Uber Challenges Study Suggesting Its Drivers Earn $3.37 Per Hour (reuters.com) 271
An MIT study using data from more than 1,100 Uber and Lyft drivers concluded they're earning a median pretax profit of just $3.37 per hour. But now Reuters reports:
Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi criticized the MIT study in a tweet on Friday as "Mathematically Incompetent Theories (at least as it pertains to ride-sharing)," and linked to a response by Uber chief economist Jonathan Hall that challenged the study's methodology. Hall's rebuttal to the study said the likely misinterpretation of a survey question and the study's "inconsistent logic" produced a wage result that was below similar studies elsewhere. He said the study used a "flawed methodology" compared with a survey that found drivers' average hour earnings were $15.68. "The earnings figures suggested in the paper are less than half the hourly earnings numbers reported in the very survey the paper derives its data from," wrote Hall.
The MIT study's lead author, Stephen Zoepf, told Reuters in an email on Saturday, "I can see how the question on revenue might have been interpreted differently by respondents" and called Hall's rebuttal thoughtful. "I'm re-running the analysis this weekend using Uber's more optimistic assumptions and should have new results and a public response acknowledging the discrepancy by Monday," he wrote.
Saturday Uber's CEO tweeted a thank-you to MIT, "for listening and revisiting this study and its findings. Right thing to do."
The MIT study's lead author, Stephen Zoepf, told Reuters in an email on Saturday, "I can see how the question on revenue might have been interpreted differently by respondents" and called Hall's rebuttal thoughtful. "I'm re-running the analysis this weekend using Uber's more optimistic assumptions and should have new results and a public response acknowledging the discrepancy by Monday," he wrote.
Saturday Uber's CEO tweeted a thank-you to MIT, "for listening and revisiting this study and its findings. Right thing to do."
This is the way it's supposed to work (Score:3)
Instead we mostly have people shouting at each other, refusing to listen to or even to interact with each other simply because they have different viewpoints. Because both sides "know" that their side is right and the other is wrong.
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A common issue with these wage calculations is - what happens when you are logged into the app but there are no fares? If you count that time as working, then your hourly rate will be quite low. But are you really working if the app is on and you are just waiting for a fare to show up?
This is part of the argument the employee rights people try to make, they want people to be paid minimum wage just for turning the app on. But that immediately falls apart because drivers often log into Uber and Lyft simultane
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A common issue with these wage calculations is - what happens when you are logged into the app but there are no fares? If you count that time as working, then your hourly rate will be quite low. But are you really working if the app is on and you are just waiting for a fare to show up?
Well how practical is it to be doing anything else, accept the fare, drop whatever you're doing, get in your car and make the pickup? And when that fare brings you to the other side of town you can either pick up a new fare or drive home on your own dime, not much choice then. I don't think a retail clerk has time off even if the store is empty for a few minutes, I don't think a taxi driver has time off if he's idling in his car waiting for the next fare. That said, if Uber were forced to introduce a "shift
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Well, if I were mowing the grass, pretty easy. Or watching TV, for that matter. Or even driving home from my day-job.
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Taxi drivers pay the taxi cab company to rent the taxi in 24hr blocks. What they do with it during the 24 hrs is their own business. Taxi drivers are independent contractors not employees. If a taxi driver is idling for a fare, that's because he chose to not because his employer made him do it.
Retail clerks have assigned tasks to do when no customers are present. How do you think the stores get restocked and who refolds everything when someone messes it all up? Who does inventory, who cleans the restroom, e
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Why would a taxi driver rent a taxi for 24h when he legally only can drive it 8h a day?
Most taxi drivers in my country are employees of the taxi company.
If a taxi driver is idling for a fare, that's because he chose to not because his employer made him do it. ... how fucked up is that?
No, he is idling because he has no customer, you moron. And as you said above: he has no employer anyway in your county
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they want people to be paid minimum wage just for turning the app on.
That is just silly sorry.
On the other hand: if the people are "full time working" and not just ride sharing and sitting with a magazine or espresso in a caffee, then yes: they should earn minimum wage during the time they have the app on.
What else would you suggest?
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The compensation paid by Uber/Lyft for doing a ride should include enough profit to cover some down-time and deadheading to the next pick up. So if you stay busy you will get enough padding to cover reasonable gap between your rides. But if you just turn the app on and don't pay attention to it, you won't be getting anything to cover down-time.
