Why the Sharing Economy Is About Desperation, Not Trust 331
An anonymous reader writes "Wired recently ran a cover story about the sharing economy — shorthand for the rise of peer-to-peer rental services like Lyft and Airbnb — which they call a cultural and economic breakthrough. They say it has ushered in a 'new era of Internet-enabled intimacy.' An article at New York Magazine has another theory: that it arose because of the weakness in the real economy. Quoting: 'A huge precondition for the sharing economy has been a depressed labor market, in which lots of people are trying to fill holes in their income by monetizing their stuff and their labor in creative ways. In many cases, people join the sharing economy because they've recently lost a full-time job and are piecing together income from several part-time gigs to replace it. In a few cases, it's because the pricing structure of the sharing economy made their old jobs less profitable. (Like full-time taxi drivers who have switched to Lyft or Uber.) In almost every case, what compels people to open up their homes and cars to complete strangers is money, not trust.'"
Sharing is common outside the west (Score:5, Informative)
In many countries in the world it's quite common for people to share stuff like taxi services and rooms and has been for decades. In many of these places the crime rate is far higher than in the United States. The huge contrast between the amount of distrust people seem to have for each other in America and the actual rate of crime (which is quite low and has been decreasing for decades) is pretty astounding.
Re:Oh please, Indeed. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Old people can't do physical labor (Score:3, Informative)
Farming has been automated. Construction is being automated. Machine work has been automated for a long time, except for specialty one-of stuff - when's the last time you had something custom made at the local machine shop? And even the one-of stuff is being largely automated by CNC and other rapid-prototyping technologies.
Plumbing, yeah, that's still mostly done by hand, as is electrical work. Maintenance of existing products (houses in this case) is still mostly beyond automation capabilities, but how many hours worth of combined plumbers, electricians, home renovators, auto mechanics, etc. do you suppose you employ in an average year?