Ours is the age of sharing, gigging and Ubering just about everything.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
When you leave here tonight,
maybe you will get on your Uber app
and you will get someone to take you home in their personal car.
Let us imagine that you decide to go on a vacation,
maybe you'll go on to Airbnb and stay with someone
in their own home while they're there.
These are the things we didn't do that long ago, but it goes further.
Let's say you go to IKEA, and you buy your child some furniture,
and you're facing putting together a crib?
You don't have to learn how to use that Allen wrench anymore,
you can go onto TaskRabbit and get somebody else to do it for you.
Le's say you're tired of cooking.
You can go onto Blue Plate,
and you can get someone to use a shared kitchen,
and they will deliver that fresh meal to your door
for your family to eat, and you don't have to cook anymore.
Now, the interesting thing about all these uses,
and a lot of the other uses of the sharing economy,
is that they profoundly change
the way that we think about the way our economy works
and the way we've done business.
The other interesting thing is that a lot of them are also illegal.
Now, I wrote an article
called "First Principles for Regulating the Sharing Economy"
that was recently published in the Harvard Journal on Legislation,
and in that, I deal with a lot of the technical issues of this illegality.
But I want to focus here today on four principles
for why you should embrace the sharing economy
and ways that it can affect your life.
I'm going to call these the core principles:
Community, Ownership, Reputation, and Equity.
So let's start with community.
When we think about community,
we often think about family, close friends.
But in the '70s, a sociologist named Mark Granovetter
started thinking about other types of community.
And what he was looking at in particular were what he came to call "weak ties."
These were the people that you barely know.
Jane Jacobs, the urbanist, might have called these, in her lingo,
"hop skip" people, the kind of people that help to bridge boundaries between us.
And what he found in his research, and subsequent sociologists have found,
is that it's along these weak ties
that a lot of information in communities flows,
and the kind of the political cohesiveness of our society tends to rest.
Well, that's all big thoughts and everything,
but I'm going to argue that the sharing economy can be valuable
because it provides us these opportunities to make weak ties in communities.
Let me give you an example.
My family, we rented an Airbnb
in a single-family residential neighborhood in Bend, Oregon.
And we go there, and we're at the park with my two-year-old daughter at the time,
and we start talking to another guy who's there,
who lives there and has a two-year-old.
And we start talking about how hard it is to find a place to go with kids,
a place go out to eat.
He tells us about this pop-up beer garden that has come up across town,
where there's food trucks,
he says, "It's a great place to go, you should go there."
We go, we have a great time, it was perfect.
That's the kind of information that wasn't in the tourist books,
that we wouldn't have found ourselves.
But it was that weak tie
that provided us the information to have a little bit of a better time.
That's the kind of community building the sharing economy can really facilitate.
But there's another issue of community that we really need to think about.
Let's say that instead of just us being there at the playground,
there were 15 people that were vacationing in that residential neighborhood.
And we were all there with our two-year-old daughters,
and he comes with his two-year-old daughter.
Well now, suddenly, it's not the same type of experience
that he was expecting when he went to the playground, right?
So one of the issues as we think about these types of uses
that allow us to engage in the communities that we visit
is that we have to think about the effects on the communities that we are visiting.
So while the sharing economy can provide us great new opportunities
through things like weak ties, to find new ways into the community,
we also need to think about the types of effects that we have
on established communities, and make sure that we're protecting them as well.
Okay, so that's community.
Now, let's talk about ownership.
Americans, we love to own things, right?
Let me give you a couple of examples
about how the sharing economy can change our emphasis on ownership
to an emphasis on access to owning collective goods.
Okay.
Let's say you're working in your wood shop trying to make a piece of furniture,
and you find out that halfway through you need some sort of specialty sander.
Well, one thing you could do is you can go down to Home Depot
and buy that thing that costs $100 or $200, right?
And you're going to use it, then it's going to sit there for a year
or maybe two years, or maybe you'll use it five times in the entire time you own it.
Then you'll sell it for $5, 20 years from now.
The alternative would be, what's happening now,
is that a lot of places have lending tool libraries.
You go, you need that specialty sander, you use it for the weekend you need it,
and then you take it back, then someone else gets to use it as well.
Let me give you another example of a sort of science fiction future.
Autonomous vehicles.
When we think about autonomous vehicles,
which are probably going to be here sooner than we imagine,
in another decade or two, right?
