The larger trend is where it looks worrisome, and that's basically what we're considering as some time has passed.

Anecdotally, I've met a number of Uber/Lyft drivers that told me driving allowed them to quit their past shitty job and choose a flexible schedule that worked well with raising their kids.

Also, drivers that quit their jobs to pour energy into their family business with some extra cash from driving when needed.

Their growth may have been aided by current levels of unemployment and underemployment, but to say they wouldn't exist is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.

Even then I could see them growing as fast if there were a robust middle class with disposable income to spend on these services.

The only thing that would change is the supply and demand curves. There would be more demand and less supply, making the only thing that would change would be the equilibrium price point where those two intersect.

Thus, I do agree with you that that the only thing that would change is the supply and demand curves, but many of these business models seem to depend on the very idea of there being a large enough supply to enable prices to be lower than alternatives.

Perhaps the Lyft statement (Lyft left too) says it the clearest:

"The rules passed by City Council don't allow true ridesharing to operate. Instead, they make it harder for part-time drivers, the heart of Lyft's peer-to-peer model, to get on the road and harder for passengers to get a ride."

If you read more than just one article on the issue, you can see that it's much more nuanced than how you represented it. They left because they both have background checks in place and that adding fingerprinting adds an additional bureaucratic burden that has poor predictive power, places an undue burden on drivers who want to engage part-time and disproportionally prevents minority communities from participating. Background checks add nothing of value and if either company were to validate Austin's approach by acquiescing, they would pave the way for other cities to follow that model.

Opposing measure on principle because it adds costs and friction without adding value is not equivalent to the statement you made. Every business is right to oppose regulations that increase costs, especially those regulations of highly dubious value. Opposing such measures is not evidence of a business model not being valid.

You assume that Say's law applies to labor markets, but this idea has been overturned by empirical evidence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_unemployment

Involuntary unemployment cannot be represented with a basic supply and demand model at a competitive equilibrium

This is, of course, something of a Hobson's choice. They can't work their own schedule; they have to work to the schedule of the temporary employer. The choice they have in this is to simply not work at time X, rather than move their work to time X.

The Uber driver has the choice of taking this job, or not. The Uber driver cannot decide to do the job in three hours time.

The truth is that most people regardless of education and job don't realize how they utilize the 168 hours per week that we all get to split between sleep, work, eating and leisure. When I used to teach, I had students give me the excuse all the time that they didn't have enough time to complete the assignment. I would ask others in the class how long they spent on average and then ask the students making the excuse to give me a rough breakdown of how they spent their last 168 hours. After account for sleep, other classes, other work, meals and liesure, they would routinely be unable to account for about ~40 hours. Most hours are squandered.

You have to be very clear and ready to tell people that they have to give that up if they want to survive.

Because in the end that's what people want. A normal life.

Not everyone is passionate. Or driven, or interested in those things that can pay well.

Which means that those hours must be stolen from a whole constellation of distractions (which get better at keeping you engaged) and interactions with other people.

So people have to be made aware that they are going to be more unhappy not doing the work, than if they did do it.

Most people aren't going to think like that.

    Most people aren't going to think like that.

That people will mix up normalcy for being coddled.

So your kids have to take a STEM course, because that's the only option to earn enough money (ps earning money != contributing to society).

Or you have to learn to code, even though you don't have the ability or aptitude to do it.

do note that this is not at all about coddling, which is a luxury long lost. Making it about coddling is straw manning the argument. There's massive numbers of people who are unviable today, and can't be retrained in any practical amount of time.

Earning money != equal to contributing to society, but prices are society's most effective way to communicate which contributions it considers value.

Using coding and STEM as your sole examples is a strawman. Mike Rowe, for example, has demonstrated on many occasions that we have a skills gap for many jobs which society needs done that you don't need higher education to perform. There are many jobs that society wants done that aren't STEM or software engineering.

https://www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/young-americans-have...

Once many of these and other in-demand jobs are lost to automation, I'll buy the argument that massive numbers of people are unviable, but until then, there are many that still are very much viable that just aren't looking at prices to determine what contributions society finds valuable.

