Is the ‘gig economy’ a myth?

Uber has pretty much single-handedly introduced the phrase “gig economy” into the national pop lexicon. It’s the thing that Hillary Clinton wants to squelch, and it’s the thing that soft libertarians like Rand Paul want to see more of.

Uber, if you haven’t heard of it, is a ride-sharing service that allows anyone with a smartphone and the Uber app to summon a private Uber contractor for a ride to somewhere else. It accomplishes much the same thing as a taxi service, except it has the advantages of (often) costing less, providing better accommodations (drivers’ personal vehicles, one of many quality measurables for which Uber riders can rate their drivers) and the immediacy of convenience that’s well-suited to a supply-demand relationship (you don’t “hail” an Uber ride; you summon a driver from your phone, and a ride appears.)

As independent service contractors begin figuring out how to exploit urban markets, companies like Uber, Airbnb (an app that allows people to rent part of their living space to overnight travelers) and Lyft (a service similar to Uber) have received enough media and Internet attention to create the general impression that some big economic change is underway.

But, argues Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle, there’s probably not — it’s just that the people who use these urban services happen to be the ones who write Internet articles for a living, and they tend to magnify their experiences in their choice of topics.

… [Urban] [j]ournalists may be tempted to over-identify with anxious workers when Uber pops up in their cities, noticeably disrupting an old-fashioned industry. So we get a spate of media attention on worker dissatisfaction with the “gig economy” from people who were never previously moved to write about taxi driver complaints about, say, the very high crime rate faced by cabbies or their problems with the taxi commission — two problems that Uber has at least partially alleviated.

In other words, while Uber’s disruption of an existing labor market is not particularly important to the national economy, it ends up looking important to a particular class of people. And that class of people happens to be the one that writes all the news articles. Which is why we keep reading about the gig economy, even though much of the country would hardly have noticed it without those reports.

The Wall Street Journal addresses the likely “gig economy” myth more directly, reviewing statistics that indicate the independent-contractor workforce doesn’t appear to be encroaching on traditional staffing.

“Official government data shows around 95% of those who report having jobs are accounted for on the formal payroll of U.S. employers, little changed from a decade ago,” the Journal notes.

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