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?
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.
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.
[1]: Yes that is illegal, but I would _love_ for it not to be. Cooking for one is a waste of time.
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.
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.
But we're helping the poor to make their own decisions about how to generate wealth.
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.
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.
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.
In my opinion, all they really want and need is _land_.
The real people squeezing everyone else are the landowners, and the landlords. With enough land, anyone can support themselves: chickens, vegetables, hunting and fishing, etc.
Mortgages in exchange for housing ("death pledges") exploit the poor, indenturing them to overemployment at insufficient wages. The novelty and promise of technology are part of the system that works like a carrot on a string enticing us toward so-called "higher standards," which we only think we need. The rest of the system is security/fear. These are the forces governments and corporations use to keep themselves secure. Anything we're going to do to escape it will be much more like what Jesus of Nazareth, Gandhi, Martin Luther Kind or Malcolm X did than what Paul Graham or Scott Adams did.
Technology and SV makes an easy whipping boy because they're in the crosshairs of the media (all the "billion dollar" buyouts), but we're just another pawn in the game the powerful landowners, governments and corporations are playing. In fact, we're playing along to their rules.
Capital in general is what you mean I think. But even then interest rates are not particularly high, and if you give people money/capital, most people will not invest it to live off the interest.
Our entire society is now based upon the idea that you need to find an employer to pay you to do something. If no one wants/needs to pay you to do things, you are screwed.
No kidding aside, in the USA anybody can own land who wants to. That seems too convenient a variable to tag all the social ills on.
So, read my comment carefully, you're not ruling by security/fear, you're squeezing the poor by playing along with market rules, you big squeezing squeezer.
If you sell land below market value to someone who has no other place to live, they will live on it and use the money to buy books, healthcare, tools, nutritious food and cooking utensils.
Thus stands my statement that landowners squeeze the poor.
So if by 'land' we mean 'any place to live' then why not make that a civil right, instead of putting the burden on landowners? E.g. people need tools, books, education too and the folks that 'own' those aren't being criticized as squeezers.
I'm not sure I agree with your statement that landowners squeeze the poor more than anyone else does.
This sort of thing is the role of governments, not businesses. The core problem you have in the US is that your government is one of those incumbent inefficient dinosaurs that doesn't really do much of anything useful any more but is so big that it's hard to topple.
Any solutions to the problems discussed in this article is inevitably going to look like politics, not business. This is a problem because in the US, it's "cool" to say "pfft, politics, it's awful why bother?" which means that competent people are driven into business instead.
>In the past 5 years, the number of vets who’ve died before their claim has even been processed has tripled.
...can be restated:
>In the past 5 years, the number of vets to whom the US government has avoided paying disability (due to their death) has tripled.
It's a comprehensive course on putting your finances in order. $100 per person or family taking the course. Scholarships often offered to callers to his show and others who demonstrate motivation but lack of means to pay.
Many Americans are poor not due to having no income, but getting themselves into too much debt through scams like credit cards and student loans.
Of course this is also useful to people with decent incomes, which means the business is not exclusively reliant on the low income market.
Maybe that's one trick for serving the "unexotic underclass", a problem experienced by enough non-poor people to pay the bills, but also offered to poor people at a lower price or free.
Maybe there are some high income single mothers to subsidize a business solving a problem experienced by all single mothers? Etc.
See, the poor are already well-served by entrepreneurs! ;) Would make for a tough fight against that given that everyone wants to live ahead of themselves, have the latest things, impress their friends, eat more, take it easier, etc.
Obviously this is just a made up example, but I am saying that there is money to be made on helping poor people,it's just not their money, because they don't have any :P
If solving poverty and unemployment was really popular, we'd have done it already. It's not, in the population. It is popular with a vocal minority of wealthy middle-class people who occasionally vote.
If you go to voters with a plan for this stuff and start knocking on random doors, I can tell you what you'll find because we find it all the time: "Where are they going to live? Not near me I hope."
I wish I could fix this, but we have to run the campaigns that people will vote for. That's democracy, and in our democracy, people are far more interested in voting against things they don't like than in voting for ideas to make society better.
These are all distasteful, but what makes them unsuitable for the task of Helping Humanity is that these transactions are really bad transactions to be making, for reasons the financials don't show. A 3rd-year developer is worth more than a 1st-year developer---is a 3rd-year sweatshop laborer worth meaningfully more than a 1st-year sweatshop laborer?
accepted
> education,
There is so much educational stuff available on the internet and public libraries that I can't see a reason why there is a lot money to spend on.
> housing
Accepted
> and entertainment.
May I tell you something: As a graduate student I have so much work to do that I hardly have any time for entertainment. Thus rather little money is spent on it. Could this be a hint for curbing the expenses for this kind of people?
No, it is a hint that you are making the wrong choices in life.
Children also have a pretty constant demand for entertainment.
A little money is still money.
> As a graduate student
You've presumably spent money on college, textbooks, etc.
First: You have to distinguish between learning stuff (which can be done mostly freely or at least in a rather cheap way) and getting social recognition for it (the latter is why you go to college and pay masses of money for tuition).
Thus: You don't have to pay a lot for education but for getting social recognition for it.
Otherwise: I admit that in Germany, university is nearly tuition-free. I only bought few textbooks, since many of them were either available in the library or the lecture notes were pretty good. If no "official" lecture notes were available, students often agreed that everybody TeXes notes for one week to make an unofficial student-made lecture notes.
Thus: Yes, some money was spent, but there are options to keep the spending down.
I know how to get 500 white liberal suburbanite young males to pay me $10 per month. They have the money and they love to spend it on tech and gadgetry that makes their lives even more comfortable. But single house mothers? Poor Romanians? How would I even get them to pay me half a cent.
In my mind, all these people really want and need is money, they are a receivers market, not a spenders market. I imagine them needing to spend money on food, education, housing and entertainment. All incredibly tough nuts to crack. If you even succeed at coming up with something those people want to spend money on, you're directly competing with the poor people dominators like Coca Cola.
The IT startup scene we're in is just a kids playground, do we really believe someone like Mark Zuckerberg could survive in the business of making money off poor people (directly)?