I think that both the Yglesias and the LPE sides of this debate are missing the point.
Uber was an end-run around regulations, whether those regulations were good and effective or bad and cartelish. It's trite to say "good regulations are good, bad regulations are bad", but that doesn't make it untrue.
US taxi regulations were bad; Uber broke the cartels by bending first the law and then the regulators to their will. But there are other places that had good regulations (e.g. London) found that Uber was flouting those regulations and in some cases have had to accept that they can't enforce perfectly reasonable laws.
It was easy to set up a new "mini-cab"* company in London. There were regulations (the drivers had to have criminal records checks and right-to-work checks to confirm they were legal immigrants and to exclude drivers who might be a danger to passengers) but calling for a ride (back when it was by telephone) in any car that was legal to have on the road had been allowed since the 1970s. There were even already apps before Uber even arrived in London, though Hailo had very few drivers when Uber London launched in 2012.
Uber repeatedly refused to comply with the pretty-minimal regulatory requirements of a London mini-cab, and in the early years, it was notorious as a place where drivers who had been fired by other mini-cab companies for cause (often for being a danger to passengers, or a danger on the roads) went to work precisely because Uber regarded the star-rating system as more important than pre-emptive regulations.
Uber London Limited did eventually settle with the regulator and now operates under exactly the same regulations as those in place before it was allowed.
* mini-cabs are not black cabs; they're normal cars, like Uber uses, and they are subject to a different and much looser set of regulations, they can use any car they like, they don't have to charge per the taximeter, but can agree a fee in advance, etc. The only restrictions are that they can't pick up passengers that hail them, they have to be dispatched to the passenger who calls for a cab or uses an app, and they also can't use taxi-only facilities (taxi-ranks, taxi-only areas at airports and stations, etc).
I also think that this is the core of the Abundance debate. Abundance is basically saying "have you noticed that bad regulations are bad, actually?" to progressives who say "what do you mean, are you just anti-regulation?" and neither side is listening to the other.
I think the best critique of Abundance is this:
Most people (both most voters and most politicians) are either pro-regulation or anti-regulation; there aren't enough people who are technocratically-inclined to look at the details of regulations. So you have to be attitudinally pro-regulation or attitudinally anti-regulation to have any impact at all, and Abundance has chosen the attitudinally anti-regulation side, which means that if it succeeds, it's going to result in sweeping away the good regulations with the bad.
I don’t think there are a lot of people who are pro-regulation or anti-regulation in general. Just look at immigration and suddenly who is pro-regulation and anti-regulation switches.
Crazy libertarian here. I’m ok with a regulation to further a legitimate government function, such as protecting against fraud, but I don’t like regulations that try to design what a transportation or housing market should look like. Ostensibly for the “greater good”, these rules are inevitably driven by various political factions seeking their own advantages, rather than wise, objective policy analysts.
I'm a neolib and my position is simple -- regulations can be fine but they shouldn't be used to do redistribution, we have taxes and transfers for that.
e.g. it's fine if we want to only allow licensed doctors to do open heart surgery, but one of the reasons for these licenses can't be to protect doctors' jobs or incomes
My own belief is that regulations are very often made for rent-seeking reasons. I think the forces that push toward good-for-all regulation are much weaker in most cases than the forces that push for good-for-me regulation (where "me" = some important interest group or donor).
No, the core of the abundance idea is that people as a rule are bad at cost benefit analysis and at noticing tradeoffs, and so there is a systematic bias in favor of regulation where it is t warranted.
The pattern is people notice a cost and enact laws against it without considering whether they are eliminating a larger benefit.
For example, you. In your very own example you just assume the London regs are justified and solving a big problem such that they are worth the cost. You don’t even consider whether their benefit (allegedly reducing risk to passengers) is larger than their costs (literal compliance costs, cost of enforcement, barriers to entry, making life harder for ex cons and immigrants, etc). Maybe they are! But you are not appropriating doing the work before assuming it’s good that the state is forcing behavior.
Yeah, Abundance libs don’t seem to realize the utopian nature of their project. They freely criticize populists (who believe that empowering either the Proletariat or the Volk will bring about prosperity), and they’re clearly deeply uncomfortable with the center-right perspective that freeing the Market (as a general matter) will bring prosperity.
To satirize a bit, abundance libs propose, instead, that Abundance (a complete absence of scarcity!) is the natural outcome of cutting the red tape facing the State, which is armed with politically independent experts who know exactly which regulations and industrial policies to implement in each sector. The purpose of the book is to persuade well-meaning left-liberals, and the main obstacle to be overcome is legions of self-interested but poorly informed voters (ew). (How this happens in a democratic society, I’m not entirely sure.)
On a more serious note, Abundance libs, as far as I can tell, haven’t really grappled with the following questions to the extent necessary:
1. How exactly did we reach this point? Are bad regulations mostly an outcome of perverse incentives or mistaken beliefs? I’ve seen them give both answers interchangeably without realizing that each calls for a very different solution.
2. To the extent that bad regulations are an outcome of perverse incentives, what mechanisms can be implemented to incentivize good regulations? Does the proposed mechanism have any potential imperfections? Public choice theory has a lot to say about this, but Abundance libs seem blissfully unaware of it. (They believe in the omnibenevolence of technocrats in the same way that right-wingers believe in the omnibenevolence of markets.)
"Are bad regulations mostly an outcome of perverse incentives or mistaken beliefs? I’ve seen them give both answers interchangeably without realizing that each calls for very different solutions."
It is almost certainly true that bad regulations are the result sometimes of perverse incentives, and sometimes mistaken beliefs, and sometimes a combination of both. Any time you want to have a single big explainer for outcomes, such as Public Choice Theory, you're going to end up mistaken because all the systems you would be analyzing with it have too much complexity and too many actors to be accounted for with one all encompassing explanation.
As I understand the Abundance folks, their view is first that it's clear that regulations AND processes put in place by relatively progressive actors now often act to inhibit rather than effect the goals those same relatively progressive folks want to achieve; that process has become a goal rather than a tool, and end goals are now ignored and success is measured by the process. They list empowering technocrats within government institutions to overcome the excess number of veto points, not as THE solution but as rather one of several steps toward solution. They're not looking for the all encompassing theory that would provide One Weird Trick to get to abundance, because there is no all encompassing theory that accomplishes that.
My point isn't that they need to come up with one theory to explain everything. To the extent that bad regulations are driven by mistaken beliefs, the solution is easy: write a book, go on TV, etc. and persuade everyone of the brilliance of your ideas.
My issue with them is that to the extent bad regulations are the product of perverse incentives, they really haven't confronted the incentive problems that arise with state-driven technocracy. This is why I bring up their neglect of public choice theory: that's the theory that explains how state-driven technocracy can fail! (Otherwise, why would you ever use markets rather than central planning?)
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Ezra Klein is aware of public choice theorem (he did discuss it on his show with Alex Tabarrok), and you should interpret his failure to mention it explicitly as being Straussian in nature.
“… failure to mention it explicitly as being Straussian….”
Not every case of tailoring your message to your audience is Straussian, nor did Strauss withhold his real views in one venue while revealing them in a podcast with Alex Tabarrok.
This is just a well-informed author writing for a popular audience.
Basically, everyone, including government actors act in their own interest. So bureaucrats, NGOs, etc. are trying to maximize their own power or influence to the detriment of the public interest, which can result in government failure.
ISTM that one important insight is that many rules are passed because of looking only at local effects (allowing X will make this identifiable set of people worse off, therefore we should ban X) rather than global effects (banning X makes other harder-to-identify people worse off, banning X everywhere makes everyone worse off long-term).
NIMBY housing restrictions are an example of this. Letting you build an apartment building across from my house will make people in my neighborhood worse off, and we're an identifiable easy-to-organized group. But it will make prospective tenants in the apartment building (who don't even know who they are yet) better off. And forbidding building apartments anywhere will make the whole community worse off, as it becomes impossible for anyone to find an affordable place to live and start a family, say.
It’s mistaken beliefs (“process is good,” “legal and compliance costs are negligible and worthwhile,” “throwing money at a problem is a good way to get what you want,” “more environmental regulation is a good way to protect the environment”), and perverse incentives (NIMBY, the tendency of groups toward the everything bagel over time as self-preservation), and just outdated laws and bad regulations (CEQA, all the veto points).
This analysis is incorrect. I have never read anything from Abundance liberals suggesting "attitudinally" they are anti-regulation. They are, in fact, quite comfortable with a regulatory state overall but question when certain regulations are de facto anti-growth for spurious reasons. I don't think the average person on the street has any strong views whether there are too many or too few regulations. There are simply too many different areas of life that are either lightly, moderately or heavily regulated to generalize. When you read them, some regulations are easy to understand. Others are extremely complex and written specifically for experts.
Uber acting unscrupulously when trying to enter the London market may be an instance where disruption may not have benefited the consumer overall. But I don't think you can argue in most jurisdictions it hasn't been a real plus. In British Columbia, the taxi cartels were so powerful politically they successfully delayed ride-hailing apps until the mid-2020s. There were even some parts of Vancouver taxi companies wouldn't service! Prices have gone down now and service overall has improved since Uber arrived.
That amounts to saying that everyone who cares about economic growth should become a Republican. “That’s how we got Trump“ is an oversimplification but it’s not wrong.
Yes, once Abundance catches on, there will be a ton of “is this regulation good” picayune arguments. But getting rid of truly awful ones like CEQA will be huge wins.
The steelman version of the LPE argument is that billionaire creation is always inefficient in the long run. Because even if you increase efficiency in the short run, the billionaire that you've allowed to come into existence now has a billion dollars, which he can and will use to influence the political process and distort policy for his own ends. So sacrificing efficiency in the short run to prevent that billionaire from existing is always, necessarily, pro-efficiency in the long run.
One might say that billionaire creation is the worst form of creation except for all the others. The billionaire has a stake in economic outcomes, so even if they are influencing policy to make things nicer for themselves, they're still seeking to make some sectors of the economy work better. Politicians or policy wonks employed by the government or NGOs have no such incentives. They can and do seek to remake real people's livelihoods along the lines of pie-in-the-sky notions in their own heads--exactly what the LPE movement does.
Source: I've sat through many long hours of planning commission hearings where real estate developers, some on their 7th or 8th hearing, were forced to have city staff make aesthetic design tweaks to their projects, where the only leverage the developer has to push back is threatening to walk away because the project has become unprofitable after all the changes the planning staff demanded because they think it's cool. I have no doubt this kind of thing happens in every industry everywhere--people with no stake in the outcome and no special knowledge of the business impacts get to act like they're in charge because they wield some sort of power/authority over the people actually taking the risk.
That reminds me of a Reddit post I saw the other day (r/CambridgeMA) about a proposed plan to replace an old side-by-side triple decker (containing 14 units) with a six-story modern building containing 77 units. The comments are full of complaints about how the new building is “ugly” and demanding something that reflects “the neighborhood aesthetic.”
On what basis can staff make arbitrary demands like these? Is your zoning ordinance insanely prescriptive? Are there no as-of-right projects where you are?
In that jurisdiction, yes it was very prescriptive and in real life there were no opportunities for as-of-right projects. It was a city that was already densely developed. In more suburban or rural areas there would be fewer opportunities for planning staff to play architect with other people's projects.
But the main dynamic wasn't prescriptive zoning ordinances, it was entitled staff and commissioners bossing the developers, nobody else in city government caring to put a stop to it, and developers playing ball as long as they were still making a profit, because they feared the alternative of being quietly frozen out of the city. The people who suffered most were the poorer city residents, because all the added cost was passed on to renters and consumers trying to live and do business in the city.
Interesting, thanks. I have seen versions of this but I'm surprised that it could go on unchecked/unchallenged for so long. There's no defensible connection between aesthetics and the health/safety/welfare concerns underlying the delegation of police power foundational to local planning.
Of course it’s not defensible. But people just still do it.
The legal system at large is still generally biased towards NIMBYism. And developers aren’t activists nor NGOs! It’s cheaper to just do whatever the municipality says and hire an extra person here or there to handle the compliance work, than to wage a decades-long national campaign on the lone principle that those muni staffers are exceeding their delegated police power.
And at the industry level, their actual activist organizations like NAHB are perfectly happy with keeping the suburban sprawl machine chugging along, because that’s still what their biggest members are best at doing. They aren’t gonna fight to destroy Euclid even if they have always kinda hated it on some ideological/self-interested level. It’s just not what they’re actually in business for.
Anti-billionaire people could also make the Econ 101 argument that billionaires are a sign of insufficient competition leading to bloated profit margins and stock market valuations and not enough people making new businesses and products. Under perfect competition there should be no profits beyond the opportunity costs of the invested labor and capital.
They could point to the actual example of China that has had strong economic growth and created leading companies in a lot of areas that offer quality products at low prices but due to “involution” has a stagnant stock market and many fewer billionaires. Tesla is worth 8x more than BYD meaning it’s created many more billionaires but not because it makes 8x more or better EVs, but because its profit margins are protected by tariffs to the detriment of consumers.
"Tesla is worth 8x more than BYD meaning it’s created many more billionaires but not because it makes 8x more or better EVs, but because its profit margins are protected by tariffs to the detriment of consumers."
Tesla is worth that much because lots of people think Tesla is going to end up being significantly more than a commodity, race to the bottom, car manufacturer - whereas that might be what BYD is aiming to be the king of.
It’s funny though given that people making this argument typically agree a lot more with billionaires than the median voter (especially on things like climate change).
matt is also making the (true) argument that uber made most people's lives better. that doesn't excuse problems at the company itself, but should surely be the central, most important takeaway.
In any heavily regulated industry with a lot inefficient, outdated and overbearing regulations there will be business opportunities for providers willing to operate in legal gray areas, to provide a better solution that poor regulation is deterring others from providing.
Sometimes those less-risk averse operators turn out to be basically good and did everyone a service by being willing to break some shells to get past the old, bad regulations. Other times they turn out to be basically slimy.
Jitneys -- the subject of August Wilson's play 'Jitney' -- sprang into being organically to serve Pittsburgh's black neighborhoods in the 1930s. Until today, jitneys have been a black-market, illegal, unregulated, un-policed but tolerated ride service for blacks. Regulators in the state government made Yellow Cab the only legal ride-for-hire company in the city and then its crooked, politically connected owners/operators and cabbies virtually ignored black people and poor people and suburbanites and 2 a.m. customers and students. The regulators were, as they almost always are, captured by the regulatorees. And until Uber arrived in the 2015 to save the day, the people of Pittsburgh -- like people in scores of cities in North America -- were screwed by a slimy, racist, protected monopoly (that is now dead). https://clips.substack.com/p/jitneys-were-pittsburghs-illegal?utm_source=publication-search
Yes, the same reason New York City introduced the green cabs. They were allowed to pick up in boroughs other than Manhattan and Manhattan above 96th or 110th street. They were sort of rendered largely unnecessary by the apps showing up soon after.
More importantly, it doesn't mean that companies ignoring the democratically arrived at laws and regulations is OK just because you have the deep pockets to out muscle and outlast the government in legal battles.
Lawlessness and disorder in the white collar world is just as bad for the general public and the commonweal as lawlessness and disorder in the subway, street corners, and other public spaces.
Please. The laws protecting taxi companies that Uber broke were not 'democratically' arrived at. They were among the finest examples of local and state laws/regulations being written -- and enforced by governments for nearly a century -- that hurt ordinary citizens in scores of cities. The laws Uber broke benefited a specific company/industry that was given monopoly power over local taxi transportation. The 'legal' taxi industry was a nation-wide racket that journalists and politicians either couldn't see or didn't care about. Bu blowing up that legacy Yellow Cab racket, Uber/Lyft dida great public service that has benefited millions of Americans of every class, color and lifestyle.
Matt agrees that there are some value judgments that are not captured by economic analysis, such as effects of social media on teens. Another one is the (complicated, contested) effects of the gig economy on well-being. The LPE people's dislike of Uber is based in part on talking to drivers, whose lives were hard as taxi drivers and (for some) became even worse as Uber drivers.
But isn't this example cutting against your (political) argument? In NYC/DC/LA/Chicago (or any significant American city, really), the regulations were terrible and a ton of consumer surplus was unlocked by Uber, which makes it very difficult to move against the ridesharing apps except in small ways. In London, an Uber-like provision already existed in these 'mini-cab' companies you're describing. Given this, the benefits of disruption were relatively small, less consumer surplus was unlocked, and the political winds blew toward reimposing the existing regulatory regime.
To me, it seems like bad regulations get locked in by political sclerosis, and technologically-enabled disruption is good. Good regulations tend to be a stable point that policy will return to because they are *actually preferable*.
In general, I think the political question that is raised here is interesting (how to eliminate bad regulations and not good ones), but ultimately I think it's not as much of a problem as it seems.
The main cause of durable bad regulations is typically the formula of a concentrated set of incumbents who are extracting rents from regulations, sympathy from local elites (whether that's educated progressives or business elites who benefit) and a public that is broadly unaware of the problem, or even has an irrational attachment to the regulatory regime despite it materially harming them. The fact that you are not legally allowed to pump your own gas in New Jersey is a prototypical example of this dynamic. If something came along that suddenly did an end-run around this, and the people of New Jersey had a year or so to enjoy the convenience of not waiting in your car for 15 minutes because the singular gas station attendant is busy and also kind of slacking off, they would likely be much less sympathetic to a renewed attempt by the government to reimpose the old regime.
Meanwhile, when good regulations get removed or hollowed out, they *tend* to get reimposed eventually, though maybe in an altered form. There is no sudden unlocking of value to generate public enthusiasm for the new environment, and the incumbents harmed by the removal of the regulation and their allies will usually be able to win the day. Your example with Uber in London is one, the establishment of practical digital copyright enforcement is another, drug criminalization is yet a third one (after the experiment with decriminalizing hard drugs, the most progressive cities have pivoted to cracking down again in at least some form)
Now, this is not universal, as some regulations have strong constituencies on both sides, and they impose both benefits and costs. Which is to say they are controversial, ideological, and therefore subject to political contestation. It would not be reasonable, ex ante, to assume we should favor either a political system that is more or less likely to favor the side of increased regulation in these cases until we take a political opinion on whether regulation generally is good or bad. But this does not really apply to clearcut cases of really bad regulations (like taxi restrictions). Stuff around federal land licensing in the US is one example of a live controversy. There are arguments on both sides, so it is right that the issue is in flux.
[If something came along that suddenly did an end-run around this, and the people of New Jersey had a year or so to enjoy the convenience of not waiting in your car for 15 minutes because the singular gas station attendant is busy and also kind of slacking off, they would likely be much less sympathetic to a renewed attempt by the government to reimpose the old regime.]
Let's all hope people in NJ don't end up barred from plugging their electric cars into chargers themselves.
If I'm reading this right, it seems like a good general approach is: give people who challenge regulations a grace period to demonstrate that the system as a whole is better off without the regulation. If they can't, the old regulations are enforced and the challengers lose their investment, while not too much harm has been done.
I remember when Uber had recently come to Paris (ca. 2012) and it was causing conflict, e.g. taxi drivers assaulting Uber drivers. Whatever the regulatory issues there, what struck me most was how this story was covered in the American environmental press, which was basically a lot of thinly veiled "the Uber drivers deserve it because they're driving cars, Q.E.D."
Honestly I doubt it’s that — Lina Khan is a lot smarter than me despite her having bad ideas about economic policy. Thinking people only disagree because they’re dumb or misinformed is untrue when the left does it to conservatives, and we shouldn’t do it to leftists.
That is true in some cases, but there is nothing “dumb” and “misinformed” is not quit right either about not having internalized the ideas of tradeoffs, opportunity costs, etc. of “Econ 101.” This includes, of course, most people who did not literally “flunk” Econ 101. :)
At this point most economists didn’t take econ 101.
Anything besides another math class on your transcript is a negative signal. (I’m kidding, sort of, but I didn’t take a core economics class until graduate school myself. )
I’d like some evidence that dangerous Uber drivers was a material problem, and that London cabs were much safer, and an explanation for why the passenger market didn’t respond by preferring the regulated cabs, please.
Will the market left to itself always enforce safety concerns? Upton Sinclair in "The Jungle" had some choice words on that.* And even if people learn to shun highly unsafe companies and drivers, do you want to be the passenger whose experience provides that useful data to the customer base?
* Of course, Sinclair's intention was to expose the abuse of poor immigrants in the meatpacking industry whose limbs might be lopped off and fall into the vats, whereas the reading public took from that that the meat they purchased might have parts of immigrants in it and so demanded government regulation to ensure purity of their food.
Is it your contention that the cabbie market in modern London—consumer facing, high profile, passengers all have picture phones—in the context of modern internet enabled London, shares material similarities to the meat packing plants in the Chicago stockyards (unseen, not consumer facing practices only witnessed by vulnerable programs workers with no voice, in a less rich media context), such that we should expect these sort of problems to similarly go unnoticed and unpunished by the market? Note that people had a very strong reaction to those meatpacking practices once made aware of them by the Jungle!
