I am the CEO of Foxes. Hens deserve better.

when a simple ‘and’ achieves the outer limits of the known epistemology

pretty sure workers don’t get to choose

I see the CEO of Uber has neglected to read my paper “Antitrust, the Gig Economy, and Labor Market Power,” or for that matter the paper by his own chief economist celebrating the surveillance-enabled control Uber exercises over the routes its drivers take.

Everyone with a literal “the problems are bad, but their causes are good” on their bingo card gets to take a bow.

This is, quite simply and seriously, entirely incorrect, both positively and normatively. Uber could increase driver pay & do literally nothing else. And policy that improves worker security increases their autonomy, and vice versa.

So this is almost certainly going to be misleading, after Uber was already sanctioned by the FTC for lying to drivers about pay. BUT note that Uber has repeatedly claimed it’s technologically impossible for them to provide this data to state unemployment insurance agencies.

The pandemic eliminated a good deal of this work, putting the lie to the propaganda you’ve been spewing for years about how the gig economy is itself an alternative to the “safety net” of social insurance. Yet here you are coming hat in hand for a bailout for your premiums.

Say what you will about the CEO of Uber, at least he recognizes that all labor under capitalism is evil.

This statement is interesting in light of the weekend’s kerfuffle about the NBER paper on the water shutoff RCT. It’s saying both Uber is itself an agent of countercyclical labor policy, but also that the government needs to enact a favorable regulatory regime to enable it.

The point being that today’s dominant elite ideology of technocracy is pretty continuous with yesterday’s dominant elite ideology of privatization. Uber & public policy are both complements & substitutes.