And the world will live as one
By 2030, the key question won’t be if network effects dominant the economy but what type of network effects operate at the local, national, regional, or global level. While most people assume that all network effects are crucial in nature, very few actually are. For instance, local network effects are crucial in the case of riding-hailing services. As a rider, I care about how many drivers are nearby when I need a ride. Similarly, most casual dating platforms rely on local network effects. By contrast, matchmaking apps are mostly national in scope. Certain platforms rely primarily on regional effects. For instance, Airbnb long realized that most international tourism is regional rather than global. In some large countries like the United States and China- most tourism is domestic. Thus, while Uber needs to create a critical mass of drivers and riders in each locality, Airbnb needs to reach a minimum threshold in each region. There are relatively few purely global two-sided platforms.
By 2030 the situation will likely become even more tilted in Asia’s favor, fundamentally because of the region’s rapidly growing middle class. The sharing and collaborative economy, however, is creating entirely different stripes of consumers and workers.
Proletarians of all countries, swipe!
Many gig workers are simply trying to avoid becoming cubicle dwellers like those depicted in the Dilbert coming strip. “I have a story to tell through my writing, and Uber is allowing me to do it,” says Kara Oh, a sixty-seven-year-old Uber driver from Santa Barbara, California, who writes novels in the morning and drives people around in the afternoon and evening. Travis Kalanick, the co-founder of Uber and erstwhile CEO, once argued that “drivers value their independence-the freedom to push a button rather than punch a clock, to use Uber and Lyft simultaneously, to drive most of the week or just a few hours.”
That’s the main benefit that other analysts see in the gig economy. As Diane Mulcahy, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation and a lecturer at Babson College writes in her book The Gig Economy, “Traditional full-time jobs are insecure, increasingly scarce, and filled with employees who wish they were doing something else with their lives.” Mulcahy believes that digital platforms “can offer an attractive, interesting, flexible, and even lucrative and secure alternative to the corporate cube,” In her view, “there is a trend towards focusing more on time and experiences rather than material goods. The emphasis of the new American Dream is quality of life, not the quantity of stuff.”
The labor market of 2030 may look very different as two-sided platforms continue to expand. It may be true that, as NYU’s Sundararajan claims, they are an efficient response to the fact that some people own things desired by others, or that some people have money while others have time. As Hill reflected in Salon, “Eventually many traditional economy companies may adapt an app-based labor market in ways we can’t yet anticipate, but that means we need to figure out a way to launch a universal, portable safety net for all U.S workers.”
2030 by Mauro.F.Guillen: 185–190
