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Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

nytimes.com

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Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#231

Post by theamk »

dannypgh wrote: post #201
theamk wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always considered "free" as lack of "coersion", where "coersion" has an agent/subject that can be removed to make situation better. Under that definition, the answers are: > If I put a gun to your head and say "Your wallet or your life," are you free? No -- the subject is you and your gun, if you remove them the situation improves. > If I lay a trap, and you fall into it, and I offer to release you if you give me y…

> or to allow living without work. I join in the argument that labor is coerced into participating in the free market in the US. The agent/subject that you're missing is the government and their enforcement of laws pertaining to property. I would argue that labor is only as free as the social net for unemployed is strong. The coercion comes from the fact that your landlord can have the sheriff evict you (or your bank…

I can see your point about property laws restricticting freedom.

But If you say that property laws are coercion, you cannot then say that social net for unemployment helps one be free. The coercion agents are still out there, waiting for you.

After all, you were not not free in USSR even if you had a job - freedom is about possibilities.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#232

Post by cirgue »

menacingly wrote: post #36
thaumasiotes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Continuing the beer theme of my sidethread comment, I read a piece years ago making the point that the then-current explosion of microbreweries looked like a productivity disaster -- microbreweries produce a gallon of beer for a much higher cost than Anheuser-Busch does, so when an economist working with national-level data divides "beer produced in 2011" by "dollars spent producing beer in 2011", it looks like beer…

This is great, it's one of those ideas I'll come back to later and think about again, applying to different stuff. Economics is such a tragedy, because on the one hand it's so elegant and satisfying, but on the other it seems sufficiently incomplete to be considered broken. Maybe it's the newtonian version of something.

> Economics is such a tragedy, because on the one hand it's so elegant and satisfying, but on the other it seems sufficiently incomplete to be considered broken.

The study of economics is as much a framework for asking questions as it is for answering them. National-level economic systems are inherently to complicated to do meaningful experiments on, so we don't get to use the tools we normally do to find our way. Economics isn't broken, but the view of economics as a sister to physics is.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#233

Post by _cs2017_ »

trophycase wrote: post #79
briandear wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are individuals incapable of making decisions on their own? Why shouldn’t the individual have the choice to drive or not drive as well as making decisions about their economic situation? Nobody is forced to drive. Nobody is forced to work for less than they value their labor. Unionizing Uber means dramatically high prices, which means less demand. There isn’t a magic pot of money just waiting to be distributed. If co…

Unions solve the coordination problem and nullify the leverage a corporation has over workers. This leverage imbalance creates imperfect markets, it doesn't facilitate it. People need to eat, they need to take time to find a new job, they need to build skills. High prices of medicine is a great example: They can get away with charging so much simply because there is an imbalance between how much you need them versus…

Could you elaborate? Why does employer have leverage? Other employers compete for labor and are willing to increase wages if that's what it takes to get the staff they need. There's already a law that prohibits multiple employers from colluding to reduce that competition.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#234

Post by conanbatt »

flomble wrote: post #202
conanbatt wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, 0 economic value. Nobody gets anything of value from using those services, its just wasted time.

The linked article is about how despite those services obviously having value to their users, they aren't accounted for in economic statistics, e.g. in measuring productivity, because they are "free" (i.e. paid for by subjecting oneself to advertising/tracking).

I am suspect of this being true because GDP is measured in several ways, and you can measure the contribution of tech companies through their salaries and profits or through their expenditures and sales to ads. (i.e. their contribution to GDPcan be measured in their revenue)

But this is also a red-herring, its at most an accounting issue, not a real economy issue.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#235

Post by GabrielBen »

neilwilson wrote: post #197
GabrielBen wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's ironic. The free market requires a form of socialism to actually work. Its not ironic, the requirement is called rule of law, and its a foundational stone from the philosophers that brought that royalty and religion from the State. The recognition of private property has been recognized as a necessity from the get go in classical philosophy and economics.

It needs more than that if you have a labour market based around money and full time jobs. Odd as it may sound, full time jobs are essentially what cause involuntary unemployment because you are not market testing your position on a daily basis. But of course you need full time jobs to have any sort of efficiency in a business using labour - and to have any stability in the customer product market where it uses debt…

An interesting expose, though I dont know how this actually reinforces the idea that free markets need socialized services to survive (other than the aforementioned private property, life and liberty). I want to answer any way because its interesting tho!

> Odd as it may sound, full time jobs are essentially what cause involuntary unemployment because you are not market testing your position on a daily basis.