This is the kind of lazy hand waving thinking that gets us reams of bad regulation. “Well this other very different market had some unrelated problems so something something capitalism something something profit”.
And sure one example is more extreme than the other and uses exaggeration to make a point. But the point still stands. And that is that "safety" is an externality that can't always be cured by reliance on pure market forces, no matter how much better information sources are today. I like it when government cares about protecting our safety.
Safety to the end consumer is not an externality and absolutely can be cured by market forces and priced in.
This is why the law around products liability is not justified by *externalities* (like dumping laws are) but by latent defects a consumer cannot reasonably detect or know about. And it calls for a different policy analysis.
Even in the US the steelman version of taxi regulations were safety issues. Matt talks about foreign taxi companies business model of taking foreign tourists for a ride. In most places I have traveled to the standard travel advice is to avoid getting into unregulated wildcat taxis, who may overcharge or extort tourists.
Uber and Lyft, as identifiable brand names with company reputations to protect take care of some of this themselves and are probably more sensitive to safety and reputation issues than a bunch of small ride providers would be without regulations.
So the basic problem is that just because you have regulations doesn't mean that the right things are being regulated.
There were plenty of problems with unsafe taxis before Uber. And not only that, but the constriction of supply meant bandit cabs were common in many urban areas, which gave rise to plenty of crime.
To me, the lesson of Uber is that you can't just be in favor of statism per se. It matters what the state is doing. In the case of taxicabs, the state was close to useless-- much of what it was doing was protecting incumbents, and indeed protecting a racist system that was very bad for Black people, and limiting cab supply such that it was hard to get cabs in any but the most high volume places. (Here in California, calling a cab used to often be an hour wait in the suburbs.) When the state is acting this way, disruption can be good.
And this isn't the only example of this happening. One of my favorite examples is how medical marijuana ballot initiatives upended the drug war. In that instance, statist control was a very right wing thing, not a left wing thing. But it was the same-- what the state was actually doing wasn't good and proper drug regulation, it was moralistic dumping on stoners. Medical marijuana provided the needed disruption.
"There were plenty of problems with unsafe taxis before Uber. And not only that, but the constriction of supply meant bandit cabs were common in many urban areas, which gave rise to plenty of crime."
I have started to see this stuff in New York again - arriving at the airport there are touts in the baggage claim area trying to get people to avoid the apps and the taxi line. I assume that's a sign that the regulated prices are getting too high again.
If MY and LPE are "missing the point", then I'm not sure what the point is.
If the point is that the regulatory environment in major US cities differs significantly than the that of London, and thus skirting regulations has different outcomes if the regulations aren't good ones, then I think you missed the point. The whole column was that it's bad to ignore detailed analysis of regulations in favor of painting with over-broad (and ideologically-tinted) brushes!
MY writes primarily about US politics, and you can assume that unless he states otherwise. So yes, London (and other locals) may have had a different experience with Uber than that of US cities. But that's irrelevant to the point at hand.
I disagree on the reading of the column - my reading was “regulations are bad, so being able to break the regulations with impunity is a good thing and we shouldn’t worry that power will enable companies to break good regulations with impunity”.
MY's whole thing is "regulations should be subjected to CBA, and this isn't done nearly enough", not "regulations bad". The text of the article is in line with the first interpretation.
I think it's pretty outlandish to suggest the second interpretation rather than the first.
I mean, it was founded on providing a service platform for money. They didn’t make their money stealing from CVS and reselling, taking advantage of tough-to-enforce shoplifting laws. They were doing something we agree on the abstract is valuable to people—giving rides on demand for money—so the CBA may actually pencil out in their favor.
Nobody actually did the CBA in advance here, though, they just went ahead and did it. Assume that this were an internet sports-betting setup and it comes out the other way. There's no general inference to be drawn from "this illegal thing happened to work out as a net plus" beyond "good regulations are good, bad regulations are bad, and CBA is helpful." Which, sure, but that's a sentence rather than an article.
The article is about doing close economic analysis of trade-offs rather than relying on vibes. MY states this pretty clearly:
“Is Uber bad or were taxi cartels bad?” is a pretty good heuristic for thinking about where you stand on these larger debates."
Uber is brought up because the school of thought MY is arguing is bad used that as an example, and MY found that a good way to talk about the broader issue. But that doesn't mean the article is "about" Uber any more than the Frog and the Scorpion is "about" crossing rivers.
I would argue that "Uber creates more consumer surplus than taxi companies did" is neither controversial as a factual claim nor especially contested and could have been a tweet.
You've been here long enough that I find this a very odd thing for you to take away. Matt regularly condemns Republicans for rolling back environmental regulations. Thinking that he would write an article saying "regulations are bad, so being able to break the regulations with impunity is a good thing and we shouldn’t worry that power will enable companies to break good regulations with impunity" given his history should make you pause and check your comprehension of what he wrote.
Though of course Matt is specifically talking about Uber, which under its original leadership was truly bad in a lot of ways, I think his main point is about the
“ridesharing” model and how it disrupted the traditional taxi business. I forget now the name of Uber’s infamous CEO, but things seem to have gotten better since he was replaced. I think the real point is that GPS-based/app based ride hailing has turned out to be superior to medallion-based cap hailing. The thing I think people may be most misty-eyed about traditional cabs (especially in London) is the existence of an elite fraternity of drivers who actually had to memorize the street map of an extraordinarily large, complex city. I remember my one experience with one of those London cabs from hailing a ride at Heathrow in 2013 (first time in UK)…very professional, a pleasant ride, and then an absolutely eye-popping charge at the end (totally above board of course, but still a bit of shock). I did switch to the mini-cab for our return trip to the airport.
There are really two stories here—the story of the techno-anarchists at Uber (who could have maybe succeeded as well without being such absolute dicks) and the story of replacing traditional taxis with an app-based “ride sharing” with drivers using their own car and no requirement for specialized knowledge, thereby dramatically changing the type/degree of regulation needed.
Yeah, as a geography nerd who thinks social status and wealth should be allocated wholly based on sense of direction and how well a person has internalized their local map, uber in London, not to mention GPS, is clearly a tragedy.
Yes good regulations are good and bad ones bad. The problem is that human psychology makes it pretty hard to improve regulations just based on ex-nihlio intuition. The only way you get rid of the bad taxi regulations is that you tear them down and rebuild the ones that you find out were bad to remove.
The system needs a certain amount of experimentation and this provides it. Usually the regulations it turns out we need get readded in the new context.
Abundance is good. Communism is evil! Given a binary choice, it is always proper to go in the direction of abundance. All of this is complicated only because some people want it to be complicated.
The binary choice is always an evil. Pure communism is no more or less evil than pure capitalism or pure anarchism or absolute monarchy. Anywhere a person would actually want to live is a mixed economy which takes the best features of both and leaves the rest. Fortunately, we humans aren’t really capable of purity and all the OECD countries are mixed economies.
What “communism” do you see referred to in the comment you’re responding to? It feels like you’re starting to say the same thing again and again regardless of context.
Agree with Yglesias' column but also agree that Uber, AirBnB and Waze are three examples where it was less about great entrepreneurial tech strategy and more about a willingness to take advantage of existing regulations and turn them on their head (with mapping software you are directed to streets with less safety infrastructure because it is quicker if you know how to avoid lights and other intentional traffic slowing measures).
I've never understood this argument about Airbnb. Maybe it's just because I grew up in a picturesque vacation area, but people have been renting cabins, houses, and condos for short term rentals for literally centuries. Probably before the US was a country. Not every short term rental is or was a legally-defined hotel. Airbnb vastly expanded the number of short term rentals, but they weren't working in a grey area at all- it was always legal to rent out your home for a week to vacationers
I believe AirBnB ignored or skirted a lot of the taxes initially, which was a big cost advantage, and they did operate in cities where short term rentals were disallowed or heavily regulated, which was not the case in picturesque vacation resorts. They actually struggled a bit initially breaking into the resort markets because there was existing infrastructure for short term rentals.
Amazon skirted paying sales tax a lot for many years. And this was an unfair advantage and probably drove a lot of companies out of business. I'd argue that on net that was good because of the benefits to consumer Amazon provided and continues to provide.
But eventually they decided to/were forced to comply with regulations on collecting sales tax. So on the one hand, it was (mostly) fine that they screwed around with regulations but it was even better that eventually they came into compliance with them.
I know there was some gray zone that Amazon operated in regarding sales tax, but to the extent they were breaking the law I don’t think it was good because of the benefits to consumers. Because what it means is that Amazon’s business model wasn’t actually sound.
I may have a restaurant that serves better food than my competitors, but if the way I overcome my initial disadvantage as a start up breaking into the market is to burn down the competitor, no matter how good the end experience will be for my customers that cannot possibly mean it’s a net benefit to society that I became successful with that model.
I mean the convenience of Amazon would have led to its success even if it had had to pay sales tax, as evidenced by the almost daily Amazon deliveries on my porch. It’s pretty amazing how efficient they are, especially here. Most orders arrive in less than 12 hours. Shoot, now I’m even starting to use them for perishable groceries because it’s actually cheaper!
It's a little unclear that Amazon should be paying sales taxes in the same way as local businesses. The local Walmart requires road/utility/police/fire support that is paid by local sales taxes, but the Amazon warehouse in another state does not.
I'd probably repeat what I said- that's not illegal and was never illegal. (Not that I really believe you have Airbnb financials from the early years as to where they made most of their money). Nothing prevented you from renting out your apartment or condo in the city for a short period of time. Or renting a room within the condo that you live in, which is actually how Airbnb (and Couchsurfing, etc.) got started
Oh no, violating condo association bylaws. Which are famously reasonable and put in place by normal, well-adjusted HOA board members. Certainly a horror worthy of the Nuremberg trials. About on the ethical level of jaywalking, talking during study hall, or dancing in Footloose.
My point was that they weren't breaking any *laws*. HOA regulations- which also cover stuff like what color you're allowed to paint your front door, or the exact length of your grass down to the inch- are not laws
The main controversy I remember about Waze was its cop patrol detection, which cops of course hated, but Waze has a First Amendment right to deliver truthful information like that.
I always hated Waze’s interface, so now I’m thankful Google does the same thing. Yeah, it’s the same thing as radar detector laws. Probably the only positive aspect of reduced law enforcement in Seattle is reduced speeding enforcement on the arterials. Most non-arterials have things like speed bumps and little traffic circles at intersections to prevent cars from going much over the limit anyway at this point, which is better than cops writing tickets. But personally I think arterial and highway speed limits here are too low.
One difference across the ideological spectrum is what fraction of laws you think are bad in the way that the taxi regs were bad. On one end, you might see the US as a place where most laws and rules are reasonable and well-thought-out, but a few are examples of regulatory capture or something and need to be altered or maybe just ignored out of existence. On the other end, you might see the US as a place where most laws and rules are rent-seeking of some kind, and only a smallish number of laws are sensible and reasonable ones that it would be bad to break.
But more often, it's a matter of which side's rent-seeking rules are being ignored. The common thing of hiring people to do some renovation on your house without checking their papers (I mean, none of them speak any English and I found them standing around in the Home Depot parking lot, why should I suspect anything?) is in one sense doing an end-run around some dumb rent-seeking rules, and in another sense it's undercutting American wages by hiring illegals. But the ideological affiliation of people outraged by this seems like it is pretty different from the ideological affiliation of people outraged by the Uber thing.
Right. Good regulations quickly iteration on rules and rules designed for egalitarian access to capital at low agency rates offered to a given citizen social security # to a fixed max of subsidized loans or investment per ssn and then # s of licenses must grow if their are delays on goals set by hyper local bodies like downtown hotel district... perhaps counties or overriding created subdistricts get some capacity input but states and congress set goals and subsidize individual providers of services
As a law professor myself, people should exercise some caution around our policy analyses. Most law professors don’t have Ph.Ds and don’t have training in quantitative methods. (This is thankfully starting to change. Alas, the fact that most law professors have scarcely actually practiced law has not changed.) We aren’t good at assessing whether the empirical research we rely upon is actually high quality.
Also, the vast majority of law reviews are not peer reviewed. And if they are, it’s by other law professors who usually have the same limitations as the author. Law review articles are selected and edited by law students, who know basically nothing and seldom provide substantive feedback. (This is obviously not their fault.)
I always check whether a law professor who’s stepping into economic policy debates (1) has training in economics, (2) co-wrote with someone who does, and/or (3) published in a peer reviewed journal. If not, it doesn’t necessarily mean the analysis is bad, just that it may not be as rigorous as you imagine.
We should be thankful that we live in America where we only have to study one math. We might instead be living in Great Britain where apparently we would have to learn multiple maths.
The problem is that it's so intertwined with logic, reason and rationality that it calls other decision-making skills into question, especially when it comes to the complex decisions that policy makers (and writers) should be expected to make (or influence).
Yes. In my experience teaching math to people who hate math and therefore take the only class that fills the math requirement that isn’t in the MATH or STAT department, I think the biggest problem is that most math people take is oriented towards calculus, without giving students any motivation for that. If you start with a kind of problem you want to solve, and then show people how a certain kind of formal method lets them solve that problem, and then afterwards they realize they’re doing math, it works much better than if you try to force them to learn the thing that will be useful for engineering (despite the fact that many of them have interests other than engineering).
I agree completely! I always got good grades as a kid but math was painful for me until I was in college, when I found myself needing to use it as an intern. Using it for some practical purpose was like flipping a switch in my brain - suddenly I "got" math! It turns out I really liked using it after all, something I would've never believed possible when I was a 10th grader suffering through pages upon pages of polynomial factoring problems.
The problem is that it builds and requires some discipline for most people. If you never had to learn your multiplication tables like some kids these days, or had a shitty algebra I teacher, that basically makes math hard for you forever because you have no foundation. I think it’s really important for elementary schools to force multiplication tables and for high schools to assign the best teachers to algebra I classes.
As a person (a journalist, no less!) who thought he hated math as a young person and later realized that he does not, in fact, hate math - I think there is something to this.
IME, many of my math teachers were very smart math people, and had a difficult time teaching to those of us who didn't "get" it. Like it's so easy, how can you not just figure it out? I found that the best math teachers were the ones who weren't the best at math (maybe didn't have a math background), as they understood the challenges of learning it and taught their classes accordingly. The issue is that the there is way more of the former than the latter (those who are really good at math are more likely to teach it!), so figuring out a way to find more math teachers with backgrounds other than math would be helpful.
Anecdotal evidence, of course, but I'd dispute the "more than other places" part. Americans seem pretty reasonably math-lovers to me (being the only people to have been on the moon, for example).
The thing that seems right to me is that more people “hate math” than are willing to describe themselves as hating another subject. I don’t have any evidence that this is different in the United States from other countries.
Do you mean that the description is inaccurate, ie it's kind of a self-deprecating tic?
I could see that to a limited extent, but my sense is that more people actually do "hate math" than other subjects.
As you said, I've never seen evidence for that being different in other countries, although I wouldn't be completely shocked to find out it was less common in stereotypically "mathy" countries like Singapore and China.
I could agree it's not the hardest part. But it's kind of a table stakes when it comes to sitting at the table, so-to-speak.
It's like the hardest part of poker is not the probabilities. And over time you could practically memorize them. But if you're bad at math you're at a real disadvantage until you do that.
This board has lots of mathy people on it, from engineers like Sharty to lots of programmers to philosophers of mathematics like Kenny E. I’m not one of the mathy types — not a skill much fostered by a life as a circus clown — but I’m glad to learn from the math-literate among us.
> And if they are, it’s by other law professors who usually have the same limitations as the author
As an aside, this aspect of peer review is also largely true in science. It’s common for subfields to perpetuate mistakes for a long time because everyone involved has the same background. In statistician Andrew Gelman’s phrase, “the problem with peer review is the peers.”
It’s why my favorite academic genre was always “actually, this has no basis” where someone tracked through citations until they found the ultimate source is an offhand comment during a talk given in 1926 at a dinner in Atlantic City.
IIRC, the natural rate of unemployment was one such thing.
One of the things I appreciated about the law school I attended, despite the general lack of prestige, was that the place kind of prided itself on employing former practitioners. I only had one professor in my 3 years who had never been in practice, and most of them had pretty extensive careers as attorneys before coming back to teach.
The issue there though is that at a certain point in the practice of law- in my experience the point where an expert witness gets involved in federal court- you go from needing to care about how normal criminal or civil law gets practiced to whatever brain worms got this panel appointed for this circuit who is gonna decide whether, I dunno, Meta has a monopoly on making the judges teen daughter have no friends and hate her dad.
It’s almost like a discontinuity. I have family who are big time plaintiffs attorneys and the way they practice law is completely alien to the “spend 200 hours running numbers so a judge can spend 30 minutes sounding like they legit did whippits before writing this opinion.”
No disagreement. The judiciary is flawed on matters of expertise beyond a certain point and I've seen some cases play out in pretty stupid ways because of it.
I'm still pretty glad my academic training included a hefty dose of 'you are unlikely to be an appellate judge publishing your analytical genius to the world, make sure to become useful enough at more mundane tasks that someone might actually want to occasionally pay you for them.'
Don't civil law countries (kind of) solve this by having more specialized appellate courts, where they only take on certain kinds of cases? Patents or something
I am not a lawyer, but I believe we have some courts in the US set up like this for specific things like tax law. Seems like a good idea to me that is worth expanding to more domains, although maybe the lawyers here will know otherwise.
I feel like the anti trust bar could use more judges who practiced before getting elevated. People complain about DAs and ADAs on the circuit but they at least have a sense of why a case looks the way it does when it gets in front of them.
It’s such a fight to even get in front of one of the few judges who knows why a company would sue over a tax write off, instead of treating the case as an opportunity to cross out an entire section of the tax code. Sometimes Exxon really does want Hess to pay them back…
Rural county courts suck because judges for them suck; high end law practice sucks because the judges suck. In both cases, the job is as much navigating nonsense as anything.
Also, just regardless, law and economics is kinda gross. The whole thing is having judges make policy, which they have neither the training nor legitimacy to do.
One of the first things I do when asking why a law professor is putting out a seemingly bizarre take is briefly checking their career history. All too often, I see a few years as a clerk, sometimes a stint in politics.
I believe at least 25% of why lefties hate Uber has to do with the fact that Travis Kalanick was a douche. In the early days the company was particularly douchy — the early branding focused on nightclubs, there was sexual harassment from employees, and they took "move fast and break things" attitude from Facebook to a more bro-ish place. All this while me-too was taking off. Those vibes from 13 years ago still linger in leftist analysis.
Good point. You don’t see much leftist opposition to say Jensen Huang or Mark Cuban or Tim Cook or Warren Buffet or Bill Gates. Rich people can tamp down a lot of populist anger by just not being douchey.
Yea. And you do see opposition to Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and (especially) Elon Musk. While "douchey" isn't as apt a word for those folks as it is for Kalanick, they have, let's say "distinctive traits" that can rub people the wrong way.
Zuck’s product is toxic. You didn’t see much anti-Zuck talk before he started monetizing Facebook. Which I get - servers cost money to operate - but it really has progressively deteriorated the product. And we’ve seen the negative effects of social media on the discourse and on people’s lives since around 2016. Most of the criticism of Zuck is really a criticism of tech company owned/monetized social media and their addictive algorithms and is fully deserved. The only personal criticisms you hear of him is 1) that he stole those guys’ ideas and 2) that he supports Trump. It makes sense that he’s not particularly loved though.
A lot of the criticism of Bezos is unwarranted in my view - I’m somewhat of a Bezos stan, though I was disappointed when he left classy Mackenzie for the lip filler trollop. But he was a pretty ruthless businessman who squeezed a lot of brick and mortar businesses. The juice in this case was worth the squeeze. But a lot of people were destined to be pissed at him.
Whether the product is toxic or not is for users of Facebook to decide. I don't use it (or Instagram) much anymore but WhatsApp and Messenger have been very useful in staying in touch with my geo-distributed family. I wouldn't call these products toxic.
One thing that makes me very happy is that because of search and social media, ad dollars have moved away from traditional media and democratized journalism and made it a more meritocratic field.
Me-from-1999 wouldn’t believe my current attitudes toward Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and their respective corporations. I still manage to never use Microsoft products, on principle, but I’m feeling less and less righteous about it as Apple and Google become more problematic.
Rideshare apps are one of the few times professionals come into close contact with strangers from other classes. Ergo, class anxieties get projected onto the apps. I can’t imagine enjoying life as a rideshare driver, I’m glad I inhabit a different part of the labor-leisure substitution curve, and fear the ruin of my affairs where I am forced to become a rideshare driver.
