SOURCE ITEMS
PAUL SOLMAN: A peak efficiency economy, that is, putting idle resources to work, like a car, or your own idle time. Cook a meal for strangers on Feastly or work a freelance gig in your downtime on oDesk or Elance.
And speaking of idle, how about that empty space in your house? The app DogVacay lets you rent it out to bored canines. One of the most popular sharing economy platforms extends that idea to humans, Airbnb, now turning the hospitality industry on its head.
The new ‘sharing economy’ can enrich micro-entrepreneurs but at what cost? PBS NewsHour, October 10, 2014.
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Our indicators of leisure quality show that, despite increases in the quantity of leisure over this period (as reported by Aguiar and Hurst [2007 ] and others, and confirmed in Section 5 below), the quality of leisure has decreased for all groups.
Almudena Sevilla Sanz, José Ignacio Giménez, Nadal Jonathan Gershuny, Leisure Inequality in the US: 1965-2003, Sociology Working Papers, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford.
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But this is not by virtue of people wanting to work less — it’s by virtue of people being able to work less.
That’s an important distinction: being able to make a living and support your family by working 40 hours a week versus 80 hours a week.
Peter Diamandis, Evidence of Abundance #1: More Leisure, Less Work, Forbes, June, 27, 2014.
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Specifically, the allocation of time for less‐educated and highly educated adults started to diverge in 1985 (panel B of Table 6) and was dramatically different by 2003 (panel C of Table 6).
Taken together, the results of Table 6 and Figures 6a and 6b document an increase in the dispersion of leisure favoring less educated adults, particularly in the last 20 years. This corresponds to a period in which wages and consumption expenditures increased faster for highly educated adults.
Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades, Working Papers, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, January 2006.
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In economics, capital goods, real capital, or capital assets are already-produced durable goods or any non-financial asset that is used in production of goods or services. … Homes and personal autos are not usually defined as capital but as durable goods because they are not used in a production of saleable goods and services.
Capital (economics), Wikipedia, Accessed 10/11/2014.
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Around the world, working-age people with full-time jobs (and therefore weekends and distinct non-work time) are now a minority: According to a new survey of 136,000 people in 136 countries by Gallup, 26 per cent of working people “worked full-time for an employer in 2013.” In India, nearly three of four are informally employed, according to the national statistics agency, either doing day-by-day piecework or buying and selling things.
Doug Saunders, Work? Leisure? It’s all a blur these days, The Globe and Mail, Aug. 30 2014.
COMMENTS
The positive spin on the sharing economy is that people have unused assets they can turn into capital and income. A spare room in the house or a car that is not always in use can be transformed into capital for a business. Non-work time can be turned into work time and thus into income.
But, what does it say about the quality of life when everything you own is seen as capital or potential capital and every waking hour is seen as potential work time? Only a generation ago, being middle class was understood to include owning things just for the pleasure of having and using them and to include having lots of time not a work to spend with family and friends enjoying our spacious homes, our comfortable cars, our hobbies, and our many wonderful toys.
The rise of the sharing economy must be put in the proper context: the globalization of competition for jobs and income, the technological destruction of higher end jobs, the permanent slow down in the growth of global wealth, and the steady increase in the world’s working age population. These forces brought the growth of middle class incomes in affluent countries to a halt over the last several decades, even while costs associated with middle class life continued to rise rapidly – costs for college, good health care, and higher end consumer goods.
The sharing economy seems new to many of us in affluent nations, but it has been a staple of human societies all along. It’s the technologies that Uber, Airbnb, and other sharing economy enterprises use that fool us into thinking the sharing economy is a modern or postmodern model of economic activity. For most of human history, people have engaged in peer to peer economic activities within the small populations their communication and transportation technologies could knit together. For most of human history people have necessarily used every available asset. They have necessarily done work in the places where they live and seen their own time and the time of their children as potential income. They have made almost no distinction between work and leisure. Ironically, what we are now calling a different and promising future is in fact just a continuation of what has historically been typical.
In another form, the sharing economy could offer a promising future. In its present form, it is only another of the many ways in which the world’s middle income people adapt to their ongoing economic decline by undercutting each others’ wages.
The world’s peoples do have to adapt to emerging limits to the growth of affluence, but we should choose to implement new technologies in ways that create real forms of economic sharing not new forms of all against all competition.
IWE WORK FUTURES 