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Fair point. Maybe the answer is, instead of trying to sell something to the poor, look for a way to enable the poor to sell a service to the rich?

I mean, two of the biggest success stories in the recent startup scene are Airbnb and Uber. What do they do? Provide a way for people who don't have much money but do have a useful asset (a spare room, a car, respectively) to make a bit of extra cash selling a service to those with disposable income.

What other opportunities along those lines are still open?

Unfortunately, this is the future. I say unfortunately, because I think if we could see the final version, we'd recoil.

The sharing economy, at heart, is about the monetization of spare capacity. So far it's mostly been physical assets, but spare time is next. Anywhere you find a poor person watching TV (or, god forbid, reading a book) there's spare capacity ready to be monetized. And, why are they sleeping so much? They could be working.

The sharing economy is also about getting around transaction costs. Ideas like "minimum wage" and "minimum shift length" can be viewed as transaction costs that services can route around.

A marginal hour's unskilled labour isn't worth very much. There's always been exploitation of this fact, but web services have the potential to scale it up.

I agree that a future where millions live in poverty, working insane hours for minimal wages is repulsive and definitely the sort of thing that the next generation of web services might bring closer.

But this future is going to come anyway, in the near future automation and centralization of production are only going to increase, leading to much increased joblessness.

The only way we can combat that is if more wealth leaks down from the top, be it through labor services or social government.

Future? Everything I've heard about society and the economy in the US says it's the present, without Web services coming into the picture. Web services don't make that aspect of things either better or worse, but what they do have the potential to do is make it so you don't have to endure a grinding commute and abuse by a sociopathic boss as well as the poverty and excessive hours

I ask this because I have never seen a decent answer to this question: how does that make the poor people worse of? I mean I can sorta see it with the spare room (rent goes up because your neighbor has a little extra cash, now you _have_ to rent your room out too) but your car? Swinging by with my groceries on your way home from work? Swing by with some ready-to-freeze homecooked dinner for me[1]?

[1]: Yes that is illegal, but I would _love_ for it not to be. Cooking for one is a waste of time.

Your question makes sense. It is more work for people who desperately need work.

The problem is that dollars have marginal utility. The first $X you make per month is your housing and your food. People who are not getting that livable minimum are at a huge disadvantage in negotiations. They will do almost anything to get that $X. This means they will accept low pay, poor conditions, awful hours - anything you can think of - to make it. This also represents a massive subsidy to businesses that have good economies of scale.

This kind of brinkmanship with total collapse has very personal consequences. If a parent can't do it for more than one or two days a year (if that), their kid(s) may become homeless or stuck in the foster system. You should care about that because society bears a large portion of the costs (the costs are high). That level of stress causes people to make mistakes, sometimes about things you care about.

The goal of labor protections is to ensure some minimum level of human decency and allow people time to improve their lot. Aside from the risks to us outlined above, the risk of a population that is too beset with surviving to pay attention or vote should be pretty obvious.

TaskRabbit is selling spare time for cash. Put together this desk, bring flowers to this girls office, etc.

I'm not aware of much like this besides mechanical turk. In any case, no one is forcing people to work, it's just an option they otherwise wouldn't have. You can argue their lives won't be any better with it, but I can't see how they would be worse. You make it sound like they are going to be rounded up by slave drivers, and otherwise would be pretty well off.

The worst case would be existing industries that are currently bound by minimum wage and working laws, that then find ways around the regulations. But new industries that didn't exist before mostly add new jobs, not replace existing ones with worse ones.

There's a short story I read a while back showing where things will likely head. 'Zero Hours' - https://medium.com/futures-exchange/f68f17e8c12a

Organ donation 2.0 and prostitution 2.0.

But we're helping the poor to make their own decisions about how to generate wealth.

Let me understand how I'm supposed to see this:

A-OK: Rich Americans die from kidney failure while poor Africans die from malnutrition/AIDS/TB/whatever.

Reprehensible exploitation: Rich American buys a kidney from a poor African, feeding his family for a decade in the process. Nobody dies.

> Rich American buys a kidney from a poor African, feeding his family for a decade in the process. Nobody dies.

Until the poor African's one remaining kidney goes bad, he can't get a transplant (nor the lifetime of expensive drugs to retain one), and his family starves for lack of a breadwinner.