Uber is synecdoche for a part of the economy that represents precarity and failure. Even though it producers more consumer surplus than cabs, it still makes me and those who think like me uneasy.
i don't think it makes much of a difference. a cab driver is a cab driver, and just like with a barber, there are certain social conventions about which topics are fair game and which are off limits, and this also varies depending on the part of the world you find yourself in.
Last time I got into a yellow cab the driver was telling me how he suspected his neighbor of stealing his catalytic convertor, so he was going to set up a booby trap by connecting his car battery to it.
In late 2019 I talked to a Haitian cabdriver in Miami who couldn’t understand why the Democrats were impeaching Trump; he thought it was obviously unjustified persecution. I thought I had just met an odd duck, I didn’t know I was witnessing the class/race realignment!
I have had a few drivers from Afghanistan who were able to get to the US because they helped the US military. Not utterly batshit conversations, but wild and sobering ones.
My favorite driver was the Latino man who drove us from 88th Street on the Southside of Chicago to the Loop, talking about the harassment he gets for being a Cubs fan in his family and neighborhood.
Three (unironic) cheers for Waymo. It really is a good service; I just hope it finds a way to be profitable.
Except that it is so rule-bound. I have an image of a future movie where one character jumps into a Waymo to chase a bad guy in another Waymo up ahead and the chase is nothing but following the speed limit, coming to a full stop at every stop sign and being cautious around pedestrians.
Yeah - I wish Matt had addressed this. Uber : gig precarity :: Instagram : teen depression.
The LPE people's dislike of Uber is based in part on talking to drivers, whose lives were hard as taxi drivers and (for some) became even worse as Uber drivers.
I have to constantly remind my partner that it’s not very polite to have a conversation about the glorious future when we can catch a Waymo everywhere when we are in the backseat of a Lyft.
Sometimes it takes a douche who is brash and willing to break existing laws that protect things like local taxicab monopolies and end bad regulations that were harmful to ordinary citizens in a hundred US cities -- for about 80 years.
No one who experienced DC's old taxi zone system could possibly have any nostalgia for it. MY is also being generous about walking a few blocks to a commercial corridor. My recollection is that it was more like you could reliably hail them at a handful of hot spots (along the mall, Union Station, Dupont Circle, China Town, K Street area, etc. and of course at the airport) but basically nowhere else absent a total stroke of luck, and in the burbs, forget about it. Even if you scheduled one there were decent odds it would never show.
As a woman who was young-ish and single both before and after uber came to DC, I can say Uber dramatically improved safety for young single women. Before Uber I and nearly every similarly situated woman I knew had some story or experience of being put in or unable to get out of an unsafe interpersonal situation because we didn’t know how we could get home otherwise. Uber totally changed that. This is also an example, IMHO of the point MY was making in a recent post about the unwillingness to engage trade offs among goals/constituencies within the progressive coalition
And DC isn't even the best example for Uber! Take a SMALLER place like Spokane (or the Frankfurt exurbs, where I recently spent some time). In many places it was just impossible to get a taxi at all, or you might have to wait an hour after you call one. Uber was a complete game changer for such places.
Not just decreasing drunk driving - I read an article arguing the rise in restaurant quality pre-COVID was in part due to more people ordering drinks at restaurants since they had a safe way home. Then those higher margins covered nicer food options to get people to go to the restaurants.
And the international dimension is huge too. You actually can go to Bogotá now and have high confidence that you won’t be swindled or hurt getting a cab
I was a small single woman in DC and Boston in the same timeframe and absolutely. I was coming from New York where cabs weren't an option because I lived/went out in Brooklyn, but there is safe public transit 24/7. The switch was really jarring. I still remember the first night I went out after Uber was becoming ubiquitous in Boston, and my friends and I were legitmately so excited that we didn't have to worry about how we were getting home.
Any reason to believe uber had an effect on drunk driving statistics? Seems like it should create some downward pressure on the temptation to drive on a night out.
Came here to say this. It sucked. I worked at the British Embassy for eight years pre-Uber and taxi drivers hated going there (Observatory Circle) and sometimes refused to take me. The cars were horrible and so were many of the drivers. When I had time and couldn’t bum a ride from a NZ colleague I’d take the Metro to Dupont and walk back or hop on a bus after a meeting/policy confab.
And actually come to think of it I do recall an evening where I was at one of the bars by Union Station and a cab took one of my friends a couple blocks before throwing her out because the driver didn't feel like going to Cheverly.
Yea I guess it's possible the old system would have adapted to pressure for up and coming areas but I have a hard time seeing them do a good job serving new and improved Petworth or what I have now seen referred to as 'NoMa' near what used to be called the NY Ave/Gallaudet metro station. Same with the development around the Rhode Island Avenue stop. And that's not even getting into the further flung areas of NE or SE which have long been pretty dense albeit not really near downtown or significant commercial areas.
San Francisco's cab system was equally terrible prior to the rideshare apps. I was an early and avid adopter of them after years of frustration with taxis there. Add in the proximity of Silicon Valley and it is no surprise that Uber, Lyft, and the now defunct Sidecar all started there around the same time.
Multiple things can be true here: the old taxi model had some serious downsides that you correctly identify. Uber did ignore/break/bend regulations to get itself situated; whether those regulations were appropriate is a separate discussion from whether it's good that a well funded challenger can simply skirt the regulations to establish their business. Traffic congestion has gotten worse with more cars providing rideshare options. And companies such as Uber notoriously provide fewer worker protections than those with full-time employees, which is a major part of the Left's opposition to them.
Athens had big, somewhat less than legal building booms to accommodate the in-migrations they experienced in the 20th century that were only legalized after the fact. I don't know what the consensus view on this is and you can argue that a lot of the housing stock now is somewhat ugly, but it looks like the least bad option to me.
I could swear Matt has written about the Athens situation before, but, if so, it was apparently not on SB because searches turn up only a single article with any mention of Athens.
I like how antiparochi translates to mutual exchange in the article, while just looking at it, I would translate it as anti-parochial, that is thinking about the greater good as opposed to only your own concerns, which I guess is mutual exchange.
In my perfect world, people who make their money exploiting loopholes would get to enjoy their money but also feel a little ashamed about it. But in practice, we just select for a bunch of shameless people being in power who get rich and *also* don't care what other people think. So I empathize with the irrational anger at big tech companies.
Flattening regulatory end-runs down to "lawbreaking" here is every bit as wrong as when conservatives insist that all immigrants without proper paperwork are criminals.
"... regulatory end-runs down to "lawbreaking"...."
To decide when a company is "bending regulations" and when it is breaking the law, we'll need to look at cases, don't you think? That's why I quoted some articles elsewhere about acts that look like clear instance of law-breaking by Uber.
I agree that we ought to distinguish regulations from sections of the criminal code. But this is also why I object to Matt treating Uber as though it was merely engaged in some harmless regulation-bending, when it was often acting as a criminal enterprise.
This idea is confusing to me. Historically, most taxicab drivers were independent contractors that wouldn’t have had healthcare benefits or 401k matching. I think what happened is that Uber being a big company tripped a switch causing leftists to mentally reclassify drivers as employees.
We’re seeing reflexive anti-corporatism, not a comparative analysis.
Yeah it was worse than that in many places, drivers were completely exploited by medallion holders who would charge them a fortune to rent shitty, poorly maintained yellow cabs and drivers ended up on net losing money for the privilege of driving on many shifts.
A lot of what this comes down to is “big corporation bad, small business good” which is just not a reliable heuristic when the small business is basically bribing the local government (think towing companies for example).
To me this argument doesn't make sense. Why does it follow that because Taxi driver's weren't paid enough that I can't be mad at Uber for also underpaying drivers?
Certainly not a comparative analysis and certainly little protection for taxicab drivers historically. The question is whether hard fought rules that are enshrined in law should be applied to workers in this situation; if you're left-leaning, you would certainly think so.
To reframe it slightly, the question is whether an independent contractor who has never had protections afforded to workers suddenly deserves them if that contractor starts using a service to schedule rides and fares. And the answer, which has been extensively litigated in courts, is broadly no, with the exception of some places like Massachusetts.
Correct. And the onus is on those who believe otherwise to make the case in the court of public opinion (and more importantly, to their state legislatures) to change the laws to reclassify those independent contractors as employees.
To be perfectly clear -- I'm not arguing that you're wrong, simply that Matt's piece didn't deal with this side of the argument at all, which is a main point of the anti-Uber movement. Most people in this comments section believe in baseline comparisons to the status quo as appropriate (I'm one of them!) but that doesn't negate the legitimate gripes about trampling regulations and lack of worker protections.
Do you think taxi drivers were well historically taken care of and treated fairly by medallion owners? And what about all the bandit cabs under the old system?
And, of course, what about all the Black people who never got picked up before Uber?
In Pittsburgh, in the 1930s, blacks not being picked up in their neighborhoods by the (tiny and racist) legal Yellow Cab monopoly created jitneys, an illegal, unregulated, entreprenurial, un-policed but vital ride-sharing system that used pay phones, word of mouth, older drivers in 4-door cars and cash -- Uber before there was Uber. August Wilson wrote 'Jitney,' a play about how jitneys worked in Pittsburgh. https://clips.substack.com/p/jitneys-were-pittsburghs-answer-to?utm_source=publication-search
First point -- not at all! I suppose I should note that my objections to this piece are that it doesn't properly address the Left opposition to Uber, not that the status quo was a good thing. It wasn't!
Second point -- Matt addresses this in his piece. I'm not sure that Uber's tweaks to their model necessarily solve this (any time you have drivers rating passengers you have space for bias) but at the very least it's an attempt to lessen the problem, which is very much real.
My guess, for what its worth, but even under the original "Ubers sometimes cancel rides with Black-sounding names" paradigms, Uber was still 100 times better for Black people than taxis were. First, lots of Black people don't have those names. And second, even if an Uber is canceled, another driver can swoop in and take the fare. Whereas Black people told stories of cabs just passing them up over and over again or refusing to come out at all to Black neighborhoods.
And of course Uber has through its various algorithms gone after racist drivers. Taxi companies never did.
I'd be interested to understand the model that compares congestion and health insurance of drivers with and without the restrictions that maintained the taxi oligopoly.
But the larger issue is, supposing that the removal of those restrictions does lead to more congestion and less health insurance coverage, is that the change exposes or highlights a pre-existing, non taxi regulation, problem: lack of congestion pricing of street and road use and linking health insurance coverage to employment.
I doubt anyone has shown that drivers were overall better off before Uber, and the anti-neolibs who hate Uber didn't like the taxi companies either. But the huge ridehailing companies 1. maximize their own profits more efficiently than the old taxi cartels and 2. provide a concentrated target for political pressure.
I don't think the anti-neolibs are being stupid or inconsistent. They think that the interests of labor (the drivers) is much more important than that of consumers, and their evidence confirms their prior that being an Uber driver sucks.
When CA tried to legislate more 'worker protections', I recall the drivers saying "no thanks, I prefer my freedom". The drivers were the ones who better understood the tradeoffs. Mostly, I think, because it was simply inconceivable to the policy wonks that people would prefer to be their own boss, even in this limited capacity, than having mom watch out for them.
Maybe... but like anything, maybe you don't realize you need the protection until you actually need it. Like the people who wouldn't get health insurance pre-ACA and then faced six-figure medical bills once they got sick.
Not saying you're wrong btw... just that the Left argument that the protections exist for a reason is legitimate.
Drivers had mixed opinions on this. The point of the worker protections and living wage laws was to extract profit from the tech company side, not to raise prices to the point where no one was calling Ubers. It was a completely predictable unintended consequence, though. I used to call uber all the time but now I never do. Part of that is having 2 cars now, but we might have at least gone longer without 2 cars if uber were still cheap.
I only have the opinions of the people I know personally, but of those, the #1 objection was not wanting to be an employee. The whole point of Uber for them was to be a freelancer.
You should read up on the fly by night insurance companies and complex networks of mortgages and shell companies that made NYC cabs judgement proof back in the day. You had not rights and no protections.
Yeah the local cab companies were shady as hell, I'm surprised that anybody would mourn their passing. Progressives see Uber as another manifestation of the subversion of the regulatory state by Silicon Valley and they don't like it any more than Meta or other tech companies. Interestingly, I was in downtown DC the other day and saw one of the new Waymo cars in traffic, lidar and other sensors spinning away. If progressives are worried about Uber's labor market displacement or 'loss of benefits' and workplace protections, driverless cabs are that future on steroids. It's weird how that business model hasn't attracted the same ire, despite likely being much more destructive to paid driver interests over the long term.
A big part of me thinks that until ALL cars are driverless (so that they can coordinate and we can eliminate congestion) and we have the luxury UBI in place, we should resist things like waymo and driverless trucking, as cool as they are.
I think I incline to expect a hunger games-type timeline, or ready player one - tech advances rapidly and substantially benefits the richest 20 percent or so, with varying degrees of immiseration for everyone else. In this timeline, we get the driverless cars and no UBI - just a lot of people in poverty, an extension of what we've got now. Delhi 2.0
You never had great rights in a taxi, to be honest. You might have formally, but taxi companies would do things like separately incorporate a small, poorly funded entity that owned each cab, so that if you sued it there was a cap on how much they'd be liable for.
Glad to see Matthew has discovered, kind of, the social value of Uber.
From 2015 to 2020, when the lockdowns put me out of business, I was a happy part-time Uber driver in Pittsburgh: 7,000 rides, about 11,000 passengers, heart transplant surgeons to strippers.
I've written a lot about my experiences -- https://clips.substack.com/p/st-patricks-day-is -- and, as a libertarian ex-newspaperman and op-ed column writer, I was an early and active defender of Uber.
First, it was because I was thrilled to see that Uber was in the process of destroying the evil, usually racist, always politically connected, often corrupt, lucrative, government-protected taxicab monopolies that had been merrily screwing people in every major city for at least 80 years with high prices, terrible service and crappy cabs.
All the usual liberal national media suspects automatically hated Uber by 2015 -- the NYT, the WaPo, NPR, et al. -- and the local media in virtually every city greeted Uber and Lyft not as liberators but as lawless, dangerous disrupters of the peace.
(In NYC, all you had to do to get a cab was raise your arm; in Pittsburgh hailing a cab to pick you up on the street was, literally, illegal and getting a cab to come to your house in a poor or suburban neighborhood was a long wait that often never ended positively. Pittsburgh's horrible cab 'service' was not an anomaly among cities. https://clips.substack.com/p/when-yellow-cab-ruled-pittsburgh)
Local journalists -- and national ones -- showed no interest in exposing how bad the existing pre-Uber taxi business was for their cities (even though everyone in town knew they sucked).
They had no idea who the monopoly cabs hurt everyday -- poor people, blacks, college students, suburbanites, late-night revelers; anyone who wasn't going to or from the airport and downtown, mainly. (In 1995 there were about 200 cabs for 1.2 million Pittsburghers; today there are probably 5,000-plus full- and part-time Uber/Lyft drivers).
Journalists also had zero idea how hard it was to start a taxi company -- or even thought that that was a problem. Existing monopolies were protected by state laws in states like Pa. The same economically challenged journalists and 'pundits,' who blindly romanticized Yellow Cabs and their many shortcomings, also railed about Uber's real and imagined dangers (anyone could be a driver; what about criminals and molesters and insurance? etc. etc.) and reported every bad Uber incident like it was a triple murder.
My fellow journalists especially focused on how awful it was that Uber was breaking the local laws that protected the local taxi monopoly from any competition while simultaneously poorly regulating it; in virtually every city in America, cabs sucked. Calling them 'cosy cartels' is a euphemism only someone from NYC or DC could use.
The local Yellow Cabs were textbook local monopolies and misbehaved like monopolies in their cities for 80 years until Uber/Lyft came along and liberated their populations.
I've written a lot about the existing cab monopoly in Pittsburgh and how Uber made the city safer and better -- especially for all the everyday people (of every age and class and lifestyle) who would never call Pittsburgh's Yellow Cab Co. a 'cosy cartel.' https://clips.substack.com/p/st-patricks-day-is
I remember when I first moved to Los Angeles and there were flyers around downtown saying “new program - hail a cab”, and I was confused about that not having always been a thing. I was even more confused a year or two later when the program was canceled for lack of use. But once Uber/Lyft used gps to make it work, I realized that it really was about no single neighborhood having high enough density for vehicles and passengers to make line-of-sight contact on a reliable basis.
"Uber developed secret system to lock down staff computers in a police raid
System called Ripley was reportedly used at least two dozen times in 2015 and 2016, including once to prevent tax investigators from collecting evidence....In one case Ripley was deployed to prevent Canadian tax investigators, who believed Uber had violated tax laws, from collecting evidence even though they had a warrant."
"In March 2017, an investigation by The New York Times revealed that Uber developed a software tool called "Greyball" to avoid giving rides to known law enforcement officers in areas where its service was illegal such as in Portland, Oregon, Australia, South Korea, and China."
It's also a curious use of commas by the Wiki author (as though there's a Portland, Oregon; a Portland, Australia; a Portland South Korea; and a Portland, China -- hey, why should Maine get all the fun?)
So, I get where you're coming from, but this still fails the comparative analysis test. Uber management in its early days can be scum bags and still be better than the scum bags who run the taxi cartels previously!
“… scum bags and still be better than the scum bags….”
We can make the moral comparison by seeing which are the greater scumbags. And we can make the legal comparison by seeing which are more in compliance with or in violation of the current laws. I don’t deny the importance of the first comparison, but I meant to refer only to the second.
The latter point is a little weak though, since the "current laws" were in place so that only taxis could exist. Obviously anyone trying to perform the service of a taxi that wasn't a licensed taxi was breaking the law. It's a tautology. Taxis don't get credit for that.
I'm not sure that anyone wants to give taxis credit for benefiting from the previous regulatory/legal regime. And I think most people agree that some laws are bad laws.
The question raised by this essay, though, is what should we do in the face of bad laws? One answer is to employ democratic means to change the laws, and obey them until they are changed. Another answer is to disregard them even while they are still on the books.
Matt thinks that people dislike Uber because it was successful, or because it represented the hated neoliberalism (for which we shill). I think that many people dislike Uber because it betrayed a high-handed disregard for law and for legal authority, here and abroad, without having anything like the justifications necessary for acts of civil disobedience (e.g. a willingness to sit in prison when apprehended).
There is a third answer, which is that the law is unclear, and some want to test the boundaries of that lack of clarity, and see what the courts say. I'm not going to say that everything Uber did falls in that category, but much of it did.
Were you in favor of compliance with the Fugitive Slave Act?
To be clear I am not saying taxi regulations were the same ballpark of evil as that law (it’s the worst regulation I could think of offhand). My point is that “always comply with law” is a pretty shaky principle and doesn’t stand on its own.
"... My point is that “always comply with law”...."
I don't recall having advocated for such principle, nor is such advocacy entailed by my criticism of Uber for breaking the laws that they broke.
The question invited by Matt's column is, "why do people dislike Uber?" and the answer, he believes, is that they have a mistaken dislike of neoliberalism. I am countering that by saying that many people dislike Uber because of its high-handed disregard for laws, e.g. the law that one must not commit spoliation of evidence that is legally sought under warrant.
But as to the Fugitive Slave Act, it may be worth recalling that Lincoln spoke in favor of complying with it in his First Inaugural. Having read aloud the portion of the Constitution on which it was based, he continues
"...I do suggest that it will be much safer for all, both in official and private stations, to conform to and abide by all those acts which stand unrepealed than to violate any of them trusting to find impunity in having them held to be unconstitutional."
This is in line with his Lyceum Speech on "reverence for the law."
I think the proper analogy wouldn't be the Underground Railroad but more like Coyotes who bring people across the Mexican border to seek a better life, but also make a bunch of money in the process.
Somewhat apt but I wasn’t trying to come to an analogy calibrated to a similar ratio of “bad law” to “sympathy level of people breaking it”. If anything, the opposite—a clear showcase that the principle of “you should follow the law” is under specified.
Someone telling me “but X broke the law” doesn’t tell me anything about how good or bad X is. Finding ways to circumvent overreaching and bad regulations is, if anything, virtuous. It’s circumventing good ones which is bad. The legality of a behavior is orthogonal to its moral valence.
"System called Ripley was reportedly used at least two dozen times in 2015 and 2016, including once to prevent tax investigators from collecting evidence....In one case Ripley was deployed to prevent Canadian tax investigators, who believed Uber had violated tax laws, from collecting evidence even though they had a warrant.""
That's just good data protection policy.
A warrant might get you into a property, it doesn't mean that you have to unlock the data!
"Lina Khan and other members of the “Yale Law School school of economics” with ties to the movement played major roles in the Biden administration....if you empower people who want to take the economic analysis out of economic policy, we’re going to end up in some very bad policy places."
I blame the Yale Law School for a lot of things -- J.D. Vance, Bart Kavanaugh, Sam Alito, Akil Amar, the list is long.
But I am surprised to hear it criticized for lacking in economists, i.e. people trained in Econ departments.