That is how existing taxis work. The drivers pays a flat fee for the 24hr rental. If he does one fare in 24hrs he won't make anything, if he does 30 fares he makes a
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For sure we can legally classify gig workers as employees, downside to doing that is that there will be a whole lot fewer gig jobs available. So that may end up being good for 10% of the current workers and really bad for the other 90%. My two cents is that a third legal classification is needed. Gig workers don't cleanly fit into either of the two existing classifications.
and with that Gig workers class cable guys and fed (Score:2)
and with that Gig workers class cable guys and fedex do not fit in it or 1099er
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The problem is that most people are not very good at negotiating. Especially if they're negotiating with professionals.
If you have a central, highly capitalized entity with professional negotiators dealing with Joe Sixpack, he's probably going to settle for what his costs are and maybe a tiny bit more (and he might have underestimated his costs).
This is why sports talent retains agents. In the era before agents, 1970s and earlier, the players were getting a much, much smaller slice of the pie, i.e. the inco
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You should actually be able to predict that already by the fact that driving a taxi is a very low wage job, and Uber claims to both be cheaper, and also to use more technology. But it still involves a driver. So. Obviously.
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Uber's entire business model is based on (a) outright breaking laws duly passed by democratically elected legislatures (b) violating regulations enacted by regulatory agencies duly constituted by legislators and put in place by electe
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An inane "argument".
Picking up people and dropping them off where they want to for monetary gain isn't the same as you giving someone a ride because you are a very kind person.
If you start cooking food at your home and serving that food to people for money you have a restaurant and have to follow a certain set of regulations. That doesn't mean you can't invite homeless people to eat at your house for free if you so desire.
The laws and regulation are there to protect the public.
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So you know better than the uber drivers, and you are a better human being than they are, so you should be able to tell them what they can and cannot do with their time?
If someone wants to drive for uber or lyft, that is their choice, and who are you to step in the middle and tell them its for their own good? What gives you the gall to do that?
What other relationships do you think you should get involved in? Perhaps people eating habits, you can go around to restaurants and tell people what they are allow
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Actually (at least in the USA) nobody can tell you that you cannot use your car to
Driving is a privilege, not a right. In the USA, nobody can tell you that you can't carry your friend or family member to the airport, that much would be true. And you certainly have a right to push their personal mobility device there.
But you don't have a right to drive, or to operate a motor vehicle. And your State is permitted to regulate it in whatever ways they want, including defining the exact conditions when you're required to have some sort of extra license.
Waving your hands in the air doesn't crea
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Instead we mostly have people shouting at each other, refusing to listen to or even to interact with each other simply because they have different viewpoints. Because both sides "know" that their side is right and the other is wrong.
The Godwin online meme used to reference a twentieth-century dictator. Now it's any reference to Uber.
At the risk of Hyperbole (Score:2)
Re: This is the way it's supposed to work (Score:2)
I think Uberâ(TM)s business plan is to use people as a bridge to when Uber owns self driving cars, until then the whole ride âoesharingâ economy is total BS. At the current price level fares are simply not high enough to pay people well enough to support themselves and maintain their car.
Just look at traditional cab companies before uber, they were no âoegolden ticketâ to mass riches, most were barely scraping by, that was the minimum fare to pay people and maintain the vehicles.
No
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To be honest, at this point I wouldn't give Uber the benefit of the doubt in any discussion.
How is that relevant? They are disputing statistical methods -- there's no benefit of the doubt like it's some subjective argument.
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I'm surprised Uber actually pays their drivers they're so corrupt.
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It is easy. One side takes the view, you are only an uber drive, when you have uber passengers in the car, whether or not they include travel from the time you picked up the request to reach the passenger. The other view is, you are an Uber driver the second you step into your vehicle looking for pickups to the time you step out of your vehicle, no longer trying to pick up passengers and of course the time you spend servicing your vehicle and the cost of that service, as well as cleaning your vehicle, your
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Yeah, I would be very wary about jumping straight from "MIT agreed to double-check their methods" to "MIT duffuses don't know the maths."
