My key takeaways:
1. Uber is actually a higher cost/less efficient producer of urban car services than the taxi companies it has driven out of business
2. Individual Uber drivers with limited capital cannot acquire, finance, maintain and insure vehicles more economically than Yellow Cab
3. Expenses other than drivers, vehicles, and fuel account for 15 percent of traditional taxi costs but Uber charges drivers 25-30 percent without coming close to covering their actual costs
4. Uber’s surge pricing does not improve efficiency, it simply prices those night shift workers out of the market
5. And as Uber has demonstrated, unlimited taxi market entry can lead to ruinous overcapacity and can allow part-timers to cherry-pick the peak revenue that full-time drivers depend on to cover their costs
6. Uber’s investors knew that it needed raw political power to accelerate growth, and to maintain its hoped-for dominance
7. Uber’s major strategic breakthrough was to treat business development as an entirely political process, using techniques that had proven successful in partisan political settings
8. All of Uber’s early popularity and rapid revenue and valuation growth are explained by the billions in predatory investor subsidies needed to drive those more efficient (but poorly capitalized) incumbents into bankruptcy
9. That [early popularity] allowed [Uber] to pursue more stratospheric valuations by exploiting anticompetitive market power and rent-extraction and buying out any potential competitive threats