Jack is also driving for Square to help combat the inequality that has proliferated alongside innovation. He makes a point of holding Square events in cities like Detroit and St. Louis that have suffered as manufacturing jobs have left the United States. He views Square as a product that can help these struggling areas incubate new businesses. [...]

[...] underemployment for young engineers. Radicalization, unemployment, and engineering skills are a nasty combination. Many suicide bombers and bomb makers that Hamas has produced have come with this background. The best way for the West Bank to not end up like Gaza is through economic integration and well-being.

[...] When I last checked, there were more than 600 castles available, with prices often approaching $10,000 a night. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but the techno-utopianism behind its origins and narrative has long been passed by economic reality. In some cases, the sharing economy has turned what might have once been a casual favor into a financial transaction. That is hardly the stuff of "sharing." In most cases, sharing-economy businesses are just businesses. Brian and Joe didn't share their spare air mattresses; they rented them out. To the extent that there is an underlying ideology, it is not about sharing or creating community around the breakfast table; it is the economic theory of neoliberalism, encouraging the free flow of goods and services in a market without government regulation.

[...] Uber is developing a ride-sharing model that aspires to take 1 million cars off the streets of London while creating 100,000 jobs. Even if it comes near a fraction of this goal, it is still all for the good for reducing carbon emissions and for employment.

[...] "Before Uber there was in Milan, Italy, in Lyon, France, two or three mini-cab companies that used to compete [...] They've all ceased to exist. The same thing will happen all over the world. You will still have drivers. But that's the most unskilled job in the line. The rest of the money will flow to Uber shareholders in Silicon Valley. So a huge chunk of the Italian GDP just moved to Silicon Valley. With these platforms, the Valley has become like ancient Rome. It exerts tribute from all its provinces. The tribute is the fact that it owns these platform businesses. Every classified ad in Italy used to go into a town newspaper. Now it goes to Google. Pinterest will basically replace magazine sales. Now Uber dominates transport."

[...]

This is an alarming trend, and to an extent, Charlie is right. There's value leaving local hubs and heading to Silicon Valley. But the drain is mitigated by a few factors. First, there is the near-inevitable fact that the large platforms in Silicon Valley will be going public. Their ownership will be much more distributed than those locally owned cab companies, and many of the beneficiaries of those early investments are pension funds that invest in the big venture capital and private equity funds. Those pension funds manage the retirement funds for people in the working class like teachers, police officers, and other civil servants. This doesn't fully account for the loss, and it doesn't negate the irony that the people driving cars for Uber don't have pensions, but it's worth noting in the face of Charlie's predictions. Also important is the fact that there is indeed new value being created in local hubs whenever platforms like Airbnb become an option.

Finally, Airbnb extends the opportunity for supplemental income to hundreds of thousands of households. I think it is no coincidence that the sharing economy took off during the economic crisis, when people throughout the United States and Europe needed extra income. Half of Airbnb hosts are moderate or low income. [...] 47 percent of Airbnb hosts say that hosting allowed them to stay in their homes.

The opportunity to work on a project-by-project basis involves trade-offs. There is more independence and flexibility but fewer worker protections and rights. This too tends to skew toward the preferences of younger workers who are less focused on entitlement programs and who don't enter the workforce expecting to have just a few employers over their lifetime.

This might be manageable if the laborer is providing very expensive, highly sought-after engineering skills, but if you are a janitor, having to migrate from a full-time employer with benefits such as workers' compensation and health insurance to brokering your services on a sharing-economy platform will lead to less well-being. When the janitor has to list his spare bedroom on Airbnb, it is not supplemental income--it is survival income. As workers enter middle age and have kids, the need for benefits grows. If more of the labor force is sharing economy-based temporary employment without benefits, it hammers the working class and pushes them into safety net programs. For all the efficiencies of the sharing economy, toward the end of the life or if a worker becomes sick or injured, the responsibility of government increases. Worker protections have shifted from employers to taxpayer-funded government solutions.

Yet as these economic changes take place [...] the role of the state as a regulator has been diminished.

As the sharing economy grows as a share of the total economy, the safety net needs to grow with it. It's a necessary cost for allowing loose labor markets to work without much regulation, and if it generates enormous amounts of wealth for the platform owners, then the platform owners can and should help pay for added costs to society.

[...] Fraud protection is a built-in part of the financial world we live in, which we've simply come to accept as the cost of doing business. But Bitcoin at its best could make fraud impossible unless one's private key is stolen and make the thieves easy to find even if a key is stolen. The result could be a major drop in fraud. Furthermore, by codifying trust for high-value transactions, the blockchain could wipe out middlemen and friction in a variety of transactions, creating consumer surplus. On the global stage, it could also help bring frontier countries into the economic mainstream.