As quick and fluidly reasoned as the decision to summon a rideshare from your iPhone, Manhattan Institute fellow Jared Meyer’s monograph-as-minibook Uber-Positive targets the Uber enthusiast. A red and electric blue pop-art style pamphlet, it clocks in at 37 generously spaced pages of glossy cardstock. While it’s easy to imagine the slender volume poking out of an evangelizing driver’s seat pocket or scattered around Uber HQ in San Francisco, it’s ideal for today’s short-attention-span reader.
Uber is convenient, everyone I know uses it, and naturally we want our preference for the so-called sharing economy propped up by someone else’s expertise. Ultra-conveniences, after all, can leave nagging doubts. Nothing should be that easy—as Indiana Jones thought when it looked like he’d make it out of the cave with the golden idol, no problem. Indeed, if you’ve ever felt a tinge of unease about indulging an ultra-convenience like Uber, you might feel a similar nagging inclination to distrust Meyer’s arguments.
He invites us into the Uber debate through a techno-libertarian view of America’s market-driven destiny, avoids some inconvenient negatives of uber-positivity and assumes a universal preference for ever-greater ease. He disdains dishonest government regulators and other status-quo-stakeholders who resist the disruptive (in a good way, of course) “sharing economy.” Trouble is the “sharing economy” is not so righteous either. For one thing, when you exchange a fee for a service, nothing is actually being shared, as great men of letters, and women of numbers, have pointed out over the years. Yet the touchy-feely Silicon Valley misnomer persists, a PR gift to today’s titans of tech.
“Disruptive,” another tech buzz word that keeps buzzing, usually describes a solution to a problem we didn’t know we had. In what’s left of the real world, disruptive innovation is also destructive. Individual workers in the sharing economy, Uber drivers or Airbnb renters, independent contractors all, tend to take on more liability than they realize or can ever handle. Lawrence Summers showed in a 2015 study of the sharing economy that liabilities which would have been shared with employers shift to the independent contractor, and at least until libertarians rule, these shift from them to the state.
Another destructive trend afflicts the world’s cities. Meyer explains what he sees as “the future of work.” Millennials supposedly live as digital nomads unmoored by that key requirement of an old-fashioned job: actually showing up someplace. He cites a survey of six hundred Uber drivers that revealed their overwhelming preference (73 percent) for the flexible schedule of an independent contractor over a nine-to-five job with benefits, and concludes that the majority chose to be Uber drivers precisely for the flexibility. They’re certainly not doing it for the big bucks: As a recent BuzzFeed report detailed, Uber drivers bring home $10.75 an hour in Houston, and $8.77 an hour in Detroit.
Our contemporary preference—the new American Dream, according to Meyer—is to flit among entrepreneurial pursuits with side-engagements in the sharing economy to make ends meet until one of our startups takes off. We of the inevitable future can’t have governments trying to regulate the services we “share.” It’s better, for the future, that everywhere we go is as convenient, as much like everywhere else, as possible.
In this formula, civic duty (an obsolescence, presumably “ripe for disruption,” in which techno-libertarians don’t indulge) runs counter to consumer convenience. Now that Uber has won the freedom to operate in most states and set it sights on world domination, major cities are teaming up to enforce common regulations. Uber is not the underdog in this fight: Standing infrastructure and geographically limited industries were the underdogs, and Uber won. As the economy rearranges itself, while hurdling toward an uncertain future with Jonesian overconfidence, tech leaves civic duty behind. Millennials, we are told, prefer to live in cities because of their increasingly uniform convenience, but in an Uber-ized universe, any given city will do.
Meyer is right that anti-Uber labor unions and city governments crying congestion are motivated by self-interest to preserve the status quo. But can you really fault a city’s self-interest that’s shared, at least sentimentally, by its native citizens? As always in the age of innovation, the question remains: Is it so foolish to feel loyal to the way things are, especially the few things that still are the way they’ve always been? Big yellow taxis. The dictionary definition of “sharing.” Uber-Positive makes its point but leaves the uneasy Uberite only more convinced that the sharing economy is nothing to feel all that positive about. Rather than knit us together, it amplifies our anonymity.