These are vehicles that will drive themselves.
Now some people will buy these, right?
These are the people that buy Teslas or something, right?
But a lot of us are not going to buy an autonomous vehicle.
Instead what we're going to do is we're going to access it
through a shared autonomous vehicle, okay?
And so what we want to do is think about creating an access point
to collective ownership of that autonomous vehicle.
This is precisely what General Motors and Lyft are teaming up to do right now.
You may have heard about this,
but GM just purchased a $500 million stake in the ride-sharing app Lyft.
And what they are trying to do is precisely this:
create an access point for you and for all of us
to these new autonomous vehicles.
Alright.
So what we've seen here with ownership is that the collective access -
if we focus on access to collectively owned goods,
we can do two things.
First, we can better utilize underutilized goods,
that's the sander that sits on the shelf,
instead of sitting on the shelf, a bunch of people get to use it.
And the other thing is we can plan for infrastructure better.
We can better use our infrastructure dollars.
So if we collectively own that car and it comes only when we need it,
maybe we don't need a five-lane highway, maybe we only need a three-lane highway.
And maybe we don't all need driveways anyway, right?
The car will just pull up right in front of our house when we need it.
Now, that may all sound like science fiction future,
but it will be here before we know it.
And if we focus on this type of thing,
we can substantially increase the way we plan for infrastructure in the future.
Alright, reputation.
When we think about reputation,
we know that it's an important part of business, right?
But the reputation in the sharing economy is all;
it is everything.
For both the workers and the consumers,
it's important that we as individuals be able to own our reputations,
and moreover, that we can take it with us.
So, what does that mean?
If you decide to use the sharing economy, like say you decide to hire a driver
to take you from point A to point B on Uber.
You're going to rate that person; you're going to give them five stars.
Great job, they got me there on time.
And they are maybe going to rate you, maybe give you four stars,
because you weren't such a great conversationalist or something.
Well, maybe in that one rating, there's some variation.
But if that driver takes 100 different rides,
or 1,000 rides over the course of a year, they start to earn a reputation.
If they're a great driver, five stars,
you're going to want to take that ride with that person.
Same with you as a passenger, right?
Reputation matters.
But here's the interesting thing.
If that Uber driver decides that they want to go some startup,
can they take their reputation with them?
Let's say it's a company that does the exact same thing,
some other startup, a Boise Uber equivalent; they want to go local, right?
Well, they can't take that reputation with them.
They can't take those 1,000 five-star ratings.
I think that's a problem;
I think that you should be able to own your reputation.
Moreover, let's talk about across platforms.
You want to hire that person to come and assemble your baby's crib.
Well, maybe you also want to know about their ratings as a driver on Uber,
or hosting people on Airbnb.
It may not be definitive with how they are with an Allen wrench,
and you may decide to hire that person anyway,
but wouldn't you want to know if they had bad ratings
or people thought they had bad driving skills or something?
These are the kinds of things that we would want to know,
and that reputation should be portable,
and somebody should be able to own it individually.
Alright.
Finally, equity.
One of the most important things that we've done over the last 50 years
is to ensure equitable accommodation in things like hotels and taxis.
People that are disabled, minorities in our population,
have historically struggled
with these types of public accommodations and public utilities.
African Americans having trouble finding taxis,
people with disabilities not being able to access buildings.
We've done a lot over the last 50 years with the Americans with Disabilities Act
and specifically the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
They've done a lot to assure that the disabled and minorities
in our society have access to these public accommodations.
But there is a lawsuit in California right now
where a number of blind individuals have alleged they've had a hard time
getting rides with ride sharing companies like Uber and Lyft,
because drivers do not want to have their dogs
in the cars with them.
At the same time, a recent study out of Harvard University
has found that those with African-American names on Airbnb
have had a much harder time securing a place to stay through the site
than those with non-African-American sounding names.
These point to problems with the sharing economy
that we need to address.
I would argue that while the nature of the regulations to ensure equity
may be difficult for us to think through,
they're important to ensure that equity remains viable
in this new economy that we're creating.
So these are the core principles.
These are the core principles, and If we follow through with these,
and we make the core principles
part of the way that we think through the sharing economy,
we can make sure that we have not only new opportunities for the sharing economy,
a new way of doing business,
but one that is equitable and can actually revolutionize our lives.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)