If the numbers change after review, it is likely to be very very small adjustments. We won't know until they finish checking. But it seems highly unlikely that $3.37 will turn into $15.68. Between the two, "highly regarded institution" or "unethical company that violated my local community's laws in an unethical way and lied to the public about it in statements to the medi
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For a few months I could see that working. Over the last 20 years there has been at least a 2 order of magnitude improvement in the reliability of automobiles. I suspect the vast majority of Uber drivers are not doing the math or even driving out of desperation but are simply burning up that reliability in search of cash with no understanding of what the tr
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This. Hourly wage is meaningless without knowing how much is going to vehicle maintenance, operation, and capital replacement. A Prius will cost about $0.30/km to operate lets say a conservative 30km/h driven (based on sample examples given by Uber drivers) which means $9 in operating costs and $1.49 in capital costs ($31,000 vehicle over 10 years). That would make their income $5.19/h for a 40h week (based on the $15.68 number), assuming a constant driving rate for 8 hours a day. Reduce that for drivin
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A Prius will cost about $0.30/km to operate
Not really. Most of the cost is not fuel, but depreciation of the vehicle. That is partly connected to distance driven, but also depends on the age of the vehicle. A vehicle is depreciating even if it is just sitting in the garage. The $/mile comes from averaging that aging cost over typical miles driven, but if you drive more the cost doesn't go up linearly. Also both aging and milage based depreciation are front-loaded, so the value drops quickly for the first few years, and the first 10k-20k miles.
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Also both aging and milage based depreciation are front-loaded, so the value drops quickly for the first few years, and the first 10k-20k miles. After than, the real depreciation per mile driven is much less.
True, but that's offset by relatively low maintenance costs and warranty coverage. The costly replacements, big repairs, downtime and hassle tends to be towards the end. There's obviously a premium paid for driving around in new cars but there's also good reasons why the drop is biggest early on. That said, not everybody drive their cars to their "potential" so you can get old cars with low mileage and put lots of miles on them quite cheaply. But if you're going to own the car from new to wreck then depreca
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"It is likely that Uber drivers aren't as dumb as you think they are."
Given what I've seen of them on the roads, both Uber and Lyft drivers should all have their licenses revoked and their vehicles impounded. Only one person in the car, that being the driver? STILL IN THE FUCKING HOV LANE. Can't use a turn signal to change lanes. Changing lanes by using the safety gap obviously left between a big fucking semi and a smaller vehicle in front, and then hitting the brakes. USING THE SHOULDER AS A DRIVING LANE.
N
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All that given - they seem remarkably better at driving, amiability, and showing up on time than regular liveried taxis.
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Mathematically Incompetent Theories
That sounds pretty insulting to me. Pointing out a error is not an insult. The word "incompetent" is an insult.
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Re: This is the way it's supposed to work (Score:2)
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There's little need to debate the meaning of words nowadays. We have long-established, centralized dictionaries which all can instantaneously access via the Internet:
1) Definition of "incompetent": [oxforddictionaries.com] Not having or showing the necessary skills to do something successfully.
2) Definition of "wrong": [oxforddictionaries.com] Not correct or true; incorrect.
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The phrase "incompetent theory" came from TFA, by the way.
And a theory that goes against what we already know does, in fact, lack the "skil
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You're not agreeing, you just haven't begun to consider attempting an understanding yet.
Some Blargs are Blue. Some Blorgs are also Blargs. All Blargs are Blue. T/F
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The $3.37/hr wasn't what caught my eye (Score:3)
I'll say this, I've taken 5 Ubers in my life and 3 of them were recently laid off folks trying to make rent with cars bought from when they were employed.
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Exactly this caught my attention too.
And if 30% of drivers are losing money, even if they are really bad on personal finances on average, wouldn't, say, half of them eventually realize it and the first time we'd be hearing about it would not be from a study?
Don't get me wrong, I've talked to a few drivers and I'd say most are not that happy with Uber, but the complaint is that they have to work more to make a proper income after their expenses - which means at least they are not on the red as in that case w
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And if 30% of drivers are losing money, even if they are really bad on personal finances on average, wouldn't, say, half of them eventually realize it and the first time we'd be hearing about it would not be from a study?
Yes? Only 4% of Uber drivers stick with it for over 1 year, and the number one reason for leaving is the pay. So yes, it seems like well over half eventually realize it and leave.
