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Fair point. Maybe the answer is, instead of trying to sell something to the poor, look for a way to enable the poor to sell a service to the rich? I mean, two

Fair point. Maybe the answer is, instead of trying to sell something to the poor, look for a way to enable the poor to sell a service to the rich? I mean, two of the biggest success stories in the recent startup scene are Airbnb and Uber. What do they do? Provide a way for people who don't have much money but do have a useful asset (a spare room, a car, respectively) to make a bit of extra cash selling a service to those with disposable income. What other opportunities along those lines are still open?

graeme 12y ago
Unfortunately, this is the future. I say unfortunately, because I think if we could see the final version, we'd recoil. The sharing economy, at heart, is about the monetization of spare capacity. So far it's mostly been physical assets, but spare time is next. Anywhere you find a poor person watching TV (or, god forbid, reading a book) there's spare capacity ready to be monetized. And, why are they sleeping so much? They could be working. The sharing economy is also about getting around transaction costs. Ideas like "minimum wage" and "minimum shift length" can be viewed as transaction costs that services can route around. A marginal hour's unskilled labour isn't worth very much. There's always been exploitation of this fact, but web services have the potential to scale it up.
- tinco 12y ago
  I agree that a future where millions live in poverty, working insane hours for minimal wages is repulsive and definitely the sort of thing that the next generation of web services might bring closer. But this future is going to come anyway, in the near future automation and centralization of production are only going to increase, leading to much increased joblessness. The only way we can combat that is if more wealth leaks down from the top, be it through labor services or social government.
  - rwallace 12y ago
    Future? Everything I've heard about society and the economy in the US says it's the present, without Web services coming into the picture. Web services don't make that aspect of things either better or worse, but what they do have the potential to do is make it so you don't have to endure a grinding commute and abuse by a sociopathic boss as well as the poverty and excessive hours
- tomjen3 12y ago
  I ask this because I have never seen a decent answer to this question: how does that make the poor people worse of? I mean I can sorta see it with the spare room (rent goes up because your neighbor has a little extra cash, now you _have_ to rent your room out too) but your car? Swinging by with my groceries on your way home from work? Swing by with some ready-to-freeze homecooked dinner for me[1]? [1]: Yes that is illegal, but I would _love_ for it not to be. Cooking for one is a waste of time.
  - aeturnum 12y ago
    Your question makes sense. It is more work for people who desperately need work. The problem is that dollars have marginal utility. The first $X you make per month is your housing and your food. People who are not getting that livable minimum are at a huge disadvantage in negotiations. They will do almost anything to get that $X. This means they will accept low pay, poor conditions, awful hours - anything you can think of - to make it. This also represents a massive subsidy to businesses that have good economies of scale. This kind of brinkmanship with total collapse has very personal consequences. If a parent can't do it for more than one or two days a year (if that), their kid(s) may become homeless or stuck in the foster system. You should care about that because society bears a large portion of the costs (the costs are high). That level of stress causes people to make mistakes, sometimes about things you care about. The goal of labor protections is to ensure some minimum level of human decency and allow people time to improve their lot. Aside from the risks to us outlined above, the risk of a population that is too beset with surviving to pay attention or vote should be pretty obvious.
- piratebroadcast 12y ago
  TaskRabbit is selling spare time for cash. Put together this desk, bring flowers to this girls office, etc.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  I'm not aware of much like this besides mechanical turk. In any case, no one is forcing people to work, it's just an option they otherwise wouldn't have. You can argue their lives won't be any better with it, but I can't see how they would be worse. You make it sound like they are going to be rounded up by slave drivers, and otherwise would be pretty well off. The worst case would be existing industries that are currently bound by minimum wage and working laws, that then find ways around the regulations. But new industries that didn't exist before mostly add new jobs, not replace existing ones with worse ones.
  - prawn 12y ago
    There's a short story I read a while back showing where things will likely head. 'Zero Hours' - https://medium.com/futures-exchange/f68f17e8c12a https://medium.com/futures-exchange/f68f17e8c12a
JabavuAdams 12y ago
Organ donation 2.0 and prostitution 2.0. But we're helping the poor to make their own decisions about how to generate wealth.
- aianus 12y ago
  Let me understand how I'm supposed to see this: A-OK: Rich Americans die from kidney failure while poor Africans die from malnutrition/AIDS/TB/whatever. Reprehensible exploitation: Rich American buys a kidney from a poor African, feeding his family for a decade in the process. Nobody dies.
  - jwgur 12y ago
    It's a false premise - the "Rich American" has a duty to help those who are less fortunate (poor Africans), and that duty extends further than just quid pro quo transactions.
    - aianus 12y ago
      That's not going to happen and in the meantime this idealism is killing people.
      - JabavuAdams 12y ago
        We don't know that. In any case, the example is too simplistic anytime there is a lucrative market in organs, there will be middlemen who coerce victims into donating. That will / does kill people, no doubt. Whenever you're thinking about human systems, you need to think about how humans will game the system. Essentially, you're not facing a static adversary, but an adaptive, motivated one.
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    > Rich American buys a kidney from a poor African, feeding his family for a decade in the process. Nobody dies. Until the poor African's one remaining kidney goes bad, he can't get a transplant (nor the lifetime of expensive drugs to retain one), and his family starves for lack of a breadwinner.

