (full-time) while I'm waiting for the IRS to approve my nonprofit's 501(c)3 status. It pays better than being a postdoc (about 20% better, also I had the 'foresight' to buy a hybrid car back in 2010). That says something about how the academic science industry has been captured to the point where labor costs are depressed to where it's better for me to have a job that doesn't require my PhD. The article writer should keep in mind that the leaders of academia are very much neoliberals often claiming to try to emulate the "profit-free" incentive structure "of europe" - and they're doing way, way worse than corporate america. Back to Lyft: Some of my 'coworkers' can't even do math (I met up with one to try to help him figure out the tax situation, deep down it was painful for me to see the blank stares he gave me when I tried to show him how to convert miles per gallon to dollars per mile). But he's making by, and probably better than he would be without Lyft. The author writes, "think for just a minute about what this means for the prospect of honest work". I don't know what his definition of honest work is, but to me it's this: Provide a service or good to someone that wants it. Go back and watch "school ties", where the dad tells his son about the scrappers picking valuables out of the dump, that at least that's "honest work". Lyft is "honest work". When I'm out there, I'm giving someone something they want, at a fair price, and having a social byproduct of keeping drunk people off the streets and giving vulnerable people a way to get home without worrying about getting stiffed for money, groped by an unscrupulous driver, or harrassed for being gay. The kicker? I can't say that anything I did in my last postdoc has any real social or individual value that compares. Yeah, there was a 401k plan and healthcare coverage, and all the trappings of a 'real job' except poor compensation. But it wasn't honest work.

brongondwana 13y ago

I see a lot of this as a logical extension of your toxic tipping culture. For many jobs, a large part of income is already based on the hustle for tips. Every interaction is a transaction. Australia is partially along the same path, though our strong anti-tipping culture (we have a reputation as poor tippers overseas) helps resist it. Still, living in Norway was a great alternative perspective - where everyone in a regular job was paid a living wage, and the hustle was really only on the very outskirts of society rather than sewn right through it.