The Shafting, Um, Sharing Economy

[marmar]

from Naked Capitalism:


The Shafting, Um, Sharing Economy
Posted on May 26, 2015 by Yves Smith


The Wall Street Journal had a surprising story over the weekend, How Everyone Gets the ‘Sharing’ Economy Wrong, with the subtitle, “Uber isn’t the Uber for rides—it’s the Uber for low-wage jobs.” While the Journal maintains separation of church and state between its rabidly right wing editorial section and its news sections, I’ve been close enough to some stories to know on good authority that the Journal has refused to publish some stories (and reported sections of stories) because they were deemed to be too business-unfriendly. So what does one make of the Journal giving prominent placement (first page above the fold in the digital version) that depicts Uber and its ilk i the manner you’d expect to see at Salon or Huffington Post, as mainly in the business of crushing wages? Is it that the Journal is skeptical of new economy hype? Or is it that the rental extraction aspects of the “sharing” economy are so bloomin’ obvious that the editors didn’t see it as controversial to depict them in an unvarnished manner?

The article goes after the canard of the feel-good “sharing” branding:

The first thing everyone misses about the sharing economy is that there is no such thing, not even if we’re being semantically charitable. Increasingly, the goods being “shared” in the sharing economy were purchased expressly for business purposes, whether it’s people renting apartments they can’t afford on the theory that they can make up the difference on Airbnb, or drivers getting financing through partners of ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft to get a new car to drive for those same services.

What’s more, many of the companies under this umbrella, like labor marketplace TaskRabbit, don’t involve “sharing” anything other than labor. If TaskRabbit is part of the sharing economy, then so is every other worker in America. The only thing these companies have in common is that they are all marketplaces, though they differ widely in the amount of control they give their buyers and sellers.

A quibble: while author Christopher Mims is technically correct in calling these services “marketplaces,” that is arguably a term that is so broad as to wind up obscuring what is distinctive about these services. It is that they are (or at least aspire to be) networks and subject to network effects, meaning disproportionate returns to scale to the dominant players. The other reason I am not keen about “marketplace” is that markets occupy a sacred spot in economics and neoliberal ideology, so treating Uber and its kin as sponsors of “markets” gives them more of a halo than they deserve. ..................(more)

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/05/the-shafting-um-sharing-economy.html