Don't get me wrong, I've talked to a few drivers and I'd say most are not that happy with Uber, but the complaint is that they have to work more to make a proper income after their expenses - which means at least they are not on the red as in that case working more would not help...
Well, the median driver is in the black, just not very far in the black. And if, as another study said the drivers that do earn reasonable wages tend to be the ones that have been on the platform long enough to know where and when to be driving, it could be the vast majority of Uber drivers either don't stick around long enough to
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I'll say this, I've taken 5 Ubers in my life and 3 of them were recently laid off folks trying to make rent with cars bought from when they were employed.
It's also a way for someone to get a way nicer car than they could otherwise afford, or get financing for. It's predatory, like most types of non-traditional lending (and plenty of traditional types, too) but it's conceivably a viable route for someone with a part-time job to get the kind of car they would get if they had a full-time job... by spending the time they're not spending working at their normal job helping Uber to put humans out of the business of driving cars. It's not a good career plan, but it
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A really nice car that they quickly depreciate with additional wear and tear.
If they get something good that can handle a lot of miles, then it's not a big problem, especially if they plan to keep it for a long time. These are not people who can afford to replace their car frequently. Most cars will do a lot of miles if you actually keep up on maintenance, especially these days.
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If you maintain your car properly in the first place that's bullshit. However if you're the sort of person who only does maintenance in an emergency or when a warning light pops on, that's probably true. Also, 4 cylinder cars are an inherently better choice for this sort of thing since the maintenance/repair costs for engine issues are significantly cheaper.
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So, you get a fare to drive 40 miles to the airport. Then what? Wait around for another - unpaid? Drive back with no fare - unpaid?
I haven't read the MIT study but unless they're including that waiting/empty driving time in the hourly calculations then they're overstating income.
Uber will quote pay per hour with a passenger in the car, but that's not the actual time worked.
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So, you get a fare to drive 40 miles to the airport. Then what? Wait around for another - unpaid? Drive back with no fare - unpaid?
I haven't read the MIT study but unless they're including that waiting/empty driving time in the hourly calculations then they're overstating income.
Uber will quote pay per hour with a passenger in the car, but that's not the actual time worked.
The Stanford gender pay gap study did this (and lots more) correctly. They were very careful, and used a very large amount of data. They found that average pay was about $18 per hour, less about $5 per hour in fuel and maintenance costs, for a net of about $13 per hour.
Total pay wasn't really their focus, though, they were looking to see if there was a gender gap -- and found there was. Women make about 7% less than men. They were able to identify the specific causes of this discrepancy, and how much each
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and retired CPA.
I can't understand why he wouldn't see the problem when looking at the offer, why would a CPA have to actually do it to themselves to find the problem?
I can't earn a living wage (Score:2)
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Only if the trucks delivering your poorly-xeroxed newsletter to the street corner are improperly licensed, insured and unregulated, and you try to define the drivers of those trucks as "independent contractors" in order to skip out on paying payroll taxes.
Other than that, your false equivalence is spot on.
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Is it OK if he does it for free out of the kindness of his heart?
Is it OK if I pay him $3 to reimburse him for the gas in his truck?
Is it OK if I pay him an extra dollar because I don't believe in accepting charity?
If it isn't, then why?
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I'm pretty sure your example would be more apt if you had 327,000 friends that you tried to pay $3 for hauling your papers.
Unless you believe that all Uber drivers are personal friends of the owners of Uber and are happy to help out by working for $3/hr.
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What if I'm particularly gregarious and have ten friends? A hundred? What if we entered into an LLP and our trucks and our time are the capital we invest in this operation? What if we plan to, but haven't yet filed the paperwork?
No one is forcing anyone to drive for Uber or Lyft or any of the dozen and a half local equivalents.
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Three. The number is three.
Fortunately, you don't have to go about determining what the number should be because I've just told you. You're welcome.
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Is it OK if he does it for free out of the kindness of his heart?
Yes. You are not paying, so the regulations about commercial delivery service do not apply.
Is it OK if I pay him $3 to reimburse him for the gas in his truck?
No. You've entered the world of commercial service and regulations apply. Doesn't matter if you say "this is for gas!". It's not like a regular delivery truck driver is not charging you for gas.
Is it OK if I pay him an extra dollar because I don't believe in accepting charity?
No, still commercial service.
If you want to be 100% legal with this, you'd need to disconnect your "gift" from the service your friend provided.
