Yours and Mine

That's the name of my review of Arun Sundararajan's book "The Sharing Economy" that appears in the June 2016 issue of the IMF's Finance and Development (F&D) magazine. I liked the book. It taught me a lot about things like bitcoin, blockchain technology, and the history of this new world where what's yours is also mine. That's the idea behind the peer-to-peer marketplace where there's no middleman, i.e., government regulators, standing between you and what you want. Think Uber and Lyft, Airbnb and Taskrabbit, Etsy and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. They're not companies and they don't have many employees. Yet, they're completely transforming the way that consumers get what they want. A common example is Uber. Why stand out in the rain with your arm helplessly flailing through the air trying to hail a practically non-existent taxi on New Year's eve when you can just push the App on your SmartPhone from your cozy den and away you go. It's magic. To put it in Adam Smith's terms --- supply and demand now intersect! Yet, all's not entirely rosy in the sharing economy. Workers don't get paid very much, and they get hardly any benefits, if they get any at all. Is this "crowd-based capitalism" the end of employment, as Sundararajan warns? It's too soon to tell. But one thing is certain. Someone's going to have to pay for health care, education, and retirement. Stay tuned.