AKA The "Sharing Economy" Is A Racist Sexist Feudal Economy - Uber/Lyft edition

Pando... Locked, provides the blurb:

This month in serious ridesharing allegations

Nathaniel Mott

October was defined by a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research which revealed that many Uber and Lyft drivers are sexist. The landmark study found that drivers in Seattle made African American passengers wait longer to be picked up, that Boston drivers often took female passengers along more expensive routes, and that drivers in both cities cancelled trips much more often if the prospective passenger had an African American-sounding name.

These findings are particularly damning because ride-hailing services are supposed to help people avoid these types of problems. Can’t hail a cab? Book an Uber. Don’t trust a taxi driver to get you home safe? Use Lyft. That’s the idea, anyway, but anyone who’s read these monthly wrap-ups knows that neither of these services are as safe as they seem...

Nber Working Paper Series
Racial And Gender Discrimination In Transportation Network Companies

Yanbo Ge
Christopher R. Knittel
Don MacKenzie
Stephen Zoepf

Working Paper 22776

Abstract: Passengers have faced a history of discrimination in transportation systems. Peer transportation companies such as Uber and Lyft present the opportunity to rectify long-standing discrimination or worsen it. We sent passengers in Seattle, WA and Boston, MA to hail nearly 1,500 rides on controlled routes and recorded key performance metrics. Results indicated a pattern of discrimination, which we observed in Seattle through longer waiting times for African American passengers—as much as a 35 percent increase. In Boston, we observed discrimination by Uber drivers via more frequent cancellations against passengers when they used African American-sounding names. Across all trips, the cancellation rate for African American sounding names was more than twice as frequent compared to white sounding names. Male passengers requesting a ride in low-density areas were more than three times as likely to have their trip canceled when they used a African American-sounding name than when they used a white-sounding name. We also find evidence that drivers took female passengers for longer, more expensive, rides in Boston. We observe that removing names from trip booking may alleviate the immediate problem but could introduce other pathways for unequal treatment of passengers.

All one has to do is read the whiny headlines and listen to people discuss the BART strike, even so-called anarchists, to know the only people the Bay Area’s hipster elite care about are themselves… Do note that Uber rideshare’s financial backers include Goldman Sachs. The article includes more information about the kind of financial scum “Hip Startups” are willing to collaborate with.

Sharing Rides, Hoarding Profits: How the SF Bay area's technology elite are destroying poor & people of color's incomes by 'Disruptive Innovation' (link)

http://auntieimperial.tumblr.com/post/64490895571

Bonus Track:

TaskRabbit...

In summer 2012, Thiel’s (Peter Thiel, PayPal founder) venture-capital group Founders Fund became a key investor in the new ideological startup Taskrabbit. While it nominally exists to turn a profit, Taskrabbit is an ingenious vehicle for social engineering which aims to lessen the control of government not over money, but work. By exploiting high unemployment as an opportunity to diminish workers’ rights, Taskrabbit aims to create an alternate, privatized set of norms based on the labor paradigm of the 1920s: “liberty of contract.”

The Ten Ninety Nihilists By Empire-Logistics, Libcom.