The Sharing Economy: Capitalism's Last Stand? - Our World - 0 views
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Access over ownership. After decades of excessive consumerism, this prospect sounded revolutionary.
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I’d like to set something straight: the collaborative economy and sharing economy (or collaborative consumption) are not the same concept.
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If we want to assess whether it should be seen as the first part of a new economic paradigm or as capitalism’s latest trick to survive at all costs, we have to analyze its likely effects on inequality.
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From a collective standpoint, it might well be better to have access to a resource rather than owning it.
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But if someone asks you to free yourself from all earthly possessions, you should always ask: if it’s not mine, then who owns it?
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Employees and customers are but a mean to an end, and in general, a good way to maximize return on investment is to get your customers to pay as much as possible (non-price competitiveness) and on the other side to pay your employees as little as possible (price competitiveness).
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This point is the most controversial of all. Sharing economy services could accelerate the phenomenon of job destruction.
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Despite all those nice speeches about empowerment and entrepreneurship, people in the sharing economy are nothing but an extreme precariat
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a new deal had to be made: people would no longer be paid according to the value they actually produced, but they would get — seemingly — unlimited access to credit.
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computers and robots will soon replace most human labor anyway. Wage labor cannot be saved, and rather than fighting long-lost battles, people should start thinking seriously about solutions such as Universal Basic Income.
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If you cannot predict something with a reasonable amount of certainty, stop arguing endlessly about it and start acting towards the outcome you would like to see
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What happens next, no one can tell. Are Silicon Valley venture capitalistss currently being fooled into creating the embryo of a P2P economic paradigm, in which they will lose most of their influence? Or are the enthusiasts talking about empowerment being tricked into creating a new kind of serfdom?
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Will big companies be able to face new competition from startups and win over new customers? If that is your main concern, you should probably stop talking about communities and peers. If the collaborative economy cannot help you solve our growing inequality problem, it should be of no interest to you.
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