I think that organ sales are substantially more complicated than this conversation is making it, but your point here could not possibly make less sense. It should be obvious with a moment's thought that "My family and I will starve right now" is way worse than "there's a small chance my second kidney will fail and then my family will starve" (and that's without considering the effect on the person who got a transplant).

(worth reading, tangentially answers your question, 10/10) http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Thanks for sharing this blog. It really jived with me how we could be in a dystopia no single person is responsible for creating, but which inertia keeps bringing forth untold misery.

It's a false premise - the "Rich American" has a duty to help those who are less fortunate (poor Africans), and that duty extends further than just quid pro quo transactions.

That's not going to happen and in the meantime this idealism is killing people.

We don't know that. In any case, the example is too simplistic anytime there is a lucrative market in organs, there will be middlemen who coerce victims into donating. That will / does kill people, no doubt.

Whenever you're thinking about human systems, you need to think about how humans will game the system. Essentially, you're not facing a static adversary, but an adaptive, motivated one.

> all these people really want and need is money,

In my opinion, all they really want and need is _land_.

The real people squeezing everyone else are the landowners, and the landlords. With enough land, anyone can support themselves: chickens, vegetables, hunting and fishing, etc.

Mortgages in exchange for housing ("death pledges") exploit the poor, indenturing them to overemployment at insufficient wages. The novelty and promise of technology are part of the system that works like a carrot on a string enticing us toward so-called "higher standards," which we only think we need. The rest of the system is security/fear. These are the forces governments and corporations use to keep themselves secure. Anything we're going to do to escape it will be much more like what Jesus of Nazareth, Gandhi, Martin Luther Kind or Malcolm X did than what Paul Graham or Scott Adams did.

Technology and SV makes an easy whipping boy because they're in the crosshairs of the media (all the "billion dollar" buyouts), but we're just another pawn in the game the powerful landowners, governments and corporations are playing. In fact, we're playing along to their rules.

We are talking about the problems of modern America, not feudal Europe. Land is not particularly scarce, and the poor don't really want to become subsistence farmers or even regular farmers. Just owning a plot of land is not enough to support a middle class family, if it ever was. There are also significant political issues like property taxes, estate taxes, etc, that make owning land more complicated and expensive.

Capital in general is what you mean I think. But even then interest rates are not particularly high, and if you give people money/capital, most people will not invest it to live off the interest.

Our entire society is now based upon the idea that you need to find an employer to pay you to do something. If no one wants/needs to pay you to do things, you are screwed.

Hey! I'm a landowner! I didn't know I was ruling by security/fear. Wow! I should make myself some jackboots or something.

No kidding aside, in the USA anybody can own land who wants to. That seems too convenient a variable to tag all the social ills on.

Well are you going to sell your land at a price poor people can afford or only the wealthy? You're going to sell it for the "best" (measured by maximizing dollar amount) price you can.

So, read my comment carefully, you're not ruling by security/fear, you're squeezing the poor by playing along with market rules, you big squeezing squeezer.

If you give someone land below market value, they will probably just sell it and pocket the difference. It's functionally equivalent to just giving them cash. If they want land they can go buy it.

If you sell land below market value to someone who already has a place to live they will probably just sell it and pocket the difference.

If you sell land below market value to someone who has no other place to live, they will live on it and use the money to buy books, healthcare, tools, nutritious food and cooking utensils.

Thus stands my statement that landowners squeeze the poor.

Anybody with money 'squeezes the poor' by not giving it to them. Land is no different. You don't have to 'live on land' - most people don't.

So if by 'land' we mean 'any place to live' then why not make that a civil right, instead of putting the burden on landowners? E.g. people need tools, books, education too and the folks that 'own' those aren't being criticized as squeezers.

If you sell land below market value to someone who has no other place to live, they will live there only so long as it will take to arrange to move somewhere cheaper when they sell their land for market value and pocket the difference. They will then have money left over to spend on healthcare, tools, etc.

I'm not sure I agree with your statement that landowners squeeze the poor more than anyone else does.

If all you need is _land_, there is plenty of cheap land in the US. But you just have to live away from the big population centers. But then if you are going to be self sustaining, you don't need to near a big population center.

