real utopias

The other night, I had the opportunity to see Rachel Botsman, co-author of What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumptionand prominent sharing economy innovator, speak for Let’s Collaborate NYC on how the socioeconomic phenomenon is transforming the way we live, work, and consume. She’s spoken on TED before, but I thought that this fireside chat with Wrede Petersmeyer of Airbnb offered a more intimate setting to clarify some points about collaborative consumption, not to mention it was pretty neat to sit just a few feet in front of a thought leader I admire. At the end, Katie Bolin of Spark Capital also led a startup pitch session, featuring local NYC early-stage startups operating within the space: Farmigo, PicSell, Sailo,SpareHire, Eleven James, and SpareChair. Incredibly cool to see some local companies participate in this larger global movement.

The “labour share” of national income has been falling across much of the world since the 1980s (see chart). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a club of mostly rich countries, reckons that labour captured just 62% of all income in the 2000s, down from over 66% in the early 1990s. That sort of decline is not supposed to happen. For decades economists treated the shares of income flowing to labour and capital as fixed (apart from short-run wiggles due to business cycles). When Nicholas Kaldor set out six “stylised facts” about economic growth in 1957, the roughly constant share of income flowing to labour made the list. Many in the profession now wonder whether it still belongs there.