karzeem's comments

The taxi industry has existed for a long time with a lot of the regulations that people are trying to force onto Uber. But drivers flocked from taxis to Ubers as soon as that option became available. That suggests that at least for those who've opted into Uber, Uber is preferable. Reducing the availability of that option (which is what these rules will cause) is going to hurt them, because the fact that they're doing Uber means that it was their best available choice.

That's what they're saying to justify it. That and the evergreen appeal to "security reasons". But these are the same people who, every few years, try to ban strong encryption. The next time they bring that up — which you'd better believe they will immediately the next time the right news story presents itself — they're going to use this as precedent. "See, we've been banning technology for all these reasons, what's one more little step? It's for national security."

One distinction I should have drawn is between running an Airbnb with a landlord's permission (or as a landlord yourself) versus doing it in violation of other agreements you have (like with your landlord or co-op board or whatever). If you're violating contracts, then yeah, you shouldn't be doing that and other people in the building have a right to be upset.

But if you own the building and are running it as an Airbnb hotel, I don't know that it's a self-evident fact that you're putting significant negative externalities onto your neighboring buildings. I can imagine negative externalities, but I can also imagine plenty of positive ones. These are exactly the kind of calculations that regulators are empirically horrible at making, even when they have the best intentions (and often they don't have even that going for them).

The ban on short-term rentals is a ban on a use of property which is provably very valuable to the people on both sides of those transactions. Banning that use destroys value for both those sides. The objection is that short-term rentals divert housing stock away from long-term renters, but that's not a problem with short-term rentals (which are, as we can see from the fact that they're so popular, an even more in-demand use of the property than long-term rentals), it's a problem with the low supply of housing. Which is a problem caused by the very regulators who are riding in to "save" renters from Airbnb.

I'm with you that if they were doing that in violation of their lease, then it's wrong.

Dense, multi-use blocks are part of the magic of New York. And there are hotels comingled with residential buildings all over the city. I'm not saying tenants should be free to violate their agreements with landlords, but these uses of Airbnb are solving a problem that city laws have created (an extreme lack of housing and hotel supply). I blame those city laws as a root cause. Putting supply on Airbnb is just water moving around obstacles the laws have created.

It harms communities by allowing housing inventory to flow to where the demand is most intense?

The key is don't follow accounts that tweet about politics. I filtered mine down a few years ago and have loved it ever since.

Any more info out there on the technical details of the bust?

I'd say that's a good argument for fixing whatever the flaws are in the handoff process that make it even worse than 28-hour shifts.

When given a choice, drivers stampeded from yellow cabs to Uber. Riders stampeded from yellow cabs to Uber. It's clear which one most parties prefer. And that suggests that all those government "services" around the provision of taxi service are valued at or below 0 by most people.

What kind of books do you write?

Huge portions of the cost of building a utility are due to local regulations, not the inherent cost of doing it. http://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-jus...

Foreign competition is important, because some things (like oil drilling or sugar farming) are only doable in a few places, so if one company captures those places it'll be tough to compete.

Also, the fact that some companies became very dominant doesn't mean ipso facto that they harmed consumers. If a company becomes huge fair and square (as opposed to via regulatory capture or other coercive means), it may just mean that people like their product the best.

What are some good examples of sustained monopolies in markets that aren't heavily regulated?

Those monopolies were generally protected by tariffs, expensive licenses or regulatory costs, or other laws that blocked competition.

Some dominant companies of course emerged in that era, but I'd be interested to see evidence that companies that weren't insulated from competition by government policies actually used their dominance to harm consumers.

There are huge regulatory hurdles to starting new ISPs.

This is an interesting angle. Are there examples of it actually happening?

Genuine question: is it safe to assume that dumping is bad for consumers? It's clearly bad for competitors, but it's basically like handing out free money to consumers. The concern is that once all the competitors die, the dumper will have a monopoly and jack prices up. But empirically, what are some examples of that happening? With few exceptions, it's only possible for monopolies to sustain above-market prices when laws block new competitors from starting up.

There's a book called "Catastrophic Care" that directly addresses this question. It's an expansion of an article the same author wrote for The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-amer...). And for a summary of the book in video form, here's a long interview the author did with Malcolm Gladwell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP--XMgEv4c

To answer your question, the way we think of health insurance isn't compatible with a free market system. Insurance pools risk and money to cap your losses in rare, ruinous events. But that's not how we use health insurance. We use health insurance to pay for low-cost, common, certain-to-happen events (blood work, checkups, X-rays, sprained joints, etc.). To borrow an example from the book, imagine we had grocery insurance. Every month, you paid $500 to the grocery insurance company, and you could go to the store to pick out any covered groceries. The market for food would quickly take on all the negative features we find in the market for healthcare. Prices that are crazy and only get higher, minimal competitive forces against low-quality providers, no transparency for consumers, etc.

Market forces are great at lowering prices while increasing quality, but they only work if people personally decide how and where to spend their money. If you give your money to a third party who then makes all the spending decisions, it smothers all the price/demand/competition signals that providers should naturally get. (And which, in a healthy market, automatically put providers out of business when their prices get to high or their results dip too low.)

To borrow from the book again: it seems crazy to expect people to pay for healthcare out of pocket. But add up your premiums. You're probably paying $6-10k per year right now. That's many times more than enough to cover typical healthcare in most years. With plenty left over to buy catastrophic coverage for high-cost low-probability stuff. And in a market where people are making their own decisions with their own money, prices would quickly drop, which would stretch your out-of-pocket dollars much further than they go today. Every $2500 MRI would go out of business, replaced by $500 ones. (We already see this kind of price deflation in the corners of medicine where people do pay out of pocket, namely laser vision correction, plastic surgery, and to some extent walk-in checkup clinics.)

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