You're also not likely to be caught unless this is a regular thing.
Re:I can't make an analogy (Score:2)
Except you're working for yourself and not another company as an employee.
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by selling copies of my poorly-xeroxed newsletter on the street corner. Should I be banned from doing so on the grounds that I can't feed a wife and two kids by doing that?
This is exactly the point. Is someone forcing the Uber driver to drive?
If not, what's the beef? We somehow want to make it illegal to make a bad business decision?
I assume that driving for a ride share service, unlike buying a storefront and inventory, etc., provides immediate feedback. Am I making any money? Am I making enough money? Seems to be one of the lowest risk things one could try.
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You're free to be as innovative and entrepreneurial as you want, as long as you're not imposing negative externalities [investopedia.com] on others.
However, rideshare drivers are not entrepreneurs. They're signing up with a central entity that is using them to make money. The individual drivers are terrible negotiators and as a result, keep a small fraction of the income they generate. This is true in a lot of industries. For programmers working at government contractors, get a look at the rates you're billed out at, and the
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Same thing with Uber. No one is making you drive for them. If you've got the entrepreneurial bent, you can start your own car service. Yo
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No one forces anyone to do anything. If a programmer wants to "negotiate" he can bill himself out and cut out the middle man. Many do. Many don't. I know a bunch from column A and a bunch from column B. The ones who don't don't because they don't want the hassle of running a business on top of doing the work they're paid to do and the difference in dollars isn't worth it.
I'm not saying they need to become a business, just that they're being taken advantage of because they're poor negotiators. I'm just saying it's not an equitable outcome.
Same thing with Uber. No one is making you drive for them. If you've got the entrepreneurial bent, you can start your own car service. You'll have to do a lot more leg work though, and that means giving up your day job if you've got one. That's not worth it for a lot of people. So they take the lower pay for the lower amount of things to have to worry about.
They can do what they want. I'm just saying it's not particularly fair that they're being taken advantage of. And they probably don't realize it either. They're just bad negotiators.
What is it in the water that's making people automatically assume that when money changes hands in exchange for services rendered that it means someone's doing something to someone?
The economy is a competition for resources. Sometimes the exchange is win-win: vendor makes a profit, and customer pays less than the benefit he
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If you're just handing out a newsletter, go for it.
If you're punching people in the face and then handing them a newsletter, there's a problem. Because you're breaking the law while handing out your newsletters.
The problem with Uber is in most cities it is breaking the law. Calling it a "ride share" doesn't suddenly make it not a taxi, nor does it make you suddenly immune to all taxi regulations.
(The taxi regulations on the books need to be changed too, but you still have to obey them)
What will happen next. (Score:2)
Can you guess who is going to get that job?
The Takeaway: Pay is Crap (Score:2)
The pay is the smallest it can get away with before drivers leave in droves, in order to compete with cabs and other services. The only upside to Uber driving is the ability to set your own hours. Otherwise, there's no reason not to work at fast food.
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Thats exactly how markets are supposed to work; and it is a good thing.
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Oddly, no links or actual numbers in your assertions. Almost as if you were just passing on Uber hype. That is really strange.
A little Googling, even filtering for recently dated reports, repeatedly lists Uber drivers in the U.S. doubling from 2014 to 2015 [businessofapps.com] (which represents flattening percentage rate of growth year over year from its founding). No actual reports of U.S. drivers since that time (but lots of people trying to extrapolate from it, as if this was an established law of nature). So, maybe it has
Is it just me (Score:3)
Or is the Uber economist's more confusing than it looks at a glance?
At a high level his argument seems to be that MIT analyzed some data from this survey [therideshareguy.com] and came up with an inappropriately low number.
The error the MIT paper is being accused of making is the survey tries to get 3 numbers:
1) How many hours a week do you work on a ridesharing service?
2) How much money do you make in a week?
3) What percentage of your income comes from ridesharing?
So the $3.37 is basically (#2 / #3) / #1 (presumably minus expenses).
The Uber economist claims that respondents actually interpreted the first question as:
1) How many hours a week do you work total?
So if you worked 1 hour ridesharing and made $20, then you worked 40 hours at a regular job then the $20 you made ridesharing would be divided by 41 instead of 1 to give you earnings of ~$0.50/hour.