I don't feel like doing all the work -- hi Caroline! hi Halina! -- but a quick glance shows that many members of the Yale Law School have PhDs from Econ departments -- Christine Jolls, Sarath Sanga, Yair Listokin, Ian Ayres ... and there I got bored. I suspect there are more.
There are problems with the Yale Law School school of economics. But they are not problems that would be solved by sending its members to get a proper training in Econ. Because many of them already did that. The problems lie elsewhere.
Some do, and this is increasing, especially at top schools like Yale. But most of us do not have any real training in quantitative methods. Theory and ideological predispositions fill in the gaps. I’ve seen some sloppy errors when law professors rely on others’ empirical research to inform their policy arguments.
It is definitely not the case that everyone (or even most of the people) who work for Yale Law School subscribe to what Matt is referring to as the "Yale Law School school of economics," any more than everyone in Austria subscribes to "Austrian economics." It's fine as a shorthand term for a viewpoint held by an influential group of scholars, many of whom have a connection to Yale. But that's all. Most YLS scholars are not part of this group, and most members of the group aren't connected to Yale.
Amar pretends to be a progressive, but actively supported Kavanaugh in ways that misrepresented Kavanaugh's own merits. Amar is the opiate of the NPR crowd, the apparent feminist who helps out rapists, the apparent abortion-rights supporter who helped create the court that overturned Roe. And he does it all because his position at Yale has made him drunk on the proximity to power. He has become a man without principles, other than YLS über alles.
I met some of the YLS faculty when I got a PhD in history at Yale. Several of them really pride themselves on building relationships that bracket political ideology, and on mentoring rightwing students they consider good people, and on the fact that law is one of the only areas of educated expertise that has rightwing and leftwing superstars who, sometimes, treat each other collegially. I respect all those things - I love that Ginzburg and Scalia used to play squash. I think AA and Amy Chua were treated unfairly for their friendliness with rightwingers. But having personal relationships with Supreme Court justices is probably corrupting at some level.
"...really pride themselves on building relationships...."
Right, so thousands of women die because they don't have access to reproductive health, and it is partly due to my actions in running cover for the reactionary right-wingers who overturned Roe, but that's okay because the important thing is that we can still all go to lunch at Mory's and I still get invited to their parties. Collegiality is far more important than any trivial principle like women's rights.
LPE's purpose as I see it is to reverse-engineer an intellectual justification for two different emotional impulses that are common on the left. The first is disgust at anyone being extremely rich, when others don't have enough (kind of understandable tbh, even if I don't agree with it). The second is something you see in highly sensitive personality types who think it's bad to "treat people like numbers." I've never seen the latter expressed as well as it was by a young woman on an episode of the Freakonomics podcast when they were interviewing the children of economists about how they felt about their parents:
"I adore my dad. And I think a great deal of what he’s taught me about how to think about the world and how to approach problems and really just how to treat people — when I take that to the logical extreme, that’s how I come to form my politics. I have trouble seeing how market economics and how capitalism are actually meeting our goals of taking care of people. It’s treating people not as people, but as workers and interchangeable bodies. It’s not seeing people for the complexity that we are. And it’s leaving some things up to chance and to a market that’s been rigged from the very beginning. . . . I think both my parents did a really great job of instilling in me and my brothers a sense of kindness towards others. I think we have a really strong, beautiful ethic of mutual aid in which all of our money is shared and we make decisions pretty collectively. And when I think about a more beautiful world, I would want it to look a little bit more like our family, and for people to have those similar networks of care."
People who hold either of these viewpoints have strong antibodies to economic arguments because economic arguments sound to them like the studies tobacco companies used to fund in the '70s and '80s showing that smoking was healthy. You can always get funded to provide scholarship that says things rich people want to hear, so anything the economics profession produces can be automatically discounted.
And that's how you end up with "advocates" who end up making the problem worse. It doesn't matter if you're actually solving homelessness or the housing crisis - all that matters is how you feel.
I think I maybe have a broader definition of economics, or economic reasoning, than you do. I agree that there are nobler aspirations than simply maximizing per-capita income or whatever, but pursuit of those nobler aspirations also has to be informed by cost-benefit analysis and questions of what's efficacious, how rational actors are going to react, etc., in order for them to be achieved.
"Beautiful ethics of mutual aid" break down in not-even-that-large groups of people because some people freely choose to exploit the benevolence of others.
It can be done in larger groups of people. I grew up as a Jehovah's Witness, and one of the wildest things you would see is after a natural disaster, people would get on a plane or a bus, go to the disaster zone, get in touch with the local congregation and start helping other Witnesses who were affected. Total strangers, and this was a completely charitable impulse, it wasn't until later on that the religion tried to impose a bit of organization and systematicity on this.
But what this original person's vision and the Witnesses do *not* have in common is that I suspect our quoted friend here thinks that the mutual aid should be freely given to all people, there should be no serious efforts at enforcement or selection or anything like that -- i.e., the 'mutual' part tends to get discarded fairly quickly. In religious communities, on the other hand, there is incredibly strong selection, especially in quasi-cult-adjacent groups like the Witnesses where you have to regularly be demonstrating commitment to the group to stay on your congregation's roll of active members. You *need* to do this for any sort of dispersed, decentralized charity to work, because a lot of people are bad actors and even a few begin to poison the logic of the whole enterprise for the volunteers until the whole thing breaks down.
LDS has a lot of services for members. Hell I mean most mainline denominations do, but with different levels of organization. The clearer the barriers between “us” and “them” I think the better the provision.
There was an effort in the last administration to get rid of cost benefit analysis in rulemaking. I don’t know how widely spread it was but there were some senior lawyers and administrators who didn’t want to do it anymore. Some of the impetus was it slows things down. Some was they genuinely did not believe that you should do cost benefit analyses- regardless of what the law and APA said.
I have names, I’d hate to say them because I would probably out myself.
However, one of the reasons the Biden administrations regulations are proving so ephemeral is because his regulators skipped so many statutorily mandated steps in the rulemaking and litigating process.
Can you point to some rulemakings the Biden Admin did that are particularly egregious? Actually just curious if you mean stuff like CFPB's click-to-cancel or something else.
That’s one of them. A bunch of the rules out of the financial regulators were sloppy on their empirical basis (see Brian Johnson’s very effective legal strategy suing them on that basis!)
A lot of the CRA actions we’ve seen aren’t exactly principled either and seem slipshod, but that doesn’t mean the rules they’re killing were kosher.
Frankly, the FTC started off really poorly but got their shit together. Lina Khan gets a lot of shit that should be aimed at Gensler and Chopra
I mean CBAs should sometimes be subject to CBAs. There’s a ton of infrastructure spend and time suck doing the CBAs, at least at EPA where I have a little bit of inside knowledge.
I’m genuinely surprised anyone who lived in DC before Uber could argue that things are worse for consumers. Though I’m making assumptions about the American U law professor I maybe shouldn’t.
You couldn’t get a ride to Virginia or EOTR. There was a zone system and most drivers “credit card reader was broken.”
Part of my SB journey (hi Caroline and Halina!) has been learning - to my embarassment, because you'd think that this is the sort of thing you learn during a PhD - that precise empirical analysis is important. Unfortunately, precise empirical analysis is tedious and boring, and *educating* people to engage in precise empirical analysis is even more so, and inefficient to boot. Data are ambiguous, and learning to approach them robustly is not something you can teach by rote.
Given that the epistemic environment in general is being assaulted by the opposite of precise empirical analysis - including the idea that precise empirical analysis is suspect - and that education itself is being shortcircuited by, inter alia, LLMs, I have no idea how we continue to educate a society to believe on any level that evidence, data and robust analysis matter. LLMs might enable huge productivity gains; I'm afraid they're also going to make the kind of analysis MY engages in here impossible for anyone outside of a few eccentric auto-didacts.
I'm sure everyone thinks that their discipline or domain or industry or whatever is the only one that approaches things from an unideological position, but I think we're actually headed to vibes all the way down and up.
Since nobody's brought it up, I will. A common critique of Uber is that the drivers make no money. I've given over 4,000 rides between Lyft and Uber and I can definitively say "it depends." There are better and worse times to drive. On weekdays the good times are around 8am and 5pm for rides to and from work. The big money times are Friday and Saturday nights. You can make good money at those times but you have to be willing to put up with drunk people and be out late. Here's a pretty typical Friday night from a few weeks ago:
So about $38/hour from 10:30pm to 3:00am. Do I want to do that every Friday? No. I had a trip coming the next week and wanted extra cash. Anyways, the REALLY volatile earnings were back in the Wild West days of Uber. It used to be that the surge pricing was a multiplier. Now it's a flat dollar amount. For those who don't know, surge pricing is Uber's way of guaranteeing supply of drivers. If there are a lot of people requesting rides and not enough drivers on the road, a surge is generated. Back in the day, it was a multiplier like 2x, 3x, or 5x, etc. This would lead to absurd outcomes like me making $91 on a ride that was only about half an hour because there was a 3x surge. Now the surge is just a flat addition. So maybe rather than 3x it would be +$10. In the new framework, my goal shifts from catching long rides with the surge to catching a series of short ones. Oh yeah, Uber also nerfed the extremities by paying more per minute and less per mile. It used to be that if you picked up a ride during traffic time and didn't travel very far, you were hosed. There were a few rides for which I made less than minimum wage definitely. Now, the per minute pay is such that slow rides aren't COMPLETELY a rip-off.
But yeah, Uber CAN be a rip-off to drive for or it can be profitable, depends when you're willing to drive.
"This would lead to absurd outcomes like me making $91 on a ride that was only about half an hour because there was a 3x surge."
Why is that absurd? The Best Western near Augusta is $125/night all year and $875 during the masters. A ticket to Paris might be $600 in January and $1800 in August.
From several of your posts I can tell you make a lot more money than me. Bully for you! For me, making $91 in 30 minutes is a crazy good deal that I don't expect to happen frequently.
Oh, I thought you meant absurd as in the idea that products should vary in price 3x or 5x based on demand. They certainly do for countless goods and services. It's too bad you can't benefit from that like airlines or hotels or Nvidia can.
I guess that ended when in New York on New Years, people were drunk and getting charged 12x or 13x surges and not realizing it until the next morning and they got all pissed off so Uber had to change it. For me, surge chasing at 2am was awesome. The $91 ride occurred on the Saturday night (early Sunday morning) before Halloween at 2am. The ride right before it was $51. I got a total of $142 on two consecutive rides just scooting around Portland in the middle of the night. Good times.
They need an app called G-Ride (Guaranteed Rides) - it's more expensive and subject to surge pricing but you always know you can get a ride in under 5 minutes.
Seeing so many vehicles with both Uber and Lyft signs it's obviously not exclusive. They could all have the G-Ride app which would push a notification we're offering 3x. And all the drivers could hop on.
Clear as mud. Hell I don't even know where the passenger is going until I pick them up. Here's what I do know: in Portland, I'll get 73 cents per mile and 25 cents per minute, plus a flat 94 cents per ride, and the ride minimum for me is $4.48. so if you're so drunk you can't walk down the street, I still get $4.48. But yeah, before the ride, I have no clue where you're going and therefore no idea what I stand to make. And even if I was given an estimate, you the passenger are free to change your mind mid-ride about where you want to go. So the upshot of this is that I don't go out driving unless I have several hours of time because I can't risk getting a ride way the hell out to the middle of nowhere. If you're going to drive, set aside several hours, and basically accept every ride you get in that time block.
The one thing I CAN see is the surge and the passenger rating. I usually don't accept people below a 4.7 and if there is a surge, I will strategize with that. If there's a +$10 surge downtown and I get offered one for +$1, I'll probably reject that and move closer in.
Racism, I believe. People will avoid pickups and drop offs in the hood if they can. I think in Memphis this has led to “no go” zones because of some high profile robberies of uber drivers, crime has gotten out of control there
I don't think that's it. The four pieces of information I get when picking up a passenger are their current location, their name, their rating, and possible surge. So I can still pretty accurately profile by name. I think they do it because drivers would be more likely to turn rides down for distance. I see where they ARE, I just don't see where they're GOING.
Because they don't want drivers being too picky. Do I like that? No. I respond by only driving when I have SEVERAL hours of free time available because I never know when I'm going to get dragged out to the boonies. I ended up in Salem a few weeks ago (about an hour south of Portland).
That seems inefficient, and defeats the purpose of "being an Uber driver is so convenient, I can fit it in little bits of time between my other commitments and earn some money!"
Uber should let you know up front where the destination is, and offer a "long-distance" bonus to entice more drivers to pick up longer drives.
The long distance bonus is that you get $0.73/mile, so I actually prefer long trips if I have time. The day I drove to Salem it was late on a weeknight. Stupid move on my part.
Does Vancouver or Portland have similar same worker protections and living wage laws as Seattle? And under which states were you regulated when you had rides between PDX and Van? I imagine you’d want to be contracted in WA to avoid the state income tax
Apparently recently WA implemented some minimums for ride share drivers so I do make more when I'm north of the river. BUT, when I do drive, usually my very first ride is somebody from Vancouver getting a ride to Portland followed by several rides around Portland, so the boosted WA fares only help me so much.
Nice article, Matt! I was familiar with most of this, but this was a good distillation of coverage on the subject. That said, I will say there's some irony in introducing a copy editor and then this line appearing in the article:
"But that doesn’t mean we should abandon economic analysis entirel" [sic]
(Sorry to bring that up immediately, but I did a double take on that sentence because at first I thought it was ending in an exclamation point ("we should abandon economic analysis entire!") and I was going to kid you about reading too much 19th Century literature.
It’s hard to generalize about all rich people. Some rich people do indeed see the world as zero-sum, and got rich by screwing other people, like Trump, and we see his approach live in trade negotiations. Other rich people get rich by making useful products, like all the multimillionaires and billionaires at Nvidia didn’t screw anyone. The left should be more discerning about anti-rich politics and focus it on the rich people who got rich in zero-sum ways from Trump to taxi cartels rather than the ones who made new products that improve people’s lives.
I think that both the Yglesias and the LPE sides of this debate are missing the point.
Uber was an end-run around regulations, whether those regulations were good and effective or bad and cartelish. It's trite to say "good regulations are good, bad regulations are bad", but that doesn't make it untrue.
US taxi regulations were bad; Uber broke the cartels by bending first the law and then the regulators to their will. But there are other places that had good regulations (e.g. London) found that Uber was flouting those regulations and in some cases have had to accept that they can't enforce perfectly reasonable laws.
It was easy to set up a new "mini-cab"* company in London. There were regulations (the drivers had to have criminal records checks and right-to-work checks to confirm they were legal immigrants and to exclude drivers who might be a danger to passengers) but calling for a ride (back when it was by telephone) in any car that was legal to have on the road had been allowed since the 1970s. There were even already apps before Uber even arrived in London, though Hailo had very few drivers when Uber London launched in 2012.
Uber repeatedly refused to comply with the pretty-minimal regulatory requirements of a London mini-cab, and in the early years, it was notorious as a place where drivers who had been fired by other mini-cab companies for cause (often for being a danger to passengers, or a danger on the roads) went to work precisely because Uber regarded the star-rating system as more important than pre-emptive regulations.
Uber London Limited did eventually settle with the regulator and now operates under exactly the same regulations as those in place before it was allowed.
* mini-cabs are not black cabs; they're normal cars, like Uber uses, and they are subject to a different and much looser set of regulations, they can use any car they like, they don't have to charge per the taximeter, but can agree a fee in advance, etc. The only restrictions are that they can't pick up passengers that hail them, they have to be dispatched to the passenger who calls for a cab or uses an app, and they also can't use taxi-only facilities (taxi-ranks, taxi-only areas at airports and stations, etc).
I also think that this is the core of the Abundance debate. Abundance is basically saying "have you noticed that bad regulations are bad, actually?" to progressives who say "what do you mean, are you just anti-regulation?" and neither side is listening to the other.
I think the best critique of Abundance is this:
Most people (both most voters and most politicians) are either pro-regulation or anti-regulation; there aren't enough people who are technocratically-inclined to look at the details of regulations. So you have to be attitudinally pro-regulation or attitudinally anti-regulation to have any impact at all, and Abundance has chosen the attitudinally anti-regulation side, which means that if it succeeds, it's going to result in sweeping away the good regulations with the bad.
I don’t think there are a lot of people who are pro-regulation or anti-regulation in general. Just look at immigration and suddenly who is pro-regulation and anti-regulation switches.
That’s why libertarians—crazy as though they may be—are the faction most able to reason from first principles
“…the faction most able to reason….”
Yes, though this does not reveal a virtue of libertarians, it just reminds us of the limits of reasoning from first principles.
I’m trying to get to this conclusion from first principles and I’m struggling
“…I’m struggling….”
It’s easy: just make your conclusion one of your first principles by stipulation. Job done.
I like it when people skip right to reasoning from second principles so they can get some actual good done in the real world.
“… reasoning from second principles….”
All my principles are seconds.
What, you think I’m going to pay full price, when this one is perfectly good, maybe a little chip or dent?
Crazy libertarian here. I’m ok with a regulation to further a legitimate government function, such as protecting against fraud, but I don’t like regulations that try to design what a transportation or housing market should look like. Ostensibly for the “greater good”, these rules are inevitably driven by various political factions seeking their own advantages, rather than wise, objective policy analysts.
I'm a neolib and my position is simple -- regulations can be fine but they shouldn't be used to do redistribution, we have taxes and transfers for that.
e.g. it's fine if we want to only allow licensed doctors to do open heart surgery, but one of the reasons for these licenses can't be to protect doctors' jobs or incomes
Qualifications are good: quotas are bad.
"[R]egulations can be fine but they shouldn't be used to do redistribution, we have taxes and transfers for that."
This really is a great way to put it.
My own belief is that regulations are very often made for rent-seeking reasons. I think the forces that push toward good-for-all regulation are much weaker in most cases than the forces that push for good-for-me regulation (where "me" = some important interest group or donor).
And yet when libertarians are offered an opportunity to abandon those principles in favor of a specific outcome, they never seem constrained.
No, the core of the abundance idea is that people as a rule are bad at cost benefit analysis and at noticing tradeoffs, and so there is a systematic bias in favor of regulation where it is t warranted.
The pattern is people notice a cost and enact laws against it without considering whether they are eliminating a larger benefit.
For example, you. In your very own example you just assume the London regs are justified and solving a big problem such that they are worth the cost. You don’t even consider whether their benefit (allegedly reducing risk to passengers) is larger than their costs (literal compliance costs, cost of enforcement, barriers to entry, making life harder for ex cons and immigrants, etc). Maybe they are! But you are not appropriating doing the work before assuming it’s good that the state is forcing behavior.
I like to characterize the bias as “people have a bias towards demand side thinking, even though supply side thinking is dramatically more powerful”.
Yeah, Abundance libs don’t seem to realize the utopian nature of their project. They freely criticize populists (who believe that empowering either the Proletariat or the Volk will bring about prosperity), and they’re clearly deeply uncomfortable with the center-right perspective that freeing the Market (as a general matter) will bring prosperity.
To satirize a bit, abundance libs propose, instead, that Abundance (a complete absence of scarcity!) is the natural outcome of cutting the red tape facing the State, which is armed with politically independent experts who know exactly which regulations and industrial policies to implement in each sector. The purpose of the book is to persuade well-meaning left-liberals, and the main obstacle to be overcome is legions of self-interested but poorly informed voters (ew). (How this happens in a democratic society, I’m not entirely sure.)
On a more serious note, Abundance libs, as far as I can tell, haven’t really grappled with the following questions to the extent necessary:
1. How exactly did we reach this point? Are bad regulations mostly an outcome of perverse incentives or mistaken beliefs? I’ve seen them give both answers interchangeably without realizing that each calls for a very different solution.
2. To the extent that bad regulations are an outcome of perverse incentives, what mechanisms can be implemented to incentivize good regulations? Does the proposed mechanism have any potential imperfections? Public choice theory has a lot to say about this, but Abundance libs seem blissfully unaware of it. (They believe in the omnibenevolence of technocrats in the same way that right-wingers believe in the omnibenevolence of markets.)
"Are bad regulations mostly an outcome of perverse incentives or mistaken beliefs? I’ve seen them give both answers interchangeably without realizing that each calls for very different solutions."
It is almost certainly true that bad regulations are the result sometimes of perverse incentives, and sometimes mistaken beliefs, and sometimes a combination of both. Any time you want to have a single big explainer for outcomes, such as Public Choice Theory, you're going to end up mistaken because all the systems you would be analyzing with it have too much complexity and too many actors to be accounted for with one all encompassing explanation.
As I understand the Abundance folks, their view is first that it's clear that regulations AND processes put in place by relatively progressive actors now often act to inhibit rather than effect the goals those same relatively progressive folks want to achieve; that process has become a goal rather than a tool, and end goals are now ignored and success is measured by the process. They list empowering technocrats within government institutions to overcome the excess number of veto points, not as THE solution but as rather one of several steps toward solution. They're not looking for the all encompassing theory that would provide One Weird Trick to get to abundance, because there is no all encompassing theory that accomplishes that.