> prices are society's most effective way to communicate which contributions it considers value.

But its not perfect. Its vastly imperfect - for a variety of reasons involving joins/intersections of various systems.

For example - media will always move towards the grosteque or attention grabbing. The feedback loop between

AD -> Money-> Attention competition -> More Attention grabbing ads -> Repeat,

is near guaranteed to spontaneously create the echo chamber effect because of human neurology.

Other examples - the failure of environmental protection, which also involves the direct manipulation of the information by vested interest who spread and maintain FUD.

Not to mention the straight up impact of concentration of wealth, and the ability of a few to then signal value disalgined with the values for the majority.

I've also seen the various examples for other industries, and they too will fail because re-training itself is a torturous and difficult process- even when you have all the time and resources you need.

Tech is a good example because its one of the easier and better covered fields.

84+56 = 140. 168 hours in a week. That's 28 hours left for everything that's not kids, work, and sleep. Fixing stuff around the house, keeping your relationship with your partner healthy-ish, prepping for the next day so you aren't constantly running late to everything, cleaning, entertainment, learning, everything. In practice you'll have an average of 2hrs/day that's actually free, maybe, without neglecting sleep, and they'll be your worst, lowest-energy, lowest-motivation hours (work gets all of the best hours 5 days/week, kids do the other 2 days)

Chief among these is the arbitrary requirement of many employers that a college degree, and particularly a degree specialized in the career field, is mandatory before any employment can occur.

Not only does this incur significant financial cost, but it also incurs a completely untenable time cost for most people aged 25+, who need to provide both physically and emotionally for themselves and their families.

While one could argue such credentials are important for life-or-death fields like engineering and medicine, the fact of the matter is that most college grads come out with a degree in a soft skill that doesn't really hold a strong relevance to the job they go on to fill in the workforce.

In reality, a college education functions as little more than a class filter. If we want improve accessibility for the self-taught and make merit more meaningful, we should stop demanding arbitrary credentials for jobs that don't really need them.

Time, opportunity, survival needs, many things curtail the ability of people to study.

Which I pay for with money from...where, exactly?

That being said, most people participating in the gig economy need access to the Internet to even participate, so most likely already have both a company and internet access.

The people you should be worrying about are those that have no under-utilized assets to capitalize on such as a car or spare room.

200 bucks a lot for some people, and you have to pass a credit check to get xfinity access.

> That being said, most people participating in the gig economy need access to the Internet to even participate, so most likely already have both a company and internet access.

Cell service != general internet service.

Try bootstrapping yourself into a tech job with only cell phone access. That may work in the third world where the standards are lower, but not in the West.

You don't need to have constant internet access to be able to be productive on a computer. In fact, I'd argue that often not having internet can make you more productive, by not giving you any distractions.

Well, if you know your entire domain well, at least. At work I'm constantly fighting frameworks or APIs or reaching edge cases or error messages I've never seen before that I've had to look up, so I'd be a lot less productive without internet.

But I can program for quite some time in Python, vanilla C#, and to a lesser extent Swift without looking anything up. And back in the day I knew Actionscript so well I never needed the internet to be productive (I miss those days).

Really, you need to be able to not have to context switch a whole lot. All-in-one platforms let you stay in one context; most modern web platforms force you to context switch all the damn time.

I agree with you, if you know your domain, you can probably do it (with headaches). If you don't, it's very hard or functionally impossible.

And even without compilers and interpreters, all you REALLY need is a text editor. Or pen and paper, in order to write code. Granted, it helps to verify the code works with compilers and interpreters, but it's possible to step through it manually yourself to verify its accuracy.

It's not too uncommon for me to write a chunk of code in a simple text editor, and then test and fix it up later.

If you're just getting started, download some technical books (you can find free ones online) or some step-by-step tutorials and work through them.

I actually got started programming in classrooms on my calculator, or in Q-Basic/HTML in the days of modems where I had to get permission to dial in to the internet, and everything went so slow I had to know exactly what I was going to get ahead of time, so I often went a long time before finding help online (which was pretty hard to find back then anyway).

