Except that the go-to solution to every industry problems has been (and continues to be) to regulate it centrally with some agency or shut it down when that doesn't make sense, which in reality only works for a big-company full time salary job oriented economy. Instead of strengthening property laws and other personal liability protections, aka the type of recourses available to contractors, and/or simply offering traditional services and protections to everyone, not just full-time employee or those who meet a byzantine list of special conditions.
Instead of trying to fix these out-of-date legacy systems, a legal and regulatory system designed for a previous generation, everyone seems to want to attack the 'gig economy' and Silicon Valley as some purposefully exploitative entity, as if this is why Uber came into existence. Rather than a natural evolution of the workplace in a high-tech economy.
My favourite are those pushing the idea that unions are the missing piece of the puzzle in 2017.
Instead of understanding the history of labor force exploitation in the United States, everyone wants to pretend that a high-tech gloss over a return to Gilded Age-style Robber barons is a “natural evolution.” Tech workers survive in comfort within the last remaining vestiges of benefits that union members fought and died to obtain. The gig economy is just what they called “piecework” a century ago.
You can make all of the correlations to historical trendlines you like but this is a new phenomenon with plenty of benefits to both the customer and workers compared to previous systems, which is why it exists, almost entirely as a result of technology. It's been disruptive and sudden largely due to a complete lack of innovation within existing systems, a possibly inherently feature of previous models. Not driven by some malicious intent of some nerds in California, as the common narratives like to push. That doesn't mean it's not flawed either, all new systems have growing pains.
But more importantly, ignoring how it fits into academic economic history, it's not going away any time soon and we're not going back to an economy where big companies + union model makes sense again merely because our legal/regulatory system was previously designed for that.
They say the political right is the one obsessed with pining for the old days in the US but I see it just as much nostalgia coming from the left. And it does little to help people solve the problems they have today and, likely more so, in the future.
The intentions of “nerds” are entirely irrelevant if the outcome is widespread economic tenuousness.
Sweeping aside history because you’re arriving at the same kind of poverty by novel means is quite the hand wave. No one disagrees that how we address these problems is going to be different from times past, but to pretend that things like class relations are ahistorical defies any notion of reasoned consideration. And especially in an age of such extreme income inequality that the greatest predictor of one’s future wealth is that of their parents.
> The intentions of “nerds” are entirely irrelevant if the outcome is widespread economic tenuousness.
Not if we're talking about history and that's very much the history being written in popular culture.
You specifically said that it's not a "natural evolution" because a similar thing happened in the past during the gilded age. And instead it's some sort of regression back to that?
My entire comment counters that sentiment. The context and motivations are very different this time around, even if some (keyword is some) of the outcomes are similar. And when context and motivation are different then the effective solutions are going to also be very different.
> but to pretend that things like class relations are ahistorical
The typical academic writing where "class relations" are the central worldview tends to push more and more economic control to centralization and socialist ideology.
If I missed an evolution in the solutions offered there (ie, deprioritizing property and tort law in favour of more unions, centralization, agency oversight, laws that only apply to full-time employee, etc), then I'll happily admit I'm wrong to dismiss it as more of the same...
So either you want to cripple the modern industrial evolution, ala Uber in London, to go back to the previous model or your think those same systems will somehow work in the new era. All I'm saying is the previous generations solutions are a poor fix for this problem. And buying into 'working class vs everyone else' worldview and the socialist breadbasket that comes with that, rather than strengthening the individual's ability to not be exploited within the context of a decentralized capitalist system through stronger courts protecting contractors and modernized government services, is a misguided and nostalgic proposition.
Instead of trying to fix these out-of-date legacy systems, a legal and regulatory system designed for a previous generation, everyone seems to want to attack the 'gig economy' and Silicon Valley as some purposefully exploitative entity, as if this is why Uber came into existence. Rather than a natural evolution of the workplace in a high-tech economy.
My favourite are those pushing the idea that unions are the missing piece of the puzzle in 2017.