the sharing economy

Distorted investment priorities, as wealth gets directed into what will earn the largest profit and not into what most people really need (so public health, public education, and even dikes for periodically swollen rivers receive little attention);Worsening exploitation of workers, since the harder, faster, and longer people work—just as the less they get paid—the more profit is earned by their employer (with this incentive and driven by the competition, employers are forever finding new ways to intensify exploitation);Overproduction of goods, since workers as a class are never paid enough to buy back, in their role as consumers, the ever growing amount of goods that they produce (in the era of automation, computerization and robotization, the gap between what workers produce—and can produce—and what their low wage allows them to consume has increased enormously);Unused industrial capacity (the mountain of unsold goods has resulted in a large percentage of machinery of all kinds lying idle, while many pressing needs—but needs that the people who have them can't pay for—go unmet);Growing unemployment (machines and raw materials are available, but using them to satisfy the needs of the people who don't have the money to pay for what could be made would not make profits for those who own the machines and raw materials—and in a market economy profits are what matters);Growing social and economic inequality (the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer, many absolutely and the rest in relation to the rapidly growing wealth of the rich);The same market experiences develop a set of anti-social attitudes and emotions (people become egotistical, concerned only with themselves. "Me first", "anything for money", "winning in competition no matter what the human costs" become what drives them in all areas of life. They also become very anxious and economically insecure, afraid of losing their job, their home, their sale, etc.; and they worry about money all the time. In this situation, feelings as well as ideas of cooperation and mutual concern are seriously weakened, where they don't disappear altogether, for in a market economy it is against one's personal interest to cooperate with others);Worsening ecological degradation (since any effort to improve the quality of the air and of the water costs the owners of industry money and reduces profits, our natural home becomes increasingly unlivable);

An individual with no specialized skills should be able to make an average of $41,000 per year in the SERead Hernandez, 23, used to work at Starbucks, but she isn’t going back after averaging $1,200 a month this fall hosting strangers’ dogs in her apartment through website DogVacay. “It’s so much more rewarding than working in a customer-service setting.”Airbnb commissioned a study of its economic impact on San Francisco last year and found a “spillover effect.” Because an Airbnb rental tends to be cheaper than a hotel, people stay longer and spent $1,100 in the city, compared with $840 for hotel guests; 14% of their customers said they would not have visited the city at all without Airbnb.Today, City CarShare members save an average of more than $8,000 per year compared with the costs of private car ownership. Studies have shown, for example, that for every reduction of 15,000 owned cars, a city keeps $127 million in the local economy as people are able to get what they need within a smaller geographic area.