Uber vs. Piketty

http://cafehayek.com/2015/08/uber-vs-piketty.html

by hga • 11 years ago

1 7 11 years ago

venomsnake3• 11 years ago

While working together earlier this week on a business trip to California, my Mercatus Center colleague Ashley Schiller and I were chatting about Uber and the assaults that governments are now launching on this amazing innovation

Calling Uber amazing innovation means you have no idea what you are talking. It is neither amazing nor innovation.

And if the government was really assaulting Uber they would have used RICO.

hga2• 11 years ago

Well, in the context of the thesis that companies like Uber are allowing people to partly convert consumption assets into production ones, to an economist it strikes me as not unreasonable he'd describe it as both "amazing" and an innovation.

That's certainly a very interesting concept, and new in the modern era, I think. Closest I can think of right now is selling surplus solar power your home is generating back to the utility, a somewhat different thing.

venomsnake3• 11 years ago

You know about the many self thought programmers that learned on their own PC-s ... since the late 70s.

Randgalt2• 11 years ago

It is both amazing and an innovation to me. Why would you dispute this? Uber is totally disrupting the way people travel within congested cities. Where I live in Panama, it has been amazingly innovative. Taxis here, while cheap, are dirty, unsafe and unreliable. Uber is remaking how people travel here and elsewhere.

venomsnake3• 11 years ago

I have been using taxis for 20 years now - it usually goes like this - I order the car to come to my departure address and take me to my destination. And then I pay. Just like Uber. Taxi services (which uber is) are a century old. So - no innovation.

And if that is the bar to clear for amazing - this is just an simple app backed by insane amount of money. Well having unlimited resources makes solving the chicken and egg problem easy.

Uber vs. Piketty

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