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I like your hypothetical of Google contracting out its programming (maybe on oDesk?) instead of using in-house employees. I agree that that would be a major shi

I like your hypothetical of Google contracting out its programming (maybe on oDesk?) instead of using in-house employees. I agree that that would be a major shift. Uber seems to be the go-to example in these kinds of articles, but is not very convincing as an example of a fundamental market shift, because the taxi market already operates similarly to how Uber operates. Taxi drivers are typically contractors, and companies like "Yellow Cab" just handle dispatch services and such in return for a cut [1]. So Uber vs. Yellow Cab is an example of a new market creator competing against an incumbent for the taxi-dispatch business. [1] Example of a Yellow Cab "non-job" posting: http://www.yellowcabaustin.com/driver.aspx http://www.yellowcabaustin.com/driver.aspx

netcan 11y ago
I agree. I don't think Uber is a hard sign of change. It's the creation of a market with one big firm and lots of small contractors in place of a market with lots of small firms. This is a normal sort of restructuring that happens a lot. Shipping in the early "age of the sail" was usually controlled and operated by monarchs or crown backed monopolies. The task was suited to this structure at the time. One big, expensive & risky journey. Technology has shifted this around a bunch of time before and after that time then. Before the medieval collapse of european trade those same routes were alive and well (eg Italy to China) but were handled by a "market" of camel drivers, corsairs, merchants, markets and who knows what all along the spice and silk "roads." Transaction costs still played a big role and technology dictated the structure of the economy. Along the silk road items could be traded dozens or hundreds of times over years before reaching users who had no idea what strange distant people made them. Beautiful, but inefficient relative to a single flotilla traveling the whole way. The internet has done these things too. eBay enabled tiny traders and decentralised retail. Amazon concentrated and centralised retail. This is normal creative destruction and it doesn't seem to have an obviously dominant current. It seems to me that this is fact and metric picking. OTOH, maybe those stats on "contractors" is indicative of some shift in our labour market conventions. Who knows.

netcan 11y ago

I agree. I don't think Uber is a hard sign of change. It's the creation of a market with one big firm and lots of small contractors in place of a market with lots of small firms. This is a normal sort of restructuring that happens a lot. Shipping in the early "age of the sail" was usually controlled and operated by monarchs or crown backed monopolies. The task was suited to this structure at the time. One big, expensive & risky journey. Technology has shifted this around a bunch of time before and after that time then. Before the medieval collapse of european trade those same routes were alive and well (eg Italy to China) but were handled by a "market" of camel drivers, corsairs, merchants, markets and who knows what all along the spice and silk "roads." Transaction costs still played a big role and technology dictated the structure of the economy. Along the silk road items could be traded dozens or hundreds of times over years before reaching users who had no idea what strange distant people made them. Beautiful, but inefficient relative to a single flotilla traveling the whole way. The internet has done these things too. eBay enabled tiny traders and decentralised retail. Amazon concentrated and centralised retail. This is normal creative destruction and it doesn't seem to have an obviously dominant current. It seems to me that this is fact and metric picking. OTOH, maybe those stats on "contractors" is indicative of some shift in our labour market conventions. Who knows.