My point isn't that they need to come up with one theory to explain everything. To the extent that bad regulations are driven by mistaken beliefs, the solution is easy: write a book, go on TV, etc. and persuade everyone of the brilliance of your ideas.
My issue with them is that to the extent bad regulations are the product of perverse incentives, they really haven't confronted the incentive problems that arise with state-driven technocracy. This is why I bring up their neglect of public choice theory: that's the theory that explains how state-driven technocracy can fail! (Otherwise, why would you ever use markets rather than central planning?)
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Ezra Klein is aware of public choice theorem (he did discuss it on his show with Alex Tabarrok), and you should interpret his failure to mention it explicitly as being Straussian in nature.
“… failure to mention it explicitly as being Straussian….”
Not every case of tailoring your message to your audience is Straussian, nor did Strauss withhold his real views in one venue while revealing them in a podcast with Alex Tabarrok.
This is just a well-informed author writing for a popular audience.
What is public choice theory?
Basically, everyone, including government actors act in their own interest. So bureaucrats, NGOs, etc. are trying to maximize their own power or influence to the detriment of the public interest, which can result in government failure.
ISTM that one important insight is that many rules are passed because of looking only at local effects (allowing X will make this identifiable set of people worse off, therefore we should ban X) rather than global effects (banning X makes other harder-to-identify people worse off, banning X everywhere makes everyone worse off long-term).
NIMBY housing restrictions are an example of this. Letting you build an apartment building across from my house will make people in my neighborhood worse off, and we're an identifiable easy-to-organized group. But it will make prospective tenants in the apartment building (who don't even know who they are yet) better off. And forbidding building apartments anywhere will make the whole community worse off, as it becomes impossible for anyone to find an affordable place to live and start a family, say.
It’s mistaken beliefs (“process is good,” “legal and compliance costs are negligible and worthwhile,” “throwing money at a problem is a good way to get what you want,” “more environmental regulation is a good way to protect the environment”), and perverse incentives (NIMBY, the tendency of groups toward the everything bagel over time as self-preservation), and just outdated laws and bad regulations (CEQA, all the veto points).
This analysis is incorrect. I have never read anything from Abundance liberals suggesting "attitudinally" they are anti-regulation. They are, in fact, quite comfortable with a regulatory state overall but question when certain regulations are de facto anti-growth for spurious reasons. I don't think the average person on the street has any strong views whether there are too many or too few regulations. There are simply too many different areas of life that are either lightly, moderately or heavily regulated to generalize. When you read them, some regulations are easy to understand. Others are extremely complex and written specifically for experts.
Uber acting unscrupulously when trying to enter the London market may be an instance where disruption may not have benefited the consumer overall. But I don't think you can argue in most jurisdictions it hasn't been a real plus. In British Columbia, the taxi cartels were so powerful politically they successfully delayed ride-hailing apps until the mid-2020s. There were even some parts of Vancouver taxi companies wouldn't service! Prices have gone down now and service overall has improved since Uber arrived.
That amounts to saying that everyone who cares about economic growth should become a Republican. “That’s how we got Trump“ is an oversimplification but it’s not wrong.
It doesn't really matter politicians and people that actually set policy need to be able to distinguish between good policy and bad policy.
And then they need to be able to break that down and explain that to the general voting public.
Otherwise, you get bad policy, and people are worse off
Yes, once Abundance catches on, there will be a ton of “is this regulation good” picayune arguments. But getting rid of truly awful ones like CEQA will be huge wins.
The steelman version of the LPE argument is that billionaire creation is always inefficient in the long run. Because even if you increase efficiency in the short run, the billionaire that you've allowed to come into existence now has a billion dollars, which he can and will use to influence the political process and distort policy for his own ends. So sacrificing efficiency in the short run to prevent that billionaire from existing is always, necessarily, pro-efficiency in the long run.
Matt has already more-or-less addressed this argument here. https://www.slowboring.com/p/neoliberalism-and-its-enemies-part/
One might say that billionaire creation is the worst form of creation except for all the others. The billionaire has a stake in economic outcomes, so even if they are influencing policy to make things nicer for themselves, they're still seeking to make some sectors of the economy work better. Politicians or policy wonks employed by the government or NGOs have no such incentives. They can and do seek to remake real people's livelihoods along the lines of pie-in-the-sky notions in their own heads--exactly what the LPE movement does.
Source: I've sat through many long hours of planning commission hearings where real estate developers, some on their 7th or 8th hearing, were forced to have city staff make aesthetic design tweaks to their projects, where the only leverage the developer has to push back is threatening to walk away because the project has become unprofitable after all the changes the planning staff demanded because they think it's cool. I have no doubt this kind of thing happens in every industry everywhere--people with no stake in the outcome and no special knowledge of the business impacts get to act like they're in charge because they wield some sort of power/authority over the people actually taking the risk.
That reminds me of a Reddit post I saw the other day (r/CambridgeMA) about a proposed plan to replace an old side-by-side triple decker (containing 14 units) with a six-story modern building containing 77 units. The comments are full of complaints about how the new building is “ugly” and demanding something that reflects “the neighborhood aesthetic.”
Ugh, I also see this all the time
Architectural concerns are the only ones I sympathize with. We just have to lower the cost of high-quality (ie traditional) construction.
Billionaries in Russia are very happy to support Putin and it's hard to see that their support makes any sector of the Russian economy work better.
On what basis can staff make arbitrary demands like these? Is your zoning ordinance insanely prescriptive? Are there no as-of-right projects where you are?
In that jurisdiction, yes it was very prescriptive and in real life there were no opportunities for as-of-right projects. It was a city that was already densely developed. In more suburban or rural areas there would be fewer opportunities for planning staff to play architect with other people's projects.
But the main dynamic wasn't prescriptive zoning ordinances, it was entitled staff and commissioners bossing the developers, nobody else in city government caring to put a stop to it, and developers playing ball as long as they were still making a profit, because they feared the alternative of being quietly frozen out of the city. The people who suffered most were the poorer city residents, because all the added cost was passed on to renters and consumers trying to live and do business in the city.
Interesting, thanks. I have seen versions of this but I'm surprised that it could go on unchecked/unchallenged for so long. There's no defensible connection between aesthetics and the health/safety/welfare concerns underlying the delegation of police power foundational to local planning.
Of course it’s not defensible. But people just still do it.
The legal system at large is still generally biased towards NIMBYism. And developers aren’t activists nor NGOs! It’s cheaper to just do whatever the municipality says and hire an extra person here or there to handle the compliance work, than to wage a decades-long national campaign on the lone principle that those muni staffers are exceeding their delegated police power.
And at the industry level, their actual activist organizations like NAHB are perfectly happy with keeping the suburban sprawl machine chugging along, because that’s still what their biggest members are best at doing. They aren’t gonna fight to destroy Euclid even if they have always kinda hated it on some ideological/self-interested level. It’s just not what they’re actually in business for.
I am critical of the steelman argument I previously outlined, but I think some of your counterpoints here are greatly overstated.
The billionaire almost certainly does not have a billion dollars. He probably has shares of an asset currently valued on the market at $1B+.
Anti-billionaire people could also make the Econ 101 argument that billionaires are a sign of insufficient competition leading to bloated profit margins and stock market valuations and not enough people making new businesses and products. Under perfect competition there should be no profits beyond the opportunity costs of the invested labor and capital.
They could point to the actual example of China that has had strong economic growth and created leading companies in a lot of areas that offer quality products at low prices but due to “involution” has a stagnant stock market and many fewer billionaires. Tesla is worth 8x more than BYD meaning it’s created many more billionaires but not because it makes 8x more or better EVs, but because its profit margins are protected by tariffs to the detriment of consumers.
"Tesla is worth 8x more than BYD meaning it’s created many more billionaires but not because it makes 8x more or better EVs, but because its profit margins are protected by tariffs to the detriment of consumers."
Tesla is worth that much because lots of people think Tesla is going to end up being significantly more than a commodity, race to the bottom, car manufacturer - whereas that might be what BYD is aiming to be the king of.
I appreciate this steelman.
It’s funny though given that people making this argument typically agree a lot more with billionaires than the median voter (especially on things like climate change).
Greed is good.
It's fair to say that the story of Uber is not all good. That doesn't make the argument Matt is critiquing a bad one.
matt is also making the (true) argument that uber made most people's lives better. that doesn't excuse problems at the company itself, but should surely be the central, most important takeaway.
In any heavily regulated industry with a lot inefficient, outdated and overbearing regulations there will be business opportunities for providers willing to operate in legal gray areas, to provide a better solution that poor regulation is deterring others from providing.
Sometimes those less-risk averse operators turn out to be basically good and did everyone a service by being willing to break some shells to get past the old, bad regulations. Other times they turn out to be basically slimy.
Jitneys -- the subject of August Wilson's play 'Jitney' -- sprang into being organically to serve Pittsburgh's black neighborhoods in the 1930s. Until today, jitneys have been a black-market, illegal, unregulated, un-policed but tolerated ride service for blacks. Regulators in the state government made Yellow Cab the only legal ride-for-hire company in the city and then its crooked, politically connected owners/operators and cabbies virtually ignored black people and poor people and suburbanites and 2 a.m. customers and students. The regulators were, as they almost always are, captured by the regulatorees. And until Uber arrived in the 2015 to save the day, the people of Pittsburgh -- like people in scores of cities in North America -- were screwed by a slimy, racist, protected monopoly (that is now dead). https://clips.substack.com/p/jitneys-were-pittsburghs-illegal?utm_source=publication-search
Yes, the same reason New York City introduced the green cabs. They were allowed to pick up in boroughs other than Manhattan and Manhattan above 96th or 110th street. They were sort of rendered largely unnecessary by the apps showing up soon after.
ok?
Uber broke some shells and did us all a service. That doesn't mean we should all start saying Uber can do no wrong.
More importantly, it doesn't mean that companies ignoring the democratically arrived at laws and regulations is OK just because you have the deep pockets to out muscle and outlast the government in legal battles.
Lawlessness and disorder in the white collar world is just as bad for the general public and the commonweal as lawlessness and disorder in the subway, street corners, and other public spaces.
Please. The laws protecting taxi companies that Uber broke were not 'democratically' arrived at. They were among the finest examples of local and state laws/regulations being written -- and enforced by governments for nearly a century -- that hurt ordinary citizens in scores of cities. The laws Uber broke benefited a specific company/industry that was given monopoly power over local taxi transportation. The 'legal' taxi industry was a nation-wide racket that journalists and politicians either couldn't see or didn't care about. Bu blowing up that legacy Yellow Cab racket, Uber/Lyft dida great public service that has benefited millions of Americans of every class, color and lifestyle.
Who said they can do no wrong?
Matt agrees that there are some value judgments that are not captured by economic analysis, such as effects of social media on teens. Another one is the (complicated, contested) effects of the gig economy on well-being. The LPE people's dislike of Uber is based in part on talking to drivers, whose lives were hard as taxi drivers and (for some) became even worse as Uber drivers.
https://lpeproject.org/blog/rule-making-as-structural-violence-from-a-taxi-to-uber-economy-in-san-francisco/
But isn't this example cutting against your (political) argument? In NYC/DC/LA/Chicago (or any significant American city, really), the regulations were terrible and a ton of consumer surplus was unlocked by Uber, which makes it very difficult to move against the ridesharing apps except in small ways. In London, an Uber-like provision already existed in these 'mini-cab' companies you're describing. Given this, the benefits of disruption were relatively small, less consumer surplus was unlocked, and the political winds blew toward reimposing the existing regulatory regime.
To me, it seems like bad regulations get locked in by political sclerosis, and technologically-enabled disruption is good. Good regulations tend to be a stable point that policy will return to because they are *actually preferable*.
In general, I think the political question that is raised here is interesting (how to eliminate bad regulations and not good ones), but ultimately I think it's not as much of a problem as it seems.
The main cause of durable bad regulations is typically the formula of a concentrated set of incumbents who are extracting rents from regulations, sympathy from local elites (whether that's educated progressives or business elites who benefit) and a public that is broadly unaware of the problem, or even has an irrational attachment to the regulatory regime despite it materially harming them. The fact that you are not legally allowed to pump your own gas in New Jersey is a prototypical example of this dynamic. If something came along that suddenly did an end-run around this, and the people of New Jersey had a year or so to enjoy the convenience of not waiting in your car for 15 minutes because the singular gas station attendant is busy and also kind of slacking off, they would likely be much less sympathetic to a renewed attempt by the government to reimpose the old regime.
Meanwhile, when good regulations get removed or hollowed out, they *tend* to get reimposed eventually, though maybe in an altered form. There is no sudden unlocking of value to generate public enthusiasm for the new environment, and the incumbents harmed by the removal of the regulation and their allies will usually be able to win the day. Your example with Uber in London is one, the establishment of practical digital copyright enforcement is another, drug criminalization is yet a third one (after the experiment with decriminalizing hard drugs, the most progressive cities have pivoted to cracking down again in at least some form)
Now, this is not universal, as some regulations have strong constituencies on both sides, and they impose both benefits and costs. Which is to say they are controversial, ideological, and therefore subject to political contestation. It would not be reasonable, ex ante, to assume we should favor either a political system that is more or less likely to favor the side of increased regulation in these cases until we take a political opinion on whether regulation generally is good or bad. But this does not really apply to clearcut cases of really bad regulations (like taxi restrictions). Stuff around federal land licensing in the US is one example of a live controversy. There are arguments on both sides, so it is right that the issue is in flux.
Underrated comment
[If something came along that suddenly did an end-run around this, and the people of New Jersey had a year or so to enjoy the convenience of not waiting in your car for 15 minutes because the singular gas station attendant is busy and also kind of slacking off, they would likely be much less sympathetic to a renewed attempt by the government to reimpose the old regime.]
Let's all hope people in NJ don't end up barred from plugging their electric cars into chargers themselves.
If I'm reading this right, it seems like a good general approach is: give people who challenge regulations a grace period to demonstrate that the system as a whole is better off without the regulation. If they can't, the old regulations are enforced and the challengers lose their investment, while not too much harm has been done.
I remember when Uber had recently come to Paris (ca. 2012) and it was causing conflict, e.g. taxi drivers assaulting Uber drivers. Whatever the regulatory issues there, what struck me most was how this story was covered in the American environmental press, which was basically a lot of thinly veiled "the Uber drivers deserve it because they're driving cars, Q.E.D."
That's because, like law professors, most journalists writing about economic issues flunked/did not take "Econ 101."
Honestly I doubt it’s that — Lina Khan is a lot smarter than me despite her having bad ideas about economic policy. Thinking people only disagree because they’re dumb or misinformed is untrue when the left does it to conservatives, and we shouldn’t do it to leftists.
The funny thing is, if you look at Ted Cruz's academic career, he was significantly higher performing than Lina Khan.
That is true in some cases, but there is nothing “dumb” and “misinformed” is not quit right either about not having internalized the ideas of tradeoffs, opportunity costs, etc. of “Econ 101.” This includes, of course, most people who did not literally “flunk” Econ 101. :)
At this point most economists didn’t take econ 101.
Anything besides another math class on your transcript is a negative signal. (I’m kidding, sort of, but I didn’t take a core economics class until graduate school myself. )
"Econ 101" is partly a joke and partly shorthand for what on "ought to know" after some ideal Econ 101.
I’d like some evidence that dangerous Uber drivers was a material problem, and that London cabs were much safer, and an explanation for why the passenger market didn’t respond by preferring the regulated cabs, please.
Will the market left to itself always enforce safety concerns? Upton Sinclair in "The Jungle" had some choice words on that.* And even if people learn to shun highly unsafe companies and drivers, do you want to be the passenger whose experience provides that useful data to the customer base?
* Of course, Sinclair's intention was to expose the abuse of poor immigrants in the meatpacking industry whose limbs might be lopped off and fall into the vats, whereas the reading public took from that that the meat they purchased might have parts of immigrants in it and so demanded government regulation to ensure purity of their food.
Is it your contention that the cabbie market in modern London—consumer facing, high profile, passengers all have picture phones—in the context of modern internet enabled London, shares material similarities to the meat packing plants in the Chicago stockyards (unseen, not consumer facing practices only witnessed by vulnerable programs workers with no voice, in a less rich media context), such that we should expect these sort of problems to similarly go unnoticed and unpunished by the market? Note that people had a very strong reaction to those meatpacking practices once made aware of them by the Jungle!
This is the kind of lazy hand waving thinking that gets us reams of bad regulation. “Well this other very different market had some unrelated problems so something something capitalism something something profit”.
Please. My hand waving is very energetic.
And sure one example is more extreme than the other and uses exaggeration to make a point. But the point still stands. And that is that "safety" is an externality that can't always be cured by reliance on pure market forces, no matter how much better information sources are today. I like it when government cares about protecting our safety.
Safety to the end consumer is not an externality and absolutely can be cured by market forces and priced in.
This is why the law around products liability is not justified by *externalities* (like dumping laws are) but by latent defects a consumer cannot reasonably detect or know about. And it calls for a different policy analysis.
Ok but I think my point still stands.
Even in the US the steelman version of taxi regulations were safety issues. Matt talks about foreign taxi companies business model of taking foreign tourists for a ride. In most places I have traveled to the standard travel advice is to avoid getting into unregulated wildcat taxis, who may overcharge or extort tourists.
Uber and Lyft, as identifiable brand names with company reputations to protect take care of some of this themselves and are probably more sensitive to safety and reputation issues than a bunch of small ride providers would be without regulations.
So the basic problem is that just because you have regulations doesn't mean that the right things are being regulated.
There were plenty of problems with unsafe taxis before Uber. And not only that, but the constriction of supply meant bandit cabs were common in many urban areas, which gave rise to plenty of crime.
To me, the lesson of Uber is that you can't just be in favor of statism per se. It matters what the state is doing. In the case of taxicabs, the state was close to useless-- much of what it was doing was protecting incumbents, and indeed protecting a racist system that was very bad for Black people, and limiting cab supply such that it was hard to get cabs in any but the most high volume places. (Here in California, calling a cab used to often be an hour wait in the suburbs.) When the state is acting this way, disruption can be good.
And this isn't the only example of this happening. One of my favorite examples is how medical marijuana ballot initiatives upended the drug war. In that instance, statist control was a very right wing thing, not a left wing thing. But it was the same-- what the state was actually doing wasn't good and proper drug regulation, it was moralistic dumping on stoners. Medical marijuana provided the needed disruption.
"There were plenty of problems with unsafe taxis before Uber. And not only that, but the constriction of supply meant bandit cabs were common in many urban areas, which gave rise to plenty of crime."
I have started to see this stuff in New York again - arriving at the airport there are touts in the baggage claim area trying to get people to avoid the apps and the taxi line. I assume that's a sign that the regulated prices are getting too high again.
If MY and LPE are "missing the point", then I'm not sure what the point is.
If the point is that the regulatory environment in major US cities differs significantly than the that of London, and thus skirting regulations has different outcomes if the regulations aren't good ones, then I think you missed the point. The whole column was that it's bad to ignore detailed analysis of regulations in favor of painting with over-broad (and ideologically-tinted) brushes!
MY writes primarily about US politics, and you can assume that unless he states otherwise. So yes, London (and other locals) may have had a different experience with Uber than that of US cities. But that's irrelevant to the point at hand.
I disagree on the reading of the column - my reading was “regulations are bad, so being able to break the regulations with impunity is a good thing and we shouldn’t worry that power will enable companies to break good regulations with impunity”.
MY's whole thing is "regulations should be subjected to CBA, and this isn't done nearly enough", not "regulations bad". The text of the article is in line with the first interpretation.
I think it's pretty outlandish to suggest the second interpretation rather than the first.
This entire article is about a company founded on the principles of thumbing its nose at state capacity. I don't think the reading is unreasonable.
I mean, it was founded on providing a service platform for money. They didn’t make their money stealing from CVS and reselling, taking advantage of tough-to-enforce shoplifting laws. They were doing something we agree on the abstract is valuable to people—giving rides on demand for money—so the CBA may actually pencil out in their favor.
Nobody actually did the CBA in advance here, though, they just went ahead and did it. Assume that this were an internet sports-betting setup and it comes out the other way. There's no general inference to be drawn from "this illegal thing happened to work out as a net plus" beyond "good regulations are good, bad regulations are bad, and CBA is helpful." Which, sure, but that's a sentence rather than an article.
The article is about doing close economic analysis of trade-offs rather than relying on vibes. MY states this pretty clearly:
“Is Uber bad or were taxi cartels bad?” is a pretty good heuristic for thinking about where you stand on these larger debates."
Uber is brought up because the school of thought MY is arguing is bad used that as an example, and MY found that a good way to talk about the broader issue. But that doesn't mean the article is "about" Uber any more than the Frog and the Scorpion is "about" crossing rivers.
