The high price of mistrust

People run to below-costs services like cats to catnip. You can make anyone happy by selling them $10 bills for $1. The problem is, what happens when all the competitors are gone, and the reason for below-cost offering ends?

> More importantly, even if you grant the government the authority to take away people's freedom to do things the government considers too risky, purely out of paternalism, the fact is that the government had no reason whatsoever to believe that Uber cabs are less safe

Of course they had, and we grant such authorities all the time. There's a special type of insurance covering commercial transport of people, it's illegal to engage in commercial transport of people without such insurance (and for good reason, if accident happens, then both the driver and the passengers are screwed); the problem, in Uber's case, was too little enforcement, and Uber shielding itself behind "independent contractor" veil and pretending they didn't encourage it.

> the reason traditional taxi companies are unhappy about Uber breaking the laws precisely because the laws help protect their business and extract rent at the expense of the consumers

These laws didn't came out of the blue and weren't just instances of random regulatory capture. The laws creating barriers to entry and (in some places) granting taxi companies limited monopoly are the flip side of the legal requirements that come with the taxi service being treated as a part of public transport infrastructure. Things like the legal requirement for taking passengers in unprofitable locations, or having cars in the fleet adapted for the needs of people with limited mobility. Things Uber did not do, because it didn't have to (and couldn't, really, with their "just a platform" business setup). Instead, Uber offered subsidized rides for able-bodied people in city centres, and no rides at all for elderly or disabled or people living further away.

> Weren't you just a moment ago saying that the drivers were "underpaid"? If it ain't the drivers who are subsidized, then who is, exactly?

The rides were. The prices you paid for a ride were sometimes less than the driver would get from Uber, but Uber wasn't going to pay the drivers more than they needed to (at least not until some follow-up competition came).

> If it's all VC subsidies, they'll run out

That's why Uber is betting so hard on self-driving. They've been operating on a loss for many years now, and they know they can't sustain it.

> and in the meantime, the customers keep benefitting from subsidized rides.

The meantime always ends, eventually. Leaving behind a thoroughly destroyed market. C.f. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/

Did you mean different companies trusting each other, and thus being "hyper productive" if getting things done together? In a way that lasts also after the individuals (executives, managers, people at the companies) who initially created that high trust, have left?

It sounded more as if you had in mind to compare the "trust level" inside different companies, with each other? Maybe plotted against profitability?

In any case, sounds like interesting topics to me.

> Across countries

Did you mean how much people in different countries, trust others in the same country as themselves?

Or if nearby countries can "lift each other up" by people and politicians there, trusting the people & politicians in the other nearby countries

I honestly think that most of the relentless unpleasantness of capitalism doesn't come from capital itself, it comes from competition and conflict over scarce resources. It's this conflict between different pools of capital which makes capitalism relentless and exhausting, and the fact that such conflicts are often won by the side which starts with more for unrelated reasons which makes capitalism unfair and often of very questionable morality. I think it's relevant to the article to point out that I this model, all of these conflicts are essentially low trust environments since the actors have by definition opposing goals.

But "social capital" doesn't have to be about conflict. Let's say I am fortunate enough to have a friendly relationship with my next door neighbors. To give a cliched example, let's say I want to bake a cake and am running low on sugar. Being able to ask them allows me to finish my task without stopping everything to run to the store. Likewise, if they need to leave town for an emergency, they can call me to check on their place or walk their dog.

These examples don't involve any conflict, so it's not clear who's losing out on any of them*? The social capital of our friendship definitely made us more productive, but who wouldn't want that? This isn't about pleasing some kind of corporate manager and churning out more widgets, it's just about personal quality of life, so what's left for there to be a problem with the idea of social capital?

* I suppose if we're being extreme then we could say that the sugar providers and grocery store lost in the first exchange by my ability to avoid buying another bag. I'm not sure this is entirely true, though, since I'm very likely to buy more sugar on my next trip anyhow. They've lost out on the urgency perhaps, but as a side note I believe that urgency is the core of the other worst aspects and cruelty of commercial capitalism; urgency sometimes forces incredibly wasteful behavior in the name of "winning the race" against a competitor or many other kinds of artificial deadlines, etc. (Anyhow I digress...)

I've assume that Nixon taking the U.S. off the gold standard precipitated the growth in the finance industry, the government needs banks to grow money supply and debt, right?

"Greed is good" may have just been an add campaign designed to justify what was already happening, a frenzy of finance, consumerism, and debt that has not stopped yet.

People like to think they live in unique times, but they don’t.