Sure, it might decrease labor flexibility which can increase unemployment, but how big an effect can that actually be? And what is the proposed solution to fix that if its an actual problem?

> The gig economy is an attempt to deskill...

The gig economy is not de-skilling workers, its consuming the labor of unskilled workers because the price-ratio works. Those very same companies pay 6 figure salaries to a lot of people, that provide utility to the company as well. Neither by design, or in theory, do companies increase their profits by reducing the skill of their labor, they do it by increasing their productivity.

I see a tenuous relationship with the reserve army concept of Marx trying to be used here, but I'm not buying it.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#236

Post by CamelCaseName »

jimmywanger wrote: post #179
Magmatic wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving everyone a job is not, and should never be, the goal of a society. In the early twentieth century American workers were killed fighting for the right to support themselves working 40 hours a week but for much the population that option has evaporated. I know people in the bay area working 70 hours a week at dead end jobs barely making ends meet; a fact I consider unacceptable given the wealth they are surround…

> I know people in the bay area working 70 hours a week at dead end jobs barely making ends meet; a fact I consider unacceptable given the wealth they are surrounded by. By what means is this unacceptable? "I find myself working 40 hours a week to afford cable and a new iphone. I consider that unacceptable given the wealth I am surrounded by." Those two statements are qualitively equivalent. Because you move to a nic…

Working 70 hours is much more than 40. In the first case you're working to survive and don't have any time outside of work to improve your situation.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#237

Post by menacingly »

cirgue wrote: post #232
menacingly wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great, it's one of those ideas I'll come back to later and think about again, applying to different stuff. Economics is such a tragedy, because on the one hand it's so elegant and satisfying, but on the other it seems sufficiently incomplete to be considered broken. Maybe it's the newtonian version of something.

> Economics is such a tragedy, because on the one hand it's so elegant and satisfying, but on the other it seems sufficiently incomplete to be considered broken. The study of economics is as much a framework for asking questions as it is for answering them. National-level economic systems are inherently to complicated to do meaningful experiments on, so we don't get to use the tools we normally do to find our way. Ec…

I was being generous hoping it's on a similar path to physics, because even in earlier stages physics produced something other than fascinating thought experiments and directly conflicting advice.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#238

Post by menacingly »

xapata wrote: post #49
menacingly wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great, it's one of those ideas I'll come back to later and think about again, applying to different stuff. Economics is such a tragedy, because on the one hand it's so elegant and satisfying, but on the other it seems sufficiently incomplete to be considered broken. Maybe it's the newtonian version of something.

You mean current methods will be replaced by more nuanced and accurate methods. Not that economics will be replaced. That'd be like physics being replaced instead of the methods changing. Newtonian methods had known flaws before relativity replaced them and quantum mechanics expanded that. Current economic methods also have known flaws. We're just waiting for Einstein.

Correct, of course, and thanks for giving me the wording I'll use instead of mine next time :)

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#239

Post by reaperducer »

ComradeTaco wrote: post #153
mmirate wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those systems have a nasty habit of running out of other people's money.

Seem to work pretty okay in the rest of the developed world.

You'll have to be more specific about "okay" and "developed world."

A lot of Americans point to Canada as an example, but it's a pretty bad example. If healthcare was so great in Canada, then there wouldn't be private hospitals in the United States that cater only to Canadians who go to America for the healthcare they can't get in Canada, or can't get in a timely fashion.

In American towns where a lot of Canadians spend the winter, the radio stations are full of ads for these hospitals. (Palm Springs, for example.)

If you mean the UK, the news over there is constantly full of horror stories about its NHS.

Perhaps you can be more specific?

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#240

Post by jsoc815 »

mgkimsal wrote: post #227
losteric wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The job market is so bad people are willing to scrounge for scrapes - their reserves have been depleted and credit maxed out. Unemployment is low because people can no longer say no. One of many reasons people draw parallels between today and the Gilded Era or Roaring twenties.

> Unemployment is low because people can no longer say no. Succinctly put. I'd say this was also a reason why, 9 years ago during the big crash, we saw "productivity" measures go up, and continue to rise even after the 'recovery', even with companies working with fewer people. They managed to get the same results out of fewer people (or... close enough results), and those people really couldn't say 'no' because... th…

This is correct. And to add more clarity about the oft-cited labor shortage, I was at an event where the President of the Minneapolis Fed talked about how when he asked employers when the best of times was w/respect to hiring, their response was 2008 - 2010. He went on to say that the issue isn't really about a labor shortage but an unwillingness to raise wages because the employers were spoiled by applicants' desperation during the cited period.
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