I would argue that "Uber creates more consumer surplus than taxi companies did" is neither controversial as a factual claim nor especially contested and could have been a tweet.
You've been here long enough that I find this a very odd thing for you to take away. Matt regularly condemns Republicans for rolling back environmental regulations. Thinking that he would write an article saying "regulations are bad, so being able to break the regulations with impunity is a good thing and we shouldn’t worry that power will enable companies to break good regulations with impunity" given his history should make you pause and check your comprehension of what he wrote.
“… my reading was “regulations are bad, so being able to break the regulations with impunity is a good….”
Yeah, if that’s the correct reading, then I disagree with Matt vehemently.
Though of course Matt is specifically talking about Uber, which under its original leadership was truly bad in a lot of ways, I think his main point is about the
“ridesharing” model and how it disrupted the traditional taxi business. I forget now the name of Uber’s infamous CEO, but things seem to have gotten better since he was replaced. I think the real point is that GPS-based/app based ride hailing has turned out to be superior to medallion-based cap hailing. The thing I think people may be most misty-eyed about traditional cabs (especially in London) is the existence of an elite fraternity of drivers who actually had to memorize the street map of an extraordinarily large, complex city. I remember my one experience with one of those London cabs from hailing a ride at Heathrow in 2013 (first time in UK)…very professional, a pleasant ride, and then an absolutely eye-popping charge at the end (totally above board of course, but still a bit of shock). I did switch to the mini-cab for our return trip to the airport.
There are really two stories here—the story of the techno-anarchists at Uber (who could have maybe succeeded as well without being such absolute dicks) and the story of replacing traditional taxis with an app-based “ride sharing” with drivers using their own car and no requirement for specialized knowledge, thereby dramatically changing the type/degree of regulation needed.
Yeah, as a geography nerd who thinks social status and wealth should be allocated wholly based on sense of direction and how well a person has internalized their local map, uber in London, not to mention GPS, is clearly a tragedy.
Yes good regulations are good and bad ones bad. The problem is that human psychology makes it pretty hard to improve regulations just based on ex-nihlio intuition. The only way you get rid of the bad taxi regulations is that you tear them down and rebuild the ones that you find out were bad to remove.
The system needs a certain amount of experimentation and this provides it. Usually the regulations it turns out we need get readded in the new context.
Abundance is good. Communism is evil! Given a binary choice, it is always proper to go in the direction of abundance. All of this is complicated only because some people want it to be complicated.
The binary choice is always an evil. Pure communism is no more or less evil than pure capitalism or pure anarchism or absolute monarchy. Anywhere a person would actually want to live is a mixed economy which takes the best features of both and leaves the rest. Fortunately, we humans aren’t really capable of purity and all the OECD countries are mixed economies.
What “communism” do you see referred to in the comment you’re responding to? It feels like you’re starting to say the same thing again and again regardless of context.
Agree with Yglesias' column but also agree that Uber, AirBnB and Waze are three examples where it was less about great entrepreneurial tech strategy and more about a willingness to take advantage of existing regulations and turn them on their head (with mapping software you are directed to streets with less safety infrastructure because it is quicker if you know how to avoid lights and other intentional traffic slowing measures).
I've never understood this argument about Airbnb. Maybe it's just because I grew up in a picturesque vacation area, but people have been renting cabins, houses, and condos for short term rentals for literally centuries. Probably before the US was a country. Not every short term rental is or was a legally-defined hotel. Airbnb vastly expanded the number of short term rentals, but they weren't working in a grey area at all- it was always legal to rent out your home for a week to vacationers
I believe AirBnB ignored or skirted a lot of the taxes initially, which was a big cost advantage, and they did operate in cities where short term rentals were disallowed or heavily regulated, which was not the case in picturesque vacation resorts. They actually struggled a bit initially breaking into the resort markets because there was existing infrastructure for short term rentals.
Amazon skirted paying sales tax a lot for many years. And this was an unfair advantage and probably drove a lot of companies out of business. I'd argue that on net that was good because of the benefits to consumer Amazon provided and continues to provide.
But eventually they decided to/were forced to comply with regulations on collecting sales tax. So on the one hand, it was (mostly) fine that they screwed around with regulations but it was even better that eventually they came into compliance with them.
I know there was some gray zone that Amazon operated in regarding sales tax, but to the extent they were breaking the law I don’t think it was good because of the benefits to consumers. Because what it means is that Amazon’s business model wasn’t actually sound.
I may have a restaurant that serves better food than my competitors, but if the way I overcome my initial disadvantage as a start up breaking into the market is to burn down the competitor, no matter how good the end experience will be for my customers that cannot possibly mean it’s a net benefit to society that I became successful with that model.
It was good to consumers who got lower prices. It was bad for disadvantaged other businesses and for the public treasury.
But I think we're definitely better off now with a successful, law-observing Amazon despite the downsides of their early non-compliance.
I mean the convenience of Amazon would have led to its success even if it had had to pay sales tax, as evidenced by the almost daily Amazon deliveries on my porch. It’s pretty amazing how efficient they are, especially here. Most orders arrive in less than 12 hours. Shoot, now I’m even starting to use them for perishable groceries because it’s actually cheaper!
It's a little unclear that Amazon should be paying sales taxes in the same way as local businesses. The local Walmart requires road/utility/police/fire support that is paid by local sales taxes, but the Amazon warehouse in another state does not.
Actually, you pay the sales tax.
Amazon just collects it.
AirBnB initially made the lion's share of its $$$ in cities where hotels are zoned and heavily taxed and AirBnB did not operate within zoned areas.
I'd probably repeat what I said- that's not illegal and was never illegal. (Not that I really believe you have Airbnb financials from the early years as to where they made most of their money). Nothing prevented you from renting out your apartment or condo in the city for a short period of time. Or renting a room within the condo that you live in, which is actually how Airbnb (and Couchsurfing, etc.) got started
"Nothing prevented you from renting out your apartment or condo in the city for a short period of time. "
NYC condos and coops always had a lot of rules about that, though. Which AirBNB ignored initially.
Oh no, violating condo association bylaws. Which are famously reasonable and put in place by normal, well-adjusted HOA board members. Certainly a horror worthy of the Nuremberg trials. About on the ethical level of jaywalking, talking during study hall, or dancing in Footloose.
My point was that they weren't breaking any *laws*. HOA regulations- which also cover stuff like what color you're allowed to paint your front door, or the exact length of your grass down to the inch- are not laws
Really? I find maps, uber, etc tend to push you onto congested arterials rather than do like me and cut through neighborhoods and side streets.
The main controversy I remember about Waze was its cop patrol detection, which cops of course hated, but Waze has a First Amendment right to deliver truthful information like that.
Waze found time-saving shortcuts via small neighborhood streets, with some cost to local residents.
I always hated Waze’s interface, so now I’m thankful Google does the same thing. Yeah, it’s the same thing as radar detector laws. Probably the only positive aspect of reduced law enforcement in Seattle is reduced speeding enforcement on the arterials. Most non-arterials have things like speed bumps and little traffic circles at intersections to prevent cars from going much over the limit anyway at this point, which is better than cops writing tickets. But personally I think arterial and highway speed limits here are too low.
One difference across the ideological spectrum is what fraction of laws you think are bad in the way that the taxi regs were bad. On one end, you might see the US as a place where most laws and rules are reasonable and well-thought-out, but a few are examples of regulatory capture or something and need to be altered or maybe just ignored out of existence. On the other end, you might see the US as a place where most laws and rules are rent-seeking of some kind, and only a smallish number of laws are sensible and reasonable ones that it would be bad to break.
But more often, it's a matter of which side's rent-seeking rules are being ignored. The common thing of hiring people to do some renovation on your house without checking their papers (I mean, none of them speak any English and I found them standing around in the Home Depot parking lot, why should I suspect anything?) is in one sense doing an end-run around some dumb rent-seeking rules, and in another sense it's undercutting American wages by hiring illegals. But the ideological affiliation of people outraged by this seems like it is pretty different from the ideological affiliation of people outraged by the Uber thing.
Right. Good regulations quickly iteration on rules and rules designed for egalitarian access to capital at low agency rates offered to a given citizen social security # to a fixed max of subsidized loans or investment per ssn and then # s of licenses must grow if their are delays on goals set by hyper local bodies like downtown hotel district... perhaps counties or overriding created subdistricts get some capacity input but states and congress set goals and subsidize individual providers of services
As a law professor myself, people should exercise some caution around our policy analyses. Most law professors don’t have Ph.Ds and don’t have training in quantitative methods. (This is thankfully starting to change. Alas, the fact that most law professors have scarcely actually practiced law has not changed.) We aren’t good at assessing whether the empirical research we rely upon is actually high quality.
Also, the vast majority of law reviews are not peer reviewed. And if they are, it’s by other law professors who usually have the same limitations as the author. Law review articles are selected and edited by law students, who know basically nothing and seldom provide substantive feedback. (This is obviously not their fault.)
I always check whether a law professor who’s stepping into economic policy debates (1) has training in economics, (2) co-wrote with someone who does, and/or (3) published in a peer reviewed journal. If not, it doesn’t necessarily mean the analysis is bad, just that it may not be as rigorous as you imagine.
This is an important test to apply to journalism as well, especially if they’re reporting on science, math, or econ.
Journalists, bless their hearts, tend to become journalists because they are people who “hated math” when they were kids.
We have far too many people who "hated math" involved in every aspect of setting and writing about public policy.
Can’t agree more!
As a person who loathes math, I feel personally attacked! Math is not good and liking it does not make one virtuous. Death to Math!
Hating math is hating education itself. It's a core part of being an educated person at home in the world. Get over it.
We should be thankful that we live in America where we only have to study one math. We might instead be living in Great Britain where apparently we would have to learn multiple maths.
Yeah, math is just a core part of adulthood. Hating math is like hating having to make your own decisions.
I’ve always wondered what would spark the fiercest internal tribal warfare on SB.
Never figured “math” would beat out trans issues for that title.
Transcendentals *are* cendentals!
People who think that every number can be expressed as a polynomial with rational coefficients are transphobes!
Give me math homework any day of the week rather than make me write a damn paper. (Of course this has changed in the era of chatGPT!)
The problem is that it's so intertwined with logic, reason and rationality that it calls other decision-making skills into question, especially when it comes to the complex decisions that policy makers (and writers) should be expected to make (or influence).
Maybe something wrong with how we teach math? Because it seems like we have more people who “hate math” in general than other places.
Yes. In my experience teaching math to people who hate math and therefore take the only class that fills the math requirement that isn’t in the MATH or STAT department, I think the biggest problem is that most math people take is oriented towards calculus, without giving students any motivation for that. If you start with a kind of problem you want to solve, and then show people how a certain kind of formal method lets them solve that problem, and then afterwards they realize they’re doing math, it works much better than if you try to force them to learn the thing that will be useful for engineering (despite the fact that many of them have interests other than engineering).
I agree completely! I always got good grades as a kid but math was painful for me until I was in college, when I found myself needing to use it as an intern. Using it for some practical purpose was like flipping a switch in my brain - suddenly I "got" math! It turns out I really liked using it after all, something I would've never believed possible when I was a 10th grader suffering through pages upon pages of polynomial factoring problems.
The problem is that it builds and requires some discipline for most people. If you never had to learn your multiplication tables like some kids these days, or had a shitty algebra I teacher, that basically makes math hard for you forever because you have no foundation. I think it’s really important for elementary schools to force multiplication tables and for high schools to assign the best teachers to algebra I classes.
As a person (a journalist, no less!) who thought he hated math as a young person and later realized that he does not, in fact, hate math - I think there is something to this.
IME, many of my math teachers were very smart math people, and had a difficult time teaching to those of us who didn't "get" it. Like it's so easy, how can you not just figure it out? I found that the best math teachers were the ones who weren't the best at math (maybe didn't have a math background), as they understood the challenges of learning it and taught their classes accordingly. The issue is that the there is way more of the former than the latter (those who are really good at math are more likely to teach it!), so figuring out a way to find more math teachers with backgrounds other than math would be helpful.
Anecdotal evidence, of course, but I'd dispute the "more than other places" part. Americans seem pretty reasonably math-lovers to me (being the only people to have been on the moon, for example).
"Because it seems like we have more people who “hate math” in general than other places"
Where do you get that impression and what could we do differently?
I'm not disputing your view here, I've just never come across it before.
The thing that seems right to me is that more people “hate math” than are willing to describe themselves as hating another subject. I don’t have any evidence that this is different in the United States from other countries.
Do you mean that the description is inaccurate, ie it's kind of a self-deprecating tic?
I could see that to a limited extent, but my sense is that more people actually do "hate math" than other subjects.
As you said, I've never seen evidence for that being different in other countries, although I wouldn't be completely shocked to find out it was less common in stereotypically "mathy" countries like Singapore and China.
I don't think this is really the issue, to be honest. The "math" of cost-benefit analysis is not the hard part of doing CBA.
I could agree it's not the hardest part. But it's kind of a table stakes when it comes to sitting at the table, so-to-speak.
It's like the hardest part of poker is not the probabilities. And over time you could practically memorize them. But if you're bad at math you're at a real disadvantage until you do that.
Science journalists are the worst. They are often "fans" of "science" and don't understand what they write about.
“ Science journalists are the worst.”
I don’t see how they can be, when substack commenters are in the competition.
You're raising our average to be above theirs!
This board has lots of mathy people on it, from engineers like Sharty to lots of programmers to philosophers of mathematics like Kenny E. I’m not one of the mathy types — not a skill much fostered by a life as a circus clown — but I’m glad to learn from the math-literate among us.
Said like a man who hasn’t read too many college football recruiting boards
Said like a man who’s been dead for forty years.
But he had the best seat for football games in the Meadowlands!
I only trust 24/7 Sports' recruit evaluations and stay off of those cesspool message boards.
> And if they are, it’s by other law professors who usually have the same limitations as the author
As an aside, this aspect of peer review is also largely true in science. It’s common for subfields to perpetuate mistakes for a long time because everyone involved has the same background. In statistician Andrew Gelman’s phrase, “the problem with peer review is the peers.”
Physics advances one funeral at a time.
Max Planck
Gatekeeping out uncomfortable information is probably the biggest issue.
Thomas Kuhn wrote an entire book about this.
It’s why my favorite academic genre was always “actually, this has no basis” where someone tracked through citations until they found the ultimate source is an offhand comment during a talk given in 1926 at a dinner in Atlantic City.
IIRC, the natural rate of unemployment was one such thing.
One of the things I appreciated about the law school I attended, despite the general lack of prestige, was that the place kind of prided itself on employing former practitioners. I only had one professor in my 3 years who had never been in practice, and most of them had pretty extensive careers as attorneys before coming back to teach.
The issue there though is that at a certain point in the practice of law- in my experience the point where an expert witness gets involved in federal court- you go from needing to care about how normal criminal or civil law gets practiced to whatever brain worms got this panel appointed for this circuit who is gonna decide whether, I dunno, Meta has a monopoly on making the judges teen daughter have no friends and hate her dad.
It’s almost like a discontinuity. I have family who are big time plaintiffs attorneys and the way they practice law is completely alien to the “spend 200 hours running numbers so a judge can spend 30 minutes sounding like they legit did whippits before writing this opinion.”
No disagreement. The judiciary is flawed on matters of expertise beyond a certain point and I've seen some cases play out in pretty stupid ways because of it.
I'm still pretty glad my academic training included a hefty dose of 'you are unlikely to be an appellate judge publishing your analytical genius to the world, make sure to become useful enough at more mundane tasks that someone might actually want to occasionally pay you for them.'
These are totally separate subjects.
Don't civil law countries (kind of) solve this by having more specialized appellate courts, where they only take on certain kinds of cases? Patents or something
The US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals hears all patent and copyright cases.
I am not a lawyer, but I believe we have some courts in the US set up like this for specific things like tax law. Seems like a good idea to me that is worth expanding to more domains, although maybe the lawyers here will know otherwise.
I feel like the anti trust bar could use more judges who practiced before getting elevated. People complain about DAs and ADAs on the circuit but they at least have a sense of why a case looks the way it does when it gets in front of them.
It’s such a fight to even get in front of one of the few judges who knows why a company would sue over a tax write off, instead of treating the case as an opportunity to cross out an entire section of the tax code. Sometimes Exxon really does want Hess to pay them back…
It sounds like a horseshoe to me.
Rural county courts suck because judges for them suck; high end law practice sucks because the judges suck. In both cases, the job is as much navigating nonsense as anything.
So, as a non-lawyer, this means our courts are probably going to be even more effective after Loper Bright, right?
Fucking thank you.
Also, just regardless, law and economics is kinda gross. The whole thing is having judges make policy, which they have neither the training nor legitimacy to do.
Seems like a sweet gig if you can get it. I’ve always wanted to play God
Yes, we should reserve policy analysis for people like Matt, people with a BA in philosophy from Harvard.
Matt is very good with numbers, as his gross revenues give ample proof.
One of the first things I do when asking why a law professor is putting out a seemingly bizarre take is briefly checking their career history. All too often, I see a few years as a clerk, sometimes a stint in politics.
I believe at least 25% of why lefties hate Uber has to do with the fact that Travis Kalanick was a douche. In the early days the company was particularly douchy — the early branding focused on nightclubs, there was sexual harassment from employees, and they took "move fast and break things" attitude from Facebook to a more bro-ish place. All this while me-too was taking off. Those vibes from 13 years ago still linger in leftist analysis.
Good point. You don’t see much leftist opposition to say Jensen Huang or Mark Cuban or Tim Cook or Warren Buffet or Bill Gates. Rich people can tamp down a lot of populist anger by just not being douchey.
Yea. And you do see opposition to Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and (especially) Elon Musk. While "douchey" isn't as apt a word for those folks as it is for Kalanick, they have, let's say "distinctive traits" that can rub people the wrong way.
Musk is definitely a douche. Zuck and Bezos don't behave poorly in public.
Zuck’s product is toxic. You didn’t see much anti-Zuck talk before he started monetizing Facebook. Which I get - servers cost money to operate - but it really has progressively deteriorated the product. And we’ve seen the negative effects of social media on the discourse and on people’s lives since around 2016. Most of the criticism of Zuck is really a criticism of tech company owned/monetized social media and their addictive algorithms and is fully deserved. The only personal criticisms you hear of him is 1) that he stole those guys’ ideas and 2) that he supports Trump. It makes sense that he’s not particularly loved though.
A lot of the criticism of Bezos is unwarranted in my view - I’m somewhat of a Bezos stan, though I was disappointed when he left classy Mackenzie for the lip filler trollop. But he was a pretty ruthless businessman who squeezed a lot of brick and mortar businesses. The juice in this case was worth the squeeze. But a lot of people were destined to be pissed at him.
Whether the product is toxic or not is for users of Facebook to decide. I don't use it (or Instagram) much anymore but WhatsApp and Messenger have been very useful in staying in touch with my geo-distributed family. I wouldn't call these products toxic.
One thing that makes me very happy is that because of search and social media, ad dollars have moved away from traditional media and democratized journalism and made it a more meritocratic field.
I mean Gates got a pie to the face thirty years ago!
Me-from-1999 wouldn’t believe my current attitudes toward Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and their respective corporations. I still manage to never use Microsoft products, on principle, but I’m feeling less and less righteous about it as Apple and Google become more problematic.
Rideshare apps are one of the few times professionals come into close contact with strangers from other classes. Ergo, class anxieties get projected onto the apps. I can’t imagine enjoying life as a rideshare driver, I’m glad I inhabit a different part of the labor-leisure substitution curve, and fear the ruin of my affairs where I am forced to become a rideshare driver.
Uber is synecdoche for a part of the economy that represents precarity and failure. Even though it producers more consumer surplus than cabs, it still makes me and those who think like me uneasy.
One hasn't really fully experienced these services if they haven't had some utterly batshit conversation with a driver at some point.
I grew up overseas. You wouldn’t believe what the Jews are responsible for
I assume everything bad in the world? I once had a cab driver go on an Anti-Trump rant that became also anti-Irish and anti-British.
I’ve had far more batshit conversations with drivers in yellow cabs.
i don't think it makes much of a difference. a cab driver is a cab driver, and just like with a barber, there are certain social conventions about which topics are fair game and which are off limits, and this also varies depending on the part of the world you find yourself in.
There are off limits?!? Someone needs to tell my previous drivers that!
Last time I got into a yellow cab the driver was telling me how he suspected his neighbor of stealing his catalytic convertor, so he was going to set up a booby trap by connecting his car battery to it.
That’s awesome
Right before Uber became a thing, a yellow cab driver told me that the Mafia controls America, but that there was no Mafia in Sicily.
Good to know!
In late 2019 I talked to a Haitian cabdriver in Miami who couldn’t understand why the Democrats were impeaching Trump; he thought it was obviously unjustified persecution. I thought I had just met an odd duck, I didn’t know I was witnessing the class/race realignment!
