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Comment by johnnyanmac | Hacker News Reader

Not too surprising. That California Prop 22 from 2020 and similar props throughout the country is finally paying off. A waning economy and rising costs also make the gig workers suffer the most.

>In response to the report, an Uber spokesperson told BI that its drivers make more than $30 an hour on average.

Gotta love the ol' "well the average is decent" line in times of unprecedented standard deviations. Though there may be even more creative accounting for their average compared to:

>Uber hide-hailing drivers saw their earnings for 2024 fall 3.4% on average to $513 a week, according to a study released Tuesday by data analytics company Gridwise. At the same time, Uber drivers worked 0.8% more hours in 2024.

roughly $13/hr.

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I eat bread, Uber CEO eats marble steak. On average we eat a burger

There is one Uber CEO and many people eating bread. On average you eat bread;

The analogy breaks because the mean is skewable by high incomes and the median is well ... a number such that if you add $1 most people earn less than that.

Bottom 10-percentile would be a good measure maybe for something to lift if you are left leaning or right leaning and see the economy holistically.

When wealth follows a power law distribution, that's very questionable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#Lack_of_well-defin...

OP should have written

We (1000 people) eat bread, Uber CEO eats 1000 marble steaks. On average we eat a burger each

Economists claim on average we eat a burger each; voters vote in politicians who want to "cut the wasteful burger budget and lower taxes on steaks"

If you have 1000 people making $1 along with one person making $1000, the average is about $2 - so 99.9% of people are making less than the average.

You're forgetting that CEO's steak is the size of a skyscraper.

> waning economy and rising costs

The US economy appears to growing at about the same (inflation-adjusted) rate that it has since the 80s. [0]

But it certainly does seem that the consumer price index is failing to capture the reality of rising costs. For example the big mac index significantly outpaced the CPI the last few years.[1] And obviously housing and education costs have outpaced inflation. I guess it's politically expedient to under-report inflation... I wonder what the "real" GDP growth would be if we had a measure of cost that actually reflected the reality of people's lives.

Of course, that's not even mentioning increasing inequality.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1/

[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/apr/how-big-m...

The components of cpi are all individually reported, as is the weighting. You’re free to present your own weightings, or perhaps analyse people’s spendings as a service and categorise it to present a personal inflation index.

I'd like to know how much they make after factoring in gas, insurance, and wear/tear on the vehicle

It's very little. Most people I know make around $10/hr after costs if they stay really busy. Most rely on a couple of big tips a day.

That's below minimum wage where I'm at. And remember there's no healthcare, benefits, etc. So that $10/hr is divided further.

How do you figure $13/hr? Most of the Uber drivers I have had work less than full time, and often weird hours: 3am to 1pm three days a week for example.

Yeah, thars probably where the "interpretation" from the Uber CEO comes in. If you measure it with 20 hour work weeks, it could indeed come down to $30/hr. I feel most people will compare it to their full time jobs when hearing the statistics, however.

Yeah, surprise surprise, $13/hour is getting close to the average minimum wage ($11.18/hour). Except without any benefits, and all the expenses that would normally be covered by your employer.

I do not want to defend the gig apps but there is a major benefit, you can make your own schedule and (mostly) work in the geography that you want. That flexibility is extremely valuable to some people.

Sure, make arguably less than minimum wage but do it whenever you want.

Sadly that’s the best option for some people. And it’s worth remembering that the hours many minimum wage jobs give are irregular in quantity with very little consistency of schedule.

We should definitely have robust protections for gig workers but we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Thing is, the model could have been built with employees, even lowly paid ones, but then it would have been pretty transparent that they were subsidizing the rates to take market share from licensed taxis. The indirection is a feature, not a bug. Have we learned anything? Probably not.

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