graeme 12y ago

Unfortunately, this is the future. I say unfortunately, because I think if we could see the final version, we'd recoil. The sharing economy, at heart, is about the monetization of spare capacity. So far it's mostly been physical assets, but spare time is next. Anywhere you find a poor person watching TV (or, god forbid, reading a book) there's spare capacity ready to be monetized. And, why are they sleeping so much? They could be working. The sharing economy is also about getting around transaction costs. Ideas like "minimum wage" and "minimum shift length" can be viewed as transaction costs that services can route around. A marginal hour's unskilled labour isn't worth very much. There's always been exploitation of this fact, but web services have the potential to scale it up.

tinco 12y ago
I agree that a future where millions live in poverty, working insane hours for minimal wages is repulsive and definitely the sort of thing that the next generation of web services might bring closer. But this future is going to come anyway, in the near future automation and centralization of production are only going to increase, leading to much increased joblessness. The only way we can combat that is if more wealth leaks down from the top, be it through labor services or social government.
- rwallace 12y ago
  Future? Everything I've heard about society and the economy in the US says it's the present, without Web services coming into the picture. Web services don't make that aspect of things either better or worse, but what they do have the potential to do is make it so you don't have to endure a grinding commute and abuse by a sociopathic boss as well as the poverty and excessive hours
tomjen3 12y ago
I ask this because I have never seen a decent answer to this question: how does that make the poor people worse of? I mean I can sorta see it with the spare room (rent goes up because your neighbor has a little extra cash, now you _have_ to rent your room out too) but your car? Swinging by with my groceries on your way home from work? Swing by with some ready-to-freeze homecooked dinner for me[1]? [1]: Yes that is illegal, but I would _love_ for it not to be. Cooking for one is a waste of time.
- aeturnum 12y ago
  Your question makes sense. It is more work for people who desperately need work. The problem is that dollars have marginal utility. The first $X you make per month is your housing and your food. People who are not getting that livable minimum are at a huge disadvantage in negotiations. They will do almost anything to get that $X. This means they will accept low pay, poor conditions, awful hours - anything you can think of - to make it. This also represents a massive subsidy to businesses that have good economies of scale. This kind of brinkmanship with total collapse has very personal consequences. If a parent can't do it for more than one or two days a year (if that), their kid(s) may become homeless or stuck in the foster system. You should care about that because society bears a large portion of the costs (the costs are high). That level of stress causes people to make mistakes, sometimes about things you care about. The goal of labor protections is to ensure some minimum level of human decency and allow people time to improve their lot. Aside from the risks to us outlined above, the risk of a population that is too beset with surviving to pay attention or vote should be pretty obvious.
piratebroadcast 12y ago
TaskRabbit is selling spare time for cash. Put together this desk, bring flowers to this girls office, etc.
Houshalter 12y ago
I'm not aware of much like this besides mechanical turk. In any case, no one is forcing people to work, it's just an option they otherwise wouldn't have. You can argue their lives won't be any better with it, but I can't see how they would be worse. You make it sound like they are going to be rounded up by slave drivers, and otherwise would be pretty well off. The worst case would be existing industries that are currently bound by minimum wage and working laws, that then find ways around the regulations. But new industries that didn't exist before mostly add new jobs, not replace existing ones with worse ones.
- prawn 12y ago
  There's a short story I read a while back showing where things will likely head. 'Zero Hours' - https://medium.com/futures-exchange/f68f17e8c12a https://medium.com/futures-exchange/f68f17e8c12a

JabavuAdams 12y ago

Organ donation 2.0 and prostitution 2.0. But we're helping the poor to make their own decisions about how to generate wealth.

aianus 12y ago
Let me understand how I'm supposed to see this: A-OK: Rich Americans die from kidney failure while poor Africans die from malnutrition/AIDS/TB/whatever. Reprehensible exploitation: Rich American buys a kidney from a poor African, feeding his family for a decade in the process. Nobody dies.
- jwgur 12y ago
  It's a false premise - the "Rich American" has a duty to help those who are less fortunate (poor Africans), and that duty extends further than just quid pro quo transactions.
  - aianus 12y ago
    That's not going to happen and in the meantime this idealism is killing people.
    - JabavuAdams 12y ago
      We don't know that. In any case, the example is too simplistic anytime there is a lucrative market in organs, there will be middlemen who coerce victims into donating. That will / does kill people, no doubt. Whenever you're thinking about human systems, you need to think about how humans will game the system. Essentially, you're not facing a static adversary, but an adaptive, motivated one.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  > Rich American buys a kidney from a poor African, feeding his family for a decade in the process. Nobody dies. Until the poor African's one remaining kidney goes bad, he can't get a transplant (nor the lifetime of expensive drugs to retain one), and his family starves for lack of a breadwinner.