I guess it takes a Haitian to know it really is a shithole country
I have had a few drivers from Afghanistan who were able to get to the US because they helped the US military. Not utterly batshit conversations, but wild and sobering ones.
My favorite driver was the Latino man who drove us from 88th Street on the Southside of Chicago to the Loop, talking about the harassment he gets for being a Cubs fan in his family and neighborhood.
Three (unironic) cheers for Waymo. It really is a good service; I just hope it finds a way to be profitable.
Except that it is so rule-bound. I have an image of a future movie where one character jumps into a Waymo to chase a bad guy in another Waymo up ahead and the chase is nothing but following the speed limit, coming to a full stop at every stop sign and being cautious around pedestrians.
At least women can feel safe in Ubers, I’ve heard lots of horror stories from the cab days
Yeah - I wish Matt had addressed this. Uber : gig precarity :: Instagram : teen depression.
The LPE people's dislike of Uber is based in part on talking to drivers, whose lives were hard as taxi drivers and (for some) became even worse as Uber drivers.
https://lpeproject.org/blog/rule-making-as-structural-violence-from-a-taxi-to-uber-economy-in-san-francisco/
You need to get out more. https://clips.substack.com/p/st-patricks-day-is?utm_source=publication-search
I have to constantly remind my partner that it’s not very polite to have a conversation about the glorious future when we can catch a Waymo everywhere when we are in the backseat of a Lyft.
Sometimes it takes a douche who is brash and willing to break existing laws that protect things like local taxicab monopolies and end bad regulations that were harmful to ordinary citizens in a hundred US cities -- for about 80 years.
Yep, that would be the vibe and handwave policy methodology Matt referenced.
I don't know enough about the company at that time to know if it was super douchy. But even assuming it was, so what.
That has literally zero to do with the value that the company brings. Or the way that the Taxi system was screwing over consumers.
No one who experienced DC's old taxi zone system could possibly have any nostalgia for it. MY is also being generous about walking a few blocks to a commercial corridor. My recollection is that it was more like you could reliably hail them at a handful of hot spots (along the mall, Union Station, Dupont Circle, China Town, K Street area, etc. and of course at the airport) but basically nowhere else absent a total stroke of luck, and in the burbs, forget about it. Even if you scheduled one there were decent odds it would never show.
As a woman who was young-ish and single both before and after uber came to DC, I can say Uber dramatically improved safety for young single women. Before Uber I and nearly every similarly situated woman I knew had some story or experience of being put in or unable to get out of an unsafe interpersonal situation because we didn’t know how we could get home otherwise. Uber totally changed that. This is also an example, IMHO of the point MY was making in a recent post about the unwillingness to engage trade offs among goals/constituencies within the progressive coalition
And DC isn't even the best example for Uber! Take a SMALLER place like Spokane (or the Frankfurt exurbs, where I recently spent some time). In many places it was just impossible to get a taxi at all, or you might have to wait an hour after you call one. Uber was a complete game changer for such places.
Uber has a huge effect on drunk driving, IIRC.
Indeed. And that's especially big in college towns where, again, taxi service was never what it was in NYC or other big cities.
Not just decreasing drunk driving - I read an article arguing the rise in restaurant quality pre-COVID was in part due to more people ordering drinks at restaurants since they had a safe way home. Then those higher margins covered nicer food options to get people to go to the restaurants.
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's loss leaders!
And the international dimension is huge too. You actually can go to Bogotá now and have high confidence that you won’t be swindled or hurt getting a cab
it's pretty much the only reasonable way to get in and out of the columbus airport
I was a small single woman in DC and Boston in the same timeframe and absolutely. I was coming from New York where cabs weren't an option because I lived/went out in Brooklyn, but there is safe public transit 24/7. The switch was really jarring. I still remember the first night I went out after Uber was becoming ubiquitous in Boston, and my friends and I were legitmately so excited that we didn't have to worry about how we were getting home.
Any reason to believe uber had an effect on drunk driving statistics? Seems like it should create some downward pressure on the temptation to drive on a night out.
Sure it’s creeped up in jurisdictions with living wage for rideshare laws
Came here to say this. It sucked. I worked at the British Embassy for eight years pre-Uber and taxi drivers hated going there (Observatory Circle) and sometimes refused to take me. The cars were horrible and so were many of the drivers. When I had time and couldn’t bum a ride from a NZ colleague I’d take the Metro to Dupont and walk back or hop on a bus after a meeting/policy confab.
If you lived in Arlington you used to have to lie about where you were going and when you got to chain bridge beg the driver to cross.
No one ever refused to take me anywhere on the Maryland side but they absolutely took the craziest routes possible to hit as many zones as they could.
And actually come to think of it I do recall an evening where I was at one of the bars by Union Station and a cab took one of my friends a couple blocks before throwing her out because the driver didn't feel like going to Cheverly.
Everyone over a certain age complaining about Uber is almost invariably white.
DC is a particularly egregious example of a really bad taxi service and a corrupt city government that was completely captured.
I grew up in the PG suburbs, and getting taxis or Super Shuttles to Dulles/BWI was always a terrible saga.
Anecdotally from Uber drivers, they still try to avoid EOTR and PG at night, especially deliveries.
You mean deliveries of people or packages?
Is uber even still doing the courier thing? Anecdotally I’ve heard of it being used by drug dealers because of course it is lol
If you were outside those core areas, you really could be waiting for hours. I once waited for over two hours on Georgia Avenue.
Yea I guess it's possible the old system would have adapted to pressure for up and coming areas but I have a hard time seeing them do a good job serving new and improved Petworth or what I have now seen referred to as 'NoMa' near what used to be called the NY Ave/Gallaudet metro station. Same with the development around the Rhode Island Avenue stop. And that's not even getting into the further flung areas of NE or SE which have long been pretty dense albeit not really near downtown or significant commercial areas.
San Francisco's cab system was equally terrible prior to the rideshare apps. I was an early and avid adopter of them after years of frustration with taxis there. Add in the proximity of Silicon Valley and it is no surprise that Uber, Lyft, and the now defunct Sidecar all started there around the same time.
Welcome Caroline! Welcome Halina!
Multiple things can be true here: the old taxi model had some serious downsides that you correctly identify. Uber did ignore/break/bend regulations to get itself situated; whether those regulations were appropriate is a separate discussion from whether it's good that a well funded challenger can simply skirt the regulations to establish their business. Traffic congestion has gotten worse with more cars providing rideshare options. And companies such as Uber notoriously provide fewer worker protections than those with full-time employees, which is a major part of the Left's opposition to them.
"... a well funded challenger can simply skirt the regulations to establish their business...."
Right -- the correct answer to cartels is not a breezy acceptance of law-breaking.
Athens had big, somewhat less than legal building booms to accommodate the in-migrations they experienced in the 20th century that were only legalized after the fact. I don't know what the consensus view on this is and you can argue that a lot of the housing stock now is somewhat ugly, but it looks like the least bad option to me.
"...looks like the least bad ...."
Better than using democratic means to change laws and regulations?
I could swear Matt has written about the Athens situation before, but, if so, it was apparently not on SB because searches turn up only a single article with any mention of Athens.
i tried to track down where i read about this a while back. this looks like the relevant article: https://elxis.com/antiparochi-the-housing-policy-that-changed-athens/
I like how antiparochi translates to mutual exchange in the article, while just looking at it, I would translate it as anti-parochial, that is thinking about the greater good as opposed to only your own concerns, which I guess is mutual exchange.
As a strong rule-of-law appreciator and also rent-seeking cartel hater, I don’t have a way to cleanly resolve the tension between these goals.
I don’t think the taxi cartels would’ve ever been broken without law breaking/bending.
In my perfect world, people who make their money exploiting loopholes would get to enjoy their money but also feel a little ashamed about it. But in practice, we just select for a bunch of shameless people being in power who get rich and *also* don't care what other people think. So I empathize with the irrational anger at big tech companies.
Flattening regulatory end-runs down to "lawbreaking" here is every bit as wrong as when conservatives insist that all immigrants without proper paperwork are criminals.
"... regulatory end-runs down to "lawbreaking"...."
To decide when a company is "bending regulations" and when it is breaking the law, we'll need to look at cases, don't you think? That's why I quoted some articles elsewhere about acts that look like clear instance of law-breaking by Uber.
I agree that we ought to distinguish regulations from sections of the criminal code. But this is also why I object to Matt treating Uber as though it was merely engaged in some harmless regulation-bending, when it was often acting as a criminal enterprise.
Was it law bending, or law breaking.
One is usually fine, the other not.
Plenty of times it's not clear whether the law has been bent or broken. That's what the courts are for.
This idea is confusing to me. Historically, most taxicab drivers were independent contractors that wouldn’t have had healthcare benefits or 401k matching. I think what happened is that Uber being a big company tripped a switch causing leftists to mentally reclassify drivers as employees.
We’re seeing reflexive anti-corporatism, not a comparative analysis.
Yeah it was worse than that in many places, drivers were completely exploited by medallion holders who would charge them a fortune to rent shitty, poorly maintained yellow cabs and drivers ended up on net losing money for the privilege of driving on many shifts.
A lot of what this comes down to is “big corporation bad, small business good” which is just not a reliable heuristic when the small business is basically bribing the local government (think towing companies for example).
Really? The medallion holders weren’t the drivers?
Nope. https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2021/04/01/private-equity-firm-is-the-city-s-biggest-taxi-medallion-player
To me this argument doesn't make sense. Why does it follow that because Taxi driver's weren't paid enough that I can't be mad at Uber for also underpaying drivers?
Certainly not a comparative analysis and certainly little protection for taxicab drivers historically. The question is whether hard fought rules that are enshrined in law should be applied to workers in this situation; if you're left-leaning, you would certainly think so.
To reframe it slightly, the question is whether an independent contractor who has never had protections afforded to workers suddenly deserves them if that contractor starts using a service to schedule rides and fares. And the answer, which has been extensively litigated in courts, is broadly no, with the exception of some places like Massachusetts.
Correct. And the onus is on those who believe otherwise to make the case in the court of public opinion (and more importantly, to their state legislatures) to change the laws to reclassify those independent contractors as employees.
To be perfectly clear -- I'm not arguing that you're wrong, simply that Matt's piece didn't deal with this side of the argument at all, which is a main point of the anti-Uber movement. Most people in this comments section believe in baseline comparisons to the status quo as appropriate (I'm one of them!) but that doesn't negate the legitimate gripes about trampling regulations and lack of worker protections.
Do you think taxi drivers were well historically taken care of and treated fairly by medallion owners? And what about all the bandit cabs under the old system?
And, of course, what about all the Black people who never got picked up before Uber?
In Pittsburgh, in the 1930s, blacks not being picked up in their neighborhoods by the (tiny and racist) legal Yellow Cab monopoly created jitneys, an illegal, unregulated, entreprenurial, un-policed but vital ride-sharing system that used pay phones, word of mouth, older drivers in 4-door cars and cash -- Uber before there was Uber. August Wilson wrote 'Jitney,' a play about how jitneys worked in Pittsburgh. https://clips.substack.com/p/jitneys-were-pittsburghs-answer-to?utm_source=publication-search
First point -- not at all! I suppose I should note that my objections to this piece are that it doesn't properly address the Left opposition to Uber, not that the status quo was a good thing. It wasn't!
Second point -- Matt addresses this in his piece. I'm not sure that Uber's tweaks to their model necessarily solve this (any time you have drivers rating passengers you have space for bias) but at the very least it's an attempt to lessen the problem, which is very much real.
My guess, for what its worth, but even under the original "Ubers sometimes cancel rides with Black-sounding names" paradigms, Uber was still 100 times better for Black people than taxis were. First, lots of Black people don't have those names. And second, even if an Uber is canceled, another driver can swoop in and take the fare. Whereas Black people told stories of cabs just passing them up over and over again or refusing to come out at all to Black neighborhoods.
And of course Uber has through its various algorithms gone after racist drivers. Taxi companies never did.
As I recall, one reason Prop 22 was so successful was because of this. But as usual on California matters like this, you likely know better than I do.
I'd be interested to understand the model that compares congestion and health insurance of drivers with and without the restrictions that maintained the taxi oligopoly.
But the larger issue is, supposing that the removal of those restrictions does lead to more congestion and less health insurance coverage, is that the change exposes or highlights a pre-existing, non taxi regulation, problem: lack of congestion pricing of street and road use and linking health insurance coverage to employment.
I doubt anyone has shown that drivers were overall better off before Uber, and the anti-neolibs who hate Uber didn't like the taxi companies either. But the huge ridehailing companies 1. maximize their own profits more efficiently than the old taxi cartels and 2. provide a concentrated target for political pressure.
I don't think the anti-neolibs are being stupid or inconsistent. They think that the interests of labor (the drivers) is much more important than that of consumers, and their evidence confirms their prior that being an Uber driver sucks.
Yes, there's a tension between "ride-sharing apps are a net good" and "Uber are a bunch of irresponsible cowboys with a healthy disdain for the law".
When CA tried to legislate more 'worker protections', I recall the drivers saying "no thanks, I prefer my freedom". The drivers were the ones who better understood the tradeoffs. Mostly, I think, because it was simply inconceivable to the policy wonks that people would prefer to be their own boss, even in this limited capacity, than having mom watch out for them.
Maybe... but like anything, maybe you don't realize you need the protection until you actually need it. Like the people who wouldn't get health insurance pre-ACA and then faced six-figure medical bills once they got sick.
Not saying you're wrong btw... just that the Left argument that the protections exist for a reason is legitimate.
Drivers had mixed opinions on this. The point of the worker protections and living wage laws was to extract profit from the tech company side, not to raise prices to the point where no one was calling Ubers. It was a completely predictable unintended consequence, though. I used to call uber all the time but now I never do. Part of that is having 2 cars now, but we might have at least gone longer without 2 cars if uber were still cheap.
I only have the opinions of the people I know personally, but of those, the #1 objection was not wanting to be an employee. The whole point of Uber for them was to be a freelancer.
Uber also provides fewer protections to passengers than taxis historically, though that may be changing.
You should read up on the fly by night insurance companies and complex networks of mortgages and shell companies that made NYC cabs judgement proof back in the day. You had not rights and no protections.
Yeah the local cab companies were shady as hell, I'm surprised that anybody would mourn their passing. Progressives see Uber as another manifestation of the subversion of the regulatory state by Silicon Valley and they don't like it any more than Meta or other tech companies. Interestingly, I was in downtown DC the other day and saw one of the new Waymo cars in traffic, lidar and other sensors spinning away. If progressives are worried about Uber's labor market displacement or 'loss of benefits' and workplace protections, driverless cabs are that future on steroids. It's weird how that business model hasn't attracted the same ire, despite likely being much more destructive to paid driver interests over the long term.
A big part of me thinks that until ALL cars are driverless (so that they can coordinate and we can eliminate congestion) and we have the luxury UBI in place, we should resist things like waymo and driverless trucking, as cool as they are.
I think I incline to expect a hunger games-type timeline, or ready player one - tech advances rapidly and substantially benefits the richest 20 percent or so, with varying degrees of immiseration for everyone else. In this timeline, we get the driverless cars and no UBI - just a lot of people in poverty, an extension of what we've got now. Delhi 2.0
Good feedback. I will!
You never had great rights in a taxi, to be honest. You might have formally, but taxi companies would do things like separately incorporate a small, poorly funded entity that owned each cab, so that if you sued it there was a cap on how much they'd be liable for.
I have found the passenger "protections" of taxis to be completely illusory.
That's because they were....
Glad to see Matthew has discovered, kind of, the social value of Uber.
From 2015 to 2020, when the lockdowns put me out of business, I was a happy part-time Uber driver in Pittsburgh: 7,000 rides, about 11,000 passengers, heart transplant surgeons to strippers.
I've written a lot about my experiences -- https://clips.substack.com/p/st-patricks-day-is -- and, as a libertarian ex-newspaperman and op-ed column writer, I was an early and active defender of Uber.
First, it was because I was thrilled to see that Uber was in the process of destroying the evil, usually racist, always politically connected, often corrupt, lucrative, government-protected taxicab monopolies that had been merrily screwing people in every major city for at least 80 years with high prices, terrible service and crappy cabs.
All the usual liberal national media suspects automatically hated Uber by 2015 -- the NYT, the WaPo, NPR, et al. -- and the local media in virtually every city greeted Uber and Lyft not as liberators but as lawless, dangerous disrupters of the peace.
(In NYC, all you had to do to get a cab was raise your arm; in Pittsburgh hailing a cab to pick you up on the street was, literally, illegal and getting a cab to come to your house in a poor or suburban neighborhood was a long wait that often never ended positively. Pittsburgh's horrible cab 'service' was not an anomaly among cities. https://clips.substack.com/p/when-yellow-cab-ruled-pittsburgh)
Local journalists -- and national ones -- showed no interest in exposing how bad the existing pre-Uber taxi business was for their cities (even though everyone in town knew they sucked).
They had no idea who the monopoly cabs hurt everyday -- poor people, blacks, college students, suburbanites, late-night revelers; anyone who wasn't going to or from the airport and downtown, mainly. (In 1995 there were about 200 cabs for 1.2 million Pittsburghers; today there are probably 5,000-plus full- and part-time Uber/Lyft drivers).
Journalists also had zero idea how hard it was to start a taxi company -- or even thought that that was a problem. Existing monopolies were protected by state laws in states like Pa. The same economically challenged journalists and 'pundits,' who blindly romanticized Yellow Cabs and their many shortcomings, also railed about Uber's real and imagined dangers (anyone could be a driver; what about criminals and molesters and insurance? etc. etc.) and reported every bad Uber incident like it was a triple murder.
My fellow journalists especially focused on how awful it was that Uber was breaking the local laws that protected the local taxi monopoly from any competition while simultaneously poorly regulating it; in virtually every city in America, cabs sucked. Calling them 'cosy cartels' is a euphemism only someone from NYC or DC could use.
The local Yellow Cabs were textbook local monopolies and misbehaved like monopolies in their cities for 80 years until Uber/Lyft came along and liberated their populations.
I've written a lot about the existing cab monopoly in Pittsburgh and how Uber made the city safer and better -- especially for all the everyday people (of every age and class and lifestyle) who would never call Pittsburgh's Yellow Cab Co. a 'cosy cartel.' https://clips.substack.com/p/st-patricks-day-is
Having done the late night shift myself, I'll say this; strippers are good tippers. They understand what it's like to work customer service.
I remember when I first moved to Los Angeles and there were flyers around downtown saying “new program - hail a cab”, and I was confused about that not having always been a thing. I was even more confused a year or two later when the program was canceled for lack of use. But once Uber/Lyft used gps to make it work, I realized that it really was about no single neighborhood having high enough density for vehicles and passengers to make line-of-sight contact on a reliable basis.
Appreciate your first hand perspective!
"Uber developed secret system to lock down staff computers in a police raid
System called Ripley was reportedly used at least two dozen times in 2015 and 2016, including once to prevent tax investigators from collecting evidence....In one case Ripley was deployed to prevent Canadian tax investigators, who believed Uber had violated tax laws, from collecting evidence even though they had a warrant."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/11/uber-developed-secret-system-to-lock-down-staff-computers-in-a-police-raid
"In March 2017, an investigation by The New York Times revealed that Uber developed a software tool called "Greyball" to avoid giving rides to known law enforcement officers in areas where its service was illegal such as in Portland, Oregon, Australia, South Korea, and China."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber#Greyball
These were bad people. Maybe you like app-based ride-sharing. But don't whitewash what Uber did.
"such as in Portland, Oregon, Australia, South Korea, and China."
This begs for a Portlandia skit.
"...begs for a Portlandia...."
So many things do.
It's also a curious use of commas by the Wiki author (as though there's a Portland, Oregon; a Portland, Australia; a Portland South Korea; and a Portland, China -- hey, why should Maine get all the fun?)
In which case it should have read "Portand United States of America, Australia . . . "
Or alternatively "Portland, Oregon, New South Wales, Chungcheongbuk-do . . . "
Fred's cyclist character goes undercover on the Portland police force's behalf to catch Uber in a sting. Wackiness ensues.
I didn't know they did this. Avoiding giving rides to cops is something they'd get applauded for here funny enough.
"...get applauded for here ...."
"here" = Portland? "here" = Matt's substack? Where is "here"?
Here, Portland. The Oregon one.
Thanks!
"We'll give the pigs rides when they stop parking their cars in places where need to pick up riders!"
My bigger complaint is people standing in places I couldn't possibly park and then getting mad at me for circling the block.
Oh yeah I forgot, something about calling ACAB
So, I get where you're coming from, but this still fails the comparative analysis test. Uber management in its early days can be scum bags and still be better than the scum bags who run the taxi cartels previously!
“… scum bags and still be better than the scum bags….”