I still managed to learn quite a bit. It's definitely possible. Not necessarily a perfect environment for coding, and definitely not ideal for a company that pressures you to perform at peak efficiency, but definitely possible.

If people aren't prepared to give you money for it, it's obviously not creating as much value as you think it is. That's nobody's fault but your own.

How does a wild animal feed his family if he can't catch any food? He gets out-competed by more effective individuals.

Given finite resources and unbounded population growth, population must grow to the point where there are not enough resources to support everybody, and then some people have to start dying.

My personal experience haven't been so - most "gig" services I've got were from people for which is was complementary income and which never intended to hold a full-time blue-collar job. Some of them could have 15-20 years of past blue collar experience only if they joined the ranks of workers straight out of kindergarten.

But my perspective is necessarily narrow and accidental - so I wonder, are there any data on it?

> perform low-level jobs, many of which require little or no specialized skills.

These jobs need to be performed. So who should be performing them?

> many gig workers find themselves too old to work but with no retirement savings, for example.

You are assuming these people would always hold these jobs until they retire. Why? Most people that drive for Uber or do gigs on taskrabbit or fiverr do not see it as a lifetime career, as far as I know. Just as a teenager getting min wage in McDonalds does not plan to do the same until she's 65. So asking "how can you retire on McDonalds salary?" doesn't make a lot of sense.

JIC you missed it: http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/17/gig-work-online-sellin...

http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/17/gig-work-online-sellin... shows that 18-29 year olds are most likely to be a part of the gig economy, as a percentage of an age range, and VERY few over 50 year olds participate (4%), so I'm not sure the data supports that specific view at all.

On the data, IMHO (and it is just an opinion) where there is data, it is going to be incomplete because as a new phenomenon, there is nothing to compare it to historically, and the current situation will not be indicative of future performance. As an example, the demographics of internet usage have changed dramatically from 1995 to today, as now the vast majority of people on the web are not white, but instead live in Asia (the top 10 here http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/ includes only the US, UK and Germany, which are dwarfed by China and India).

BTW: that NY Times article is a great example of using data really selectively, if not downright misleadingly. Examples:

* "In New York City, an Uber drivers group affiliated with the machinists union said that more than one-fifth of its members earn less than $30,000 before expenses." OK, but is that BECAUSE of Uber, or the reason they drive for Uber? i.e. without Uber would they have more or less income? How many hours do they drive for Uber? Are they full or part time? And really, how is employing poor people anything but a positive thing? The mind boggles!

* I absolutely LOVE how having a large number of minorities was presented as a negative. "Company employs 47% blacks and minorities" would seem to mean it is a really progressive company, however the NYTimes article takes this as evidence of how bad a company it is. I can only assume that is because them there my-norities are too stupid to see how they are being ripped off by these evil corporations, unlike the oh so clevery smart Whitey White-White-McWhite-Whites. I could have the tone wrong there, but man, it comes off to me as really patronising to these minorities.

Last point and I'm done, from the Pew Data I love how it is a shock that people earning < $30K are more likely to take part in the gig economy than those making $75K. It is almost like people rationally choose to engage only when the marginal return from their time is best spent on the gig economy vs some other task ...

NYT loves doing stuff like this. It's the same paper that reported 39% of colleges having less overseas applicants, 35% - more and the rest roughly the same number as "Amid ‘Trump Effect’ Fear, 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants".[1] Looks like they just can't help themselves.

[1] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/03/one...

Union jobs raised wages for everyone: even though only a third of private-sector jobs were unionized, the threat of unionization pushed most employers to pay well.

In the 1960s, one person could get a blue-collar job and keep a family going in a suburban house, with a car. This was all due to unions.

We have been subjected to thirty years of propaganda about how unions kill jobs, how regulation is bad for jobs, how you should have "freedom to invest your money" (ie a 401-k rather than a company pension). This propaganda is now taken as gospel, and we don't realize it's just a ploy by those with inherited wealth to get a bigger share of the wealth.

BTW, that's how we ended up with Trump. Yes, he's a narcissistic windbag, but people who voted for him had real grievances.