The problem is the survey questions look a bit odd and the Uber economist claims an even odder interpretation:
Q11: “How many hours per week do you work on average? Combine all of the on-demand services that you work for.”
Q14: “How much money do you make in the average month? Combine the income from all your on-demand activities.”
So the Uber economist claims that the MIT authors interpreted #11 to mean hours only from on-demand services and #14 to be money from all sources. Which is a bizarre interpretation of questions with almost identical questions wording, yet instead of pointing out how weird the interpretation is the Uber economist actually seems to imply that their interpretation is correct and it was the respondents who misunderstood. Which makes me wonder what the actual sequence and context of the questions looked like.
Unfortunately he doesn't link to the study and the survey questions seem to only be available if "If you’re a media member and would like a full question list and anonymized data/calculations used in this report, please make a request here.
The MIT authors seem to be taking the criticism seriously so maybe I just suck at reading, but given the nature of the claimed error it seems like he should be able to make a much clearer argument.
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The MIT authors seem to be taking the criticism seriously so maybe I just suck at reading
Nah, they just may have academic integrity and want to look into it in detail in case they did somehow miss something.
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The MIT authors seem to be taking the criticism seriously so maybe I just suck at reading
Nah, they just may have academic integrity and want to look into it in detail in case they did somehow miss something.
Or somebody at Uber reminded the author that on a Friday night last September, they took a ride from a bar to a residential property that was not their home. And the next morning at 6:35AM they took another ride from that property back to their home. Perhaps they further suggested that the author must love his wife and kids, and it would be a shame if the author's ride information was made public.
Somewhere in the middle (Score:4, Informative)
I drive for Lyft sometimes, but the pay is similar. I earn anywhere between $8 and $20 an hour. Mostly it averages in the $10-12 range. (In the Portland, Oregon area.) I have only been doing it for a few months. I have talked to some guys who were doing it when ride sharing first came to the region, and they said that they were making around $800 a night on the weekends. I pull around $200 for ~6-8 hours on Saturday. Any other night I am lucky to get between $75-100.
I do not understand how people can try to make a living doing it.
I do it for a few reasons. I like to drive and talk to people. It gets me out into the real world and off of the computer. I also appreciate that I can write off car maintenance, tires and things like that. I would also be able to write off my cell phone, but my main job already pays for that.
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Be sure to add to your write-offs "Commercial Car Insurance".
Something that can't go on forever, won't (Score:2)
I am pretty sure the ~$3 figure is wrong, from one simple fact - Uber and Lyft are still in business.
Because the truth is no-one could even afford gas for cars at that kind of wage. No drive would work for more than a few days for that kind of wage. And all of the Uber/Lyft drivers I have had have all been doing it for a while.
The fact is that serious drivers work for both companies, and know how to take advantage of surge pricing and location to make sure they earn a decent amount of money. The fact is t
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No drive would work for more than a few days for that kind of wage. And all of the Uber/Lyft drivers I have had have all been doing it for a while.
Irrationality can last a lot longer that an econ textbook says it will. I have relatives who have been hawking the same multi-level-marketing garbage for 4+ years and couldn't, at least honestly, show a penny of profit from it. And they'll defend their particular MLM religiously. Hell, I've known people who sent money to African e-mail scammers for multiple years. Didn't make them rational actors.
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I am pretty sure the ~$3 figure is wrong, from one simple fact - Uber and Lyft are still in business.
Multi-level marketing still exists, despite the vast majority of the workers losing tons of money.
Still makes no sense (Score:2)
The cited number is the median profit per hour, so the study already factored in gas and maintenance expenses.
Sorry, even factoring that in people would not work long for a mere $3/hour, because they could earn MUCH more doing other things. Sorry, but the numbers make no sense unless drivers are making significantly more.
As a rockstar programmer (Score:2)
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designed to make maximum use of crazy people (Score:2)
Re:Amazon's Self-Reinforcing Decline in Hires (Score:5, Insightful)
by Chris Johnson (580)
Sure, a bit. Uber's the same thing. It's designed to make maximum use of crazy people and force the others to live up to that standard or be fired.
I'll define 'crazy Uber people' not as 'danger to customers', but 'people who are bringing more value in terms of vehicle, skill and desire to please, than they are getting back in pay and benefits'. So the crazy Uber person is the one who keeps buyi
Never believe (Score:2)
the numbers when the Fox counts the chickens....
