The new sharing economy in the USA

from David Ruccio

We’re hearing a lot about the virtues of the new sharing economy these days. But Kevin Roose [ht: sm] has a different view:

When wages fall and full-time jobs are hard to get, workers seek out flexible part-time gigs to sustain themselves while they look for something better.

As Sarah Kessler discovered in her Fast Company investigation, it’s hard to make it in the sharing economy. Many of the people renting out their labor and goods through these services will end up making a fraction of what they did at their full-time jobs, and having none of the benefits. Tanz writes that “in the sharing economy, the commerce feels almost secondary.” That may be true for the buyers, but it certainly isn’t true for the sellers, for whom these transactions are often an important source of income.

The title of Tanz’s story is “How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other.” But as Tanz himself notes, the data clearly show that Americans don’t trust each other: One survey, he says, “found that just 41 percent of respondents express ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a bit’ of trust in the people they hire to work in their home, only 30 percent trust the cashiers who swipe their credit or debit card, and a mere 19 percent trust ‘people you meet when you are traveling away from home.’” So something else must be compelling people to exhibit what he calls “behaviors that would have seemed unthinkably foolhardy as recently as five years ago.” One plausible explanation is that people don’t have a choice: They have to get comfortable with the sharing economy because that’s where the money is.

A narrative about labor-market weakness isn’t as uplifting as one about strangers learning to trust enough other with the help of ride-sharing apps. But it’s a necessary piece of the puzzle. Tools that help people trust in the kindness of strangers might be the thing pushing hesitant sharing-economy participants over the threshold to adoption. But what’s getting them to the threshold in the first place is a damaged economy, and harmful public policy that has forced millions of people to look to odd jobs for sustenance.