Further, housing for GIs in the 40s and 50s was subsidized, thus changing the entire housing equation, and, further, women had not entered the workforce in large numbers, and, further, we require many more safety features on cars.

These factors all are major portions of the story when comparing against your prototypical factory worker story, and mean that a simple narrative of Unions => Better Life doesn't work. Although unions do need to become much stronger in American life, they won't unspool us back to the prior era.

and, tacking a paragraph on in my edit: probably want to talk to some black people about how great those years were. It's entirely plausible that some of the White American prosperity was due to heavily underpaying the Black Americans and treating them very poorly.

Vast land was easy to steal when 9/10 natives died from disease. The others lacked equivalent technology and weaponry.

Slavery ensured the newly established federal government made good on its debts. A good credit score means a SHITTON for the success of any state.

Abundant (stolen) land with loads of natural resources settled at the time industrialization ramped up. Lucky.

Literal boatloads of immigrants from all over the world prop up the population, increase production, and suppress wages. Great for industrial growth (like china recently).

And that's all before the 20th century.

That said:

one factor is that computers started really becoming available to businesses, so you really had an automation boom.

one factor is the cold war ended, which changed... a lot of things, including capital flows. That capital shuffling may have helped prosperity.

one factor is the boomers hit their financially most productive years.

Even if this person happened to be female or non-white?

> it's just a ploy by those with inherited wealth to get a bigger share of the wealth.

By blocking access to good jobs to lowest tier - people without union connections, without union seniority, without ability to complete complicated licensing requirements, etc. - you are doing exactly this. You are making harder to gain footing on the job market for people that do not have a base to complete complicated licensing requirements, that can not deliver enough productivity to be hired at the above-market rates set by unions, who may not fit the job descriptions and requirements set by unions, etc. You benefit a narrow sliver of the population (1/3 at the highest times, much less now) at the expense of everybody else.

Simple economics is right. In _real_ economics, things are a lot more complex and unions don't "kill jobs".

Software salaries are higher in SF and lower in Jackson, Mississippi. Do you believe there are more programmers per capita in Mississippi?

So, if a unionized company in SF with higher salaries would be consistently hiring more people than essentially similar company with no unions and lower salaries, in the same environment - that might be a counter-example or at least a beginning of one (one still needs to consider the confounders - maybe CEO of the former one is a genius and of the second one is an idiot and had run the company into the ground, and that explains hiring differences).

Of course in SF and Jackson salaries are different - those are different markets. That has nothing to do with my argument.

> things are a lot more complex and unions don't "kill jobs".

Making a claim is not proving it. I've provided an argument why I think they do. If you want to argue against it, the least you could do is providing your own counter-argument. And no, "it's complicated" does not count as one. You have to point out which part of the complication, in your opinion at least, makes the conclusion wrong.

> Since workers for most gig economy companies are considered independent contractors, not employees, they do not qualify for basic protections like overtime pay and minimum wages. This helped Uber, which started in 2009, quickly grow to 700,000 active drivers in the United States, nearly three times the number of taxi drivers and chauffeurs in the country in 2014.

In other words, Uber could overtake taxi & chauffeur industry and provide jobs to 700K people because they weren't saddled with onerous regulations and union rules. That's not my words, that's NYT's words.

Progress is determined by your viewpoint.

This is not to say there hasn't been wonderful progress in social justice. But from an economic justice perspective the modern economy is a disaster.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-t...

the US economy is currently spiraling away from that stability, as evidenced by our worsening gini coefficient over the past several decades.

have to implies there's a wealth of "white-collar work or stable and well-paying blue-collar work" out there but people are forced or coerced to act against their best interests.

What's the alternative? Let's say the government decides to step in and make a structural change by changing the rules on W-2 employee vs 1099 contractor treatment. Will this lead to a resurrection of the American Middle Class?

They do already offer the ACA exchanges as well as subsidies for low-income wage earners under ACA. ACA also mandates a maximum annual out-of-pocket cost of $6,600 per individual (and $13,200 for entire family). While still a substantial amount, it's a far cry from millions of dollars of medical bills that people were saddled with pre-ACA.

The social problems of the low-income job lifer is not new.