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And, the genius of Uber is:
- people enjoy driving, so it doesn't feel like work, so why not get "paid" even if it's barely break-even for the risk and actual expenses for doing something you enjoy?
- people are stupid about what they call "sunk costs" - your car is only a sunk cost if you are never going to replace it, tires wear by the mile, as do timing belts, alternators, water pumps, and all the other things that are going to need service before you send the car to the junk heap. Even the window seals and other things not normally serviced wear faster when exposed to driving as opposed to being parked, particularly if you park in a shelter.
What's missing from the above analysis is also "- people learn from experience" and "- people aren't going to get out of bed, if their cut of the action is too low."
Let's consider that first bullet point. People learn from experience. I doubt, for example, that JoeMerchant learned of the many costs of car ownership from a class or via hearsay. Similarly, how is one to learn the many niggling details of the cost of being their own employer (or an employer of others!), if they never experience it?
It's no secret that Uber has massive turnover, in part due to the heavy competition by drivers who are not fully clued in. So what? That's thousands of drivers who each year will learn what competition and costs mean at low cost to the rest of us (we get a lot of cheap rides out of this, remember?). And as bonus, they'll get a piece of JoeMerchant's hard-earned tax dollars and we get a quality bellyache from a guy who wouldn't have cared in the least otherwise, if Uber weren't somehow peripherally involved.
Let's consider another example which occasionally is seen in universal basic income (UBI) arguments. When people don't have to work, they'll instead pour their time into hobbies which somehow will be better for us than the work would be. We'll get like one or two orders of magnitude more awesome guitar solos. That surely more than compensates for having fewer people who actually know how to do stuff that keeps societies functioning, right?
That's also ignoring that most peoples' hobbies will be watching porn and other push media on the internet.
How does one learn to manage their time, or manage other people, if they never do it? The nuts and bolts of particular industries? How to help people? The huge thing missed is that all this work has created a huge population of people who know what they are doing. Take it away and you take away the competence as well.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 13 2019, @04:54AM
I really should say "Obsessing over people on the fringes".
What is the point of that observation? First, you conflated two different scopes: societies and organisms. A better analogy would be societies and species or ecosystems. Or individuals and organisms. It's a subtle distinction in that Lamarckism is the idea that individuals adapt over time by their own efforts (or rather over generations, but locally) - a single organism can change its future generations by stretching its neck for food (as the case of the giraffe). While Darwinism only works over populations because there's selection in aggregate (the giraffes with the longer necks survived to reproduce more often than the ones with shorter necks leading to an aggregate shift in the population).
Second, "individuals on the fringes" is just another group like the norms. My take here is that Social Darwinism doesn't ignore this group, it's simply the people who either die out via the SD idea of lack of fitness, and/or have unusually fit social/cultural/memetic "mutations" that will eventually enter the main population and make the more general groups fitter. My impression is that some of the earlier SD advocates thought that fringe populations would never have beneficial mutations, and would just go extinct due to their inferior nature. So sure, that's ignoring the group, but I doubt it's in the way you meant.
SL doesn't have much to say about this group in comparison since the little it does say about groups is what they try. The effort is what makes that part of the population more fit to do what the effort attempts to do. "Individuals on the fringes" might have a more exotic and broader range of things that are tried, but that's it. Maybe it would imply that the fringe gets even "fringier" over time?
But my take is that a lot of the would-be solutions to the existence of fringe populations operate by taking wealth away from people who weren't part of the fringe and make things overall a bit worse. Maybe the policy creates a permanent underclass with little work experience or competence, worsening the state of the fringe it was supposed to help. Maybe it merely destroys jobs and makes everyone a little poorer. That has little to do with biologically inspired economics theory.