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Which would translate into the taxpayer basically supporting Uber's business model by reducing drivers' overall taxes owing.
That's not even counting the underlying problem that at least some jurisdictions don't even buy the claim that Uber drivers are private contractors, meaning Uber is stiffing those jurisdictions in payroll taxes.
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Being able to deduct income used as part of employment isn't unique to Uber. The same thing would be true for an independent taxi driver.
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Of course businesses can. But there are two questions to ask:
1. Is an Uber driver really a private contractor? That's an open question in a number of jurisdictions.
2. If the pay is as low as is stated, then in effect allowing Uber drivers to deduct vehicle maintenance amounts to an effective subsidy to Uber (much as Walmart keeping a lot of employees on low hour part time schedules while those employees continue to access some degree of the social safety net amounts to a subsidy for Walmart).
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1. Is an Uber driver really a private contractor? That's an open question in a number of jurisdictions.
In general, you are a private/independent contractor if:
1. You are under no obligation to work a specific time or place
2. Your employer doesn't tell you how to do your job
The first requirement is usually the primary delineation. If you can show up whenever you want and work as much as you want, you are clearly not a traditional employee.
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Depends on the way you interpret the data, the $3.37 figure comes in from the worst case scenario of figuring in mileage and maintenance costs, sales taxes and "no-work hours" etc as a direct cost to the Uber driver. Eg. if one Uber driver does 2 rides in a day before and after their 'day job', the $3.37 number would have that as "10 hours worked, 2 rides".
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They study didn't say worst case (Score:2)
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The scientific term you're looking for is not 'coincidence' but 'bullshit'. Every Uber ride carrying a passenger is a car drive not taken by that passenger. Because rideshare drivers do not have to loiter or deadhead like cabdrivers, there is no net contribution to traffic.
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... Every Uber ride carrying a passenger is a car drive not taken by that passenger. Because rideshare drivers do not have to loiter or deadhead like cabdrivers, there is no net contribution to traffic.
That would be true only if you assume the passenger would drive if did not have the Uber ride. If someone instead of using an Uber car takes the metro, a bus, a train or uses a bicycle or walks then it is the case where Uber increases traffic.
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The Uber car does not magically come into existence when a transit rider uses it. It already exists.
The edge case: A transit rider takes an Uber instead of taking a train he normally walks to. Because an Uber costs more on the average than a transit ride, people will do this only if they have a toothache or an urgent appointment. Net change in traffic, zero cars, because he is taking an Uber instead of his own ride.
The common case: A transit rider normally drives to the train station, but takes an Uber inst
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. Because rideshare drivers do not have to loiter or deadhead like cabdrivers, there is no net contribution to traffic.
So if I use Uber to get to the train station, I teleport there and the road isn't used by a car taking me?
The car that doesn't exist doesn't also then have to use a road to get back to my village as that's where the driver lives and you've said he can't loiter by the station?
You're a fucking genius and no mistake. How could I have failed to spot the total absence of traffic in this. To think I might have done something stupid like catch the fucking bus instead.
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When to Uber to the station, your own car is still parked at home, rather than being in traffic. Two people in one car, instead of two people in two cars. But best of all, an increasing number of big-city drivers will decide they no longer need a car at all. In fact, this encourages more people to ride transit if a train would save money and/or time on your regular route. In fact, I predict that rideshare apps will make arrangements with transit operators to include a transit option in ride route displays s
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When to Uber to the station, your own car is still parked at home, rather than being in traffic.
So fucking what? I'm still in a car that's in traffic, and wouldn't otherwise be.
Two people in one car, instead of two people in two cars.
No. Two people in one car, instead of one person in one car and one person doing a job that pays well instead.
In fact, this encourages more people to ride transit if a train would save money and/or time on your regular route.
Wait? Access to Uber encourages people to use the train? Is it really that shit?
In fact, I predict
Predict what you like, based on your demonstrated logic and analysis thus far I'm going to disregard you anyway. In fact, I didn't even bother reading the end of your post. You make that little sense.
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Slashdot told me not to yell but I man come on really you're supposed to be smart people. Don't give away a chance at a reasonably healthy society. The enemy is not the people who you think it is, and Uber is no white knight.
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