We can make the moral comparison by seeing which are the greater scumbags. And we can make the legal comparison by seeing which are more in compliance with or in violation of the current laws. I don’t deny the importance of the first comparison, but I meant to refer only to the second.
The latter point is a little weak though, since the "current laws" were in place so that only taxis could exist. Obviously anyone trying to perform the service of a taxi that wasn't a licensed taxi was breaking the law. It's a tautology. Taxis don't get credit for that.
"... breaking the law. It's a tautology."
I'm not sure that anyone wants to give taxis credit for benefiting from the previous regulatory/legal regime. And I think most people agree that some laws are bad laws.
The question raised by this essay, though, is what should we do in the face of bad laws? One answer is to employ democratic means to change the laws, and obey them until they are changed. Another answer is to disregard them even while they are still on the books.
Matt thinks that people dislike Uber because it was successful, or because it represented the hated neoliberalism (for which we shill). I think that many people dislike Uber because it betrayed a high-handed disregard for law and for legal authority, here and abroad, without having anything like the justifications necessary for acts of civil disobedience (e.g. a willingness to sit in prison when apprehended).
There is a third answer, which is that the law is unclear, and some want to test the boundaries of that lack of clarity, and see what the courts say. I'm not going to say that everything Uber did falls in that category, but much of it did.
"... test the boundaries of that lack of clarity, and see what...."
Fair enough.
Were you in favor of compliance with the Fugitive Slave Act?
To be clear I am not saying taxi regulations were the same ballpark of evil as that law (it’s the worst regulation I could think of offhand). My point is that “always comply with law” is a pretty shaky principle and doesn’t stand on its own.
"... My point is that “always comply with law”...."
I don't recall having advocated for such principle, nor is such advocacy entailed by my criticism of Uber for breaking the laws that they broke.
The question invited by Matt's column is, "why do people dislike Uber?" and the answer, he believes, is that they have a mistaken dislike of neoliberalism. I am countering that by saying that many people dislike Uber because of its high-handed disregard for laws, e.g. the law that one must not commit spoliation of evidence that is legally sought under warrant.
But as to the Fugitive Slave Act, it may be worth recalling that Lincoln spoke in favor of complying with it in his First Inaugural. Having read aloud the portion of the Constitution on which it was based, he continues
"...I do suggest that it will be much safer for all, both in official and private stations, to conform to and abide by all those acts which stand unrepealed than to violate any of them trusting to find impunity in having them held to be unconstitutional."
This is in line with his Lyceum Speech on "reverence for the law."
I don’t think that high-handed disregard for the law animates progressive antipathy to uber.
This group is totally fine with high handed disregard for the law with regard to protests, illegal strikes, draft dodging, etc.
"...high handed disregard for the law...."
Fair point. See my comments elsewhere about conditions for invoking civil disobedience.
I think the proper analogy wouldn't be the Underground Railroad but more like Coyotes who bring people across the Mexican border to seek a better life, but also make a bunch of money in the process.
Somewhat apt but I wasn’t trying to come to an analogy calibrated to a similar ratio of “bad law” to “sympathy level of people breaking it”. If anything, the opposite—a clear showcase that the principle of “you should follow the law” is under specified.
Someone telling me “but X broke the law” doesn’t tell me anything about how good or bad X is. Finding ways to circumvent overreaching and bad regulations is, if anything, virtuous. It’s circumventing good ones which is bad. The legality of a behavior is orthogonal to its moral valence.
"System called Ripley was reportedly used at least two dozen times in 2015 and 2016, including once to prevent tax investigators from collecting evidence....In one case Ripley was deployed to prevent Canadian tax investigators, who believed Uber had violated tax laws, from collecting evidence even though they had a warrant.""
That's just good data protection policy.
A warrant might get you into a property, it doesn't mean that you have to unlock the data!
"...warrant might get you into a property, it doesn't mean...."
Does that depend on how the warrant was written? And could the answer change from country to country?
Fair. I'm sure changes from country to country
Most countries do not have the bill of rights protections that we do
"Lina Khan and other members of the “Yale Law School school of economics” with ties to the movement played major roles in the Biden administration....if you empower people who want to take the economic analysis out of economic policy, we’re going to end up in some very bad policy places."
I blame the Yale Law School for a lot of things -- J.D. Vance, Bart Kavanaugh, Sam Alito, Akil Amar, the list is long.
But I am surprised to hear it criticized for lacking in economists, i.e. people trained in Econ departments.
I don't feel like doing all the work -- hi Caroline! hi Halina! -- but a quick glance shows that many members of the Yale Law School have PhDs from Econ departments -- Christine Jolls, Sarath Sanga, Yair Listokin, Ian Ayres ... and there I got bored. I suspect there are more.
There are problems with the Yale Law School school of economics. But they are not problems that would be solved by sending its members to get a proper training in Econ. Because many of them already did that. The problems lie elsewhere.
Some do, and this is increasing, especially at top schools like Yale. But most of us do not have any real training in quantitative methods. Theory and ideological predispositions fill in the gaps. I’ve seen some sloppy errors when law professors rely on others’ empirical research to inform their policy arguments.
It is definitely not the case that everyone (or even most of the people) who work for Yale Law School subscribe to what Matt is referring to as the "Yale Law School school of economics," any more than everyone in Austria subscribes to "Austrian economics." It's fine as a shorthand term for a viewpoint held by an influential group of scholars, many of whom have a connection to Yale. But that's all. Most YLS scholars are not part of this group, and most members of the group aren't connected to Yale.
“…everyone in Austria subscribes to "Austrian economics."…”
This is also material for a skit.
“It's fine as a shorthand term….” Is it, though, when you have to be an insider in order not to be misled by it?
"Christoph Waltz, call your agent."
What's wrong with Akil Amar?
Amar pretends to be a progressive, but actively supported Kavanaugh in ways that misrepresented Kavanaugh's own merits. Amar is the opiate of the NPR crowd, the apparent feminist who helps out rapists, the apparent abortion-rights supporter who helped create the court that overturned Roe. And he does it all because his position at Yale has made him drunk on the proximity to power. He has become a man without principles, other than YLS über alles.
I met some of the YLS faculty when I got a PhD in history at Yale. Several of them really pride themselves on building relationships that bracket political ideology, and on mentoring rightwing students they consider good people, and on the fact that law is one of the only areas of educated expertise that has rightwing and leftwing superstars who, sometimes, treat each other collegially. I respect all those things - I love that Ginzburg and Scalia used to play squash. I think AA and Amy Chua were treated unfairly for their friendliness with rightwingers. But having personal relationships with Supreme Court justices is probably corrupting at some level.
"...really pride themselves on building relationships...."
Right, so thousands of women die because they don't have access to reproductive health, and it is partly due to my actions in running cover for the reactionary right-wingers who overturned Roe, but that's okay because the important thing is that we can still all go to lunch at Mory's and I still get invited to their parties. Collegiality is far more important than any trivial principle like women's rights.
Profoundly corrupt.
The point is whether you agree with abortion or not.
Roe V Wade was wrongly decided.
Kudos to Amar we're putting aside his own policy preferences
And coming to the correct judicial outcome
I'd be eager to read Milan's take on this!
I hope that Milan will read all of AA's op-eds in support of Kavanaugh and Alito before he develops a settled view about AA.
Seems like another battle of conflict theorists vs mistake theorists
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
LPE's purpose as I see it is to reverse-engineer an intellectual justification for two different emotional impulses that are common on the left. The first is disgust at anyone being extremely rich, when others don't have enough (kind of understandable tbh, even if I don't agree with it). The second is something you see in highly sensitive personality types who think it's bad to "treat people like numbers." I've never seen the latter expressed as well as it was by a young woman on an episode of the Freakonomics podcast when they were interviewing the children of economists about how they felt about their parents:
"I adore my dad. And I think a great deal of what he’s taught me about how to think about the world and how to approach problems and really just how to treat people — when I take that to the logical extreme, that’s how I come to form my politics. I have trouble seeing how market economics and how capitalism are actually meeting our goals of taking care of people. It’s treating people not as people, but as workers and interchangeable bodies. It’s not seeing people for the complexity that we are. And it’s leaving some things up to chance and to a market that’s been rigged from the very beginning. . . . I think both my parents did a really great job of instilling in me and my brothers a sense of kindness towards others. I think we have a really strong, beautiful ethic of mutual aid in which all of our money is shared and we make decisions pretty collectively. And when I think about a more beautiful world, I would want it to look a little bit more like our family, and for people to have those similar networks of care."
People who hold either of these viewpoints have strong antibodies to economic arguments because economic arguments sound to them like the studies tobacco companies used to fund in the '70s and '80s showing that smoking was healthy. You can always get funded to provide scholarship that says things rich people want to hear, so anything the economics profession produces can be automatically discounted.
And that's how you end up with "advocates" who end up making the problem worse. It doesn't matter if you're actually solving homelessness or the housing crisis - all that matters is how you feel.
I think what she said is rather lovely.
Modern market economics has yielded much higher standards of living but it's not utopia. There's room beyond economics for more noble aspirations.
I still can’t get the dog to agree to being a foot rest so alas capitalism has failed.
If you want pure cost-benefit, rational calculator homo economincus then you have to get a cat.
Alas, I am allergic to cats.
I think I maybe have a broader definition of economics, or economic reasoning, than you do. I agree that there are nobler aspirations than simply maximizing per-capita income or whatever, but pursuit of those nobler aspirations also has to be informed by cost-benefit analysis and questions of what's efficacious, how rational actors are going to react, etc., in order for them to be achieved.
"Beautiful ethics of mutual aid" break down in not-even-that-large groups of people because some people freely choose to exploit the benevolence of others.
It can be done in larger groups of people. I grew up as a Jehovah's Witness, and one of the wildest things you would see is after a natural disaster, people would get on a plane or a bus, go to the disaster zone, get in touch with the local congregation and start helping other Witnesses who were affected. Total strangers, and this was a completely charitable impulse, it wasn't until later on that the religion tried to impose a bit of organization and systematicity on this.
But what this original person's vision and the Witnesses do *not* have in common is that I suspect our quoted friend here thinks that the mutual aid should be freely given to all people, there should be no serious efforts at enforcement or selection or anything like that -- i.e., the 'mutual' part tends to get discarded fairly quickly. In religious communities, on the other hand, there is incredibly strong selection, especially in quasi-cult-adjacent groups like the Witnesses where you have to regularly be demonstrating commitment to the group to stay on your congregation's roll of active members. You *need* to do this for any sort of dispersed, decentralized charity to work, because a lot of people are bad actors and even a few begin to poison the logic of the whole enterprise for the volunteers until the whole thing breaks down.
LDS has a lot of services for members. Hell I mean most mainline denominations do, but with different levels of organization. The clearer the barriers between “us” and “them” I think the better the provision.
There was an effort in the last administration to get rid of cost benefit analysis in rulemaking. I don’t know how widely spread it was but there were some senior lawyers and administrators who didn’t want to do it anymore. Some of the impetus was it slows things down. Some was they genuinely did not believe that you should do cost benefit analyses- regardless of what the law and APA said.
I have names, I’d hate to say them because I would probably out myself.
However, one of the reasons the Biden administrations regulations are proving so ephemeral is because his regulators skipped so many statutorily mandated steps in the rulemaking and litigating process.
Can you point to some rulemakings the Biden Admin did that are particularly egregious? Actually just curious if you mean stuff like CFPB's click-to-cancel or something else.
That’s one of them. A bunch of the rules out of the financial regulators were sloppy on their empirical basis (see Brian Johnson’s very effective legal strategy suing them on that basis!)
A lot of the CRA actions we’ve seen aren’t exactly principled either and seem slipshod, but that doesn’t mean the rules they’re killing were kosher.
Frankly, the FTC started off really poorly but got their shit together. Lina Khan gets a lot of shit that should be aimed at Gensler and Chopra
Thanks!
I mean CBAs should sometimes be subject to CBAs. There’s a ton of infrastructure spend and time suck doing the CBAs, at least at EPA where I have a little bit of inside knowledge.
But should the CBAs of CBAs be subject to their own CBAs?
[Pitch Meeting Guy voice] "Ooohh, infinite regression is TIGHT!"
I’m genuinely surprised anyone who lived in DC before Uber could argue that things are worse for consumers. Though I’m making assumptions about the American U law professor I maybe shouldn’t.
You couldn’t get a ride to Virginia or EOTR. There was a zone system and most drivers “credit card reader was broken.”
EOTR?
East of the Anacostia river in DC
gotcha. I was thinking "end of the road"
Thinking out loud here.
Part of my SB journey (hi Caroline and Halina!) has been learning - to my embarassment, because you'd think that this is the sort of thing you learn during a PhD - that precise empirical analysis is important. Unfortunately, precise empirical analysis is tedious and boring, and *educating* people to engage in precise empirical analysis is even more so, and inefficient to boot. Data are ambiguous, and learning to approach them robustly is not something you can teach by rote.
Given that the epistemic environment in general is being assaulted by the opposite of precise empirical analysis - including the idea that precise empirical analysis is suspect - and that education itself is being shortcircuited by, inter alia, LLMs, I have no idea how we continue to educate a society to believe on any level that evidence, data and robust analysis matter. LLMs might enable huge productivity gains; I'm afraid they're also going to make the kind of analysis MY engages in here impossible for anyone outside of a few eccentric auto-didacts.
I'm sure everyone thinks that their discipline or domain or industry or whatever is the only one that approaches things from an unideological position, but I think we're actually headed to vibes all the way down and up.
"...that precise empirical analysis is important."
Okay, but how important?
My calculations show that it is 37.44 important.
I could add some more decimal points, but that would be spurious precision.
37.44 percent, repeating, of course.
"...repeating, of course."
In which case it is *precisely* 37 and 4/9ths.
Leeeeeeerooooooooyyyyyyyyy.....
Also reading and writing in addition to evidence, data, and robust analysis.
Yeah. I'm pretty worried about reading and writing.
Since nobody's brought it up, I will. A common critique of Uber is that the drivers make no money. I've given over 4,000 rides between Lyft and Uber and I can definitively say "it depends." There are better and worse times to drive. On weekdays the good times are around 8am and 5pm for rides to and from work. The big money times are Friday and Saturday nights. You can make good money at those times but you have to be willing to put up with drunk people and be out late. Here's a pretty typical Friday night from a few weeks ago:
https://x.com/Whateve03887524/status/1952369643781603649?t=ATVe7vrFYF5xAPB81EfnDQ&s=19
So about $38/hour from 10:30pm to 3:00am. Do I want to do that every Friday? No. I had a trip coming the next week and wanted extra cash. Anyways, the REALLY volatile earnings were back in the Wild West days of Uber. It used to be that the surge pricing was a multiplier. Now it's a flat dollar amount. For those who don't know, surge pricing is Uber's way of guaranteeing supply of drivers. If there are a lot of people requesting rides and not enough drivers on the road, a surge is generated. Back in the day, it was a multiplier like 2x, 3x, or 5x, etc. This would lead to absurd outcomes like me making $91 on a ride that was only about half an hour because there was a 3x surge. Now the surge is just a flat addition. So maybe rather than 3x it would be +$10. In the new framework, my goal shifts from catching long rides with the surge to catching a series of short ones. Oh yeah, Uber also nerfed the extremities by paying more per minute and less per mile. It used to be that if you picked up a ride during traffic time and didn't travel very far, you were hosed. There were a few rides for which I made less than minimum wage definitely. Now, the per minute pay is such that slow rides aren't COMPLETELY a rip-off.
But yeah, Uber CAN be a rip-off to drive for or it can be profitable, depends when you're willing to drive.
"This would lead to absurd outcomes like me making $91 on a ride that was only about half an hour because there was a 3x surge."
Why is that absurd? The Best Western near Augusta is $125/night all year and $875 during the masters. A ticket to Paris might be $600 in January and $1800 in August.
From several of your posts I can tell you make a lot more money than me. Bully for you! For me, making $91 in 30 minutes is a crazy good deal that I don't expect to happen frequently.
Oh, I thought you meant absurd as in the idea that products should vary in price 3x or 5x based on demand. They certainly do for countless goods and services. It's too bad you can't benefit from that like airlines or hotels or Nvidia can.
Oh, no I miss the Wild West days haha
I guess that ended when in New York on New Years, people were drunk and getting charged 12x or 13x surges and not realizing it until the next morning and they got all pissed off so Uber had to change it. For me, surge chasing at 2am was awesome. The $91 ride occurred on the Saturday night (early Sunday morning) before Halloween at 2am. The ride right before it was $51. I got a total of $142 on two consecutive rides just scooting around Portland in the middle of the night. Good times.
They need an app called G-Ride (Guaranteed Rides) - it's more expensive and subject to surge pricing but you always know you can get a ride in under 5 minutes.
Seeing so many vehicles with both Uber and Lyft signs it's obviously not exclusive. They could all have the G-Ride app which would push a notification we're offering 3x. And all the drivers could hop on.
There is definitely a market for that.
I would never do anything else.
Of course with a rate of 3x, idk how frequent those requests would be.
As a driver, how clear is it to you upfront whether you’re going to be making the amount of money you want to make?
My baseline view on this is that this is exactly how a market _should_ function.
Clear as mud. Hell I don't even know where the passenger is going until I pick them up. Here's what I do know: in Portland, I'll get 73 cents per mile and 25 cents per minute, plus a flat 94 cents per ride, and the ride minimum for me is $4.48. so if you're so drunk you can't walk down the street, I still get $4.48. But yeah, before the ride, I have no clue where you're going and therefore no idea what I stand to make. And even if I was given an estimate, you the passenger are free to change your mind mid-ride about where you want to go. So the upshot of this is that I don't go out driving unless I have several hours of time because I can't risk getting a ride way the hell out to the middle of nowhere. If you're going to drive, set aside several hours, and basically accept every ride you get in that time block.
The one thing I CAN see is the surge and the passenger rating. I usually don't accept people below a 4.7 and if there is a surge, I will strategize with that. If there's a +$10 surge downtown and I get offered one for +$1, I'll probably reject that and move closer in.
“I don’t even know where the passenger is going until I pick them up.”
Wut? When I summon an Uber, I input my origin and my destination! Why won’t Uber share that info with the driver at the outset?
Racism, I believe. People will avoid pickups and drop offs in the hood if they can. I think in Memphis this has led to “no go” zones because of some high profile robberies of uber drivers, crime has gotten out of control there
I don't think that's it. The four pieces of information I get when picking up a passenger are their current location, their name, their rating, and possible surge. So I can still pretty accurately profile by name. I think they do it because drivers would be more likely to turn rides down for distance. I see where they ARE, I just don't see where they're GOING.
Because they don't want drivers being too picky. Do I like that? No. I respond by only driving when I have SEVERAL hours of free time available because I never know when I'm going to get dragged out to the boonies. I ended up in Salem a few weeks ago (about an hour south of Portland).
That seems inefficient, and defeats the purpose of "being an Uber driver is so convenient, I can fit it in little bits of time between my other commitments and earn some money!"
Uber should let you know up front where the destination is, and offer a "long-distance" bonus to entice more drivers to pick up longer drives.
The long distance bonus is that you get $0.73/mile, so I actually prefer long trips if I have time. The day I drove to Salem it was late on a weeknight. Stupid move on my part.
"fitting it in between other tasks" is bullshit. Not worth it unless you have several hours free.
Does Vancouver or Portland have similar same worker protections and living wage laws as Seattle? And under which states were you regulated when you had rides between PDX and Van? I imagine you’d want to be contracted in WA to avoid the state income tax
Apparently recently WA implemented some minimums for ride share drivers so I do make more when I'm north of the river. BUT, when I do drive, usually my very first ride is somebody from Vancouver getting a ride to Portland followed by several rides around Portland, so the boosted WA fares only help me so much.
Nice article, Matt! I was familiar with most of this, but this was a good distillation of coverage on the subject. That said, I will say there's some irony in introducing a copy editor and then this line appearing in the article:
"But that doesn’t mean we should abandon economic analysis entirel" [sic]
(Sorry to bring that up immediately, but I did a double take on that sentence because at first I thought it was ending in an exclamation point ("we should abandon economic analysis entire!") and I was going to kid you about reading too much 19th Century literature.
See also “a push by legal scholars to do the reverse of” …? Maybe she hasn’t started yet!
It’s hard to generalize about all rich people. Some rich people do indeed see the world as zero-sum, and got rich by screwing other people, like Trump, and we see his approach live in trade negotiations. Other rich people get rich by making useful products, like all the multimillionaires and billionaires at Nvidia didn’t screw anyone. The left should be more discerning about anti-rich politics and focus it on the rich people who got rich in zero-sum ways from Trump to taxi cartels rather than the ones who made new products that improve people’s lives.
"But that doesn’t mean we should abandon economic analysis entirel" This cuts off in the middle of a word.
"Y?" I asked myself, "Y you no proofread?"