Agreed. The core thing that any business has to do is make a product that people will pay for at a price that at least breaks even. You can't sell salvation to a person that doesn't have any spare cash.

This sort of thing is the role of governments, not businesses. The core problem you have in the US is that your government is one of those incumbent inefficient dinosaurs that doesn't really do much of anything useful any more but is so big that it's hard to topple.

Any solutions to the problems discussed in this article is inevitably going to look like politics, not business. This is a problem because in the US, it's "cool" to say "pfft, politics, it's awful why bother?" which means that competent people are driven into business instead.

Why does the US government insist on being an "inefficient dinosaur"? Stacks of paper forms processed by hand? It seems as though the process is designed to be as inefficient as is possible. Perhaps the US government delays paying the war veterans on purpose because it saves money. 9 months of being unemployed and disabled with possible mental trauma from war:

>In the past 5 years, the number of vets who’ve died before their claim has even been processed has tripled.

...can be restated:

>In the past 5 years, the number of vets to whom the US government has avoided paying disability (due to their death) has tripled.

Disability benefits are paid to spouses on death, in many cases, so, no, it can't be stated that way.

absolutely true. For the poor and the elderly, the money comes from the government (as you noted). Tapping into that should be straightforward, but it must be incredibly difficult. Otherwise, it seems that VC's would have invested heavily into tapping that. I suspect that the last thing the government wants is (more) scrutiny about its business practices from the private sector.

The best example I can think of in this category is Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University.

http://www.daveramsey.com/fpu

It's a comprehensive course on putting your finances in order. $100 per person or family taking the course. Scholarships often offered to callers to his show and others who demonstrate motivation but lack of means to pay.

Many Americans are poor not due to having no income, but getting themselves into too much debt through scams like credit cards and student loans.

Of course this is also useful to people with decent incomes, which means the business is not exclusively reliant on the low income market.

Maybe that's one trick for serving the "unexotic underclass", a problem experienced by enough non-poor people to pay the bills, but also offered to poor people at a lower price or free.

Maybe there are some high income single mothers to subsidize a business solving a problem experienced by all single mothers? Etc.

"Many Americans are poor not due to having no income, but getting themselves into too much debt through scams like credit cards and student loans."

See, the poor are already well-served by entrepreneurs! ;) Would make for a tough fight against that given that everyone wants to live ahead of themselves, have the latest things, impress their friends, eat more, take it easier, etc.

You don't get the money from them, that's the point. You build a system that helps them,and then sell it to the government or any organisation which has the money to pay for it. You get your money, and they get the help they need.

What do the government or organisations which have the money get out of it?

Let's say you create an application which allows unemployed find jobs easier - you go to your local council, say that by deploying this app in all local job centres they can reduce unemployment by 50%. By doing so, they increase their own popularity with people, and every politician likes that.

Obviously this is just a made up example, but I am saying that there is money to be made on helping poor people,it's just not their money, because they don't have any :P

(Dis)claimer: I do real-world, boots-on-the-ground, ministers-in-government politics.

If solving poverty and unemployment was really popular, we'd have done it already. It's not, in the population. It is popular with a vocal minority of wealthy middle-class people who occasionally vote.

If you go to voters with a plan for this stuff and start knocking on random doors, I can tell you what you'll find because we find it all the time: "Where are they going to live? Not near me I hope."

I wish I could fix this, but we have to run the campaigns that people will vote for. That's democracy, and in our democracy, people are far more interested in voting against things they don't like than in voting for ideas to make society better.

The political benefit politicians get out of buying something is much lower than creating their own program.

According to previous thread, paid positions in the board of the contractor company.

I suspect the key to making money off the poor is buying from them low, rather than selling to them high. In other words...sweatshops. Pimps. Mechanical Turk.

These are all distasteful, but what makes them unsuitable for the task of Helping Humanity is that these transactions are really bad transactions to be making, for reasons the financials don't show. A 3rd-year developer is worth more than a 1st-year developer---is a 3rd-year sweatshop laborer worth meaningfully more than a 1st-year sweatshop laborer?

You can innovate to sell them something they're already buying or a substitute but cheaper.

> I imagine them needing to spend money on food,

accepted

> education,

There is so much educational stuff available on the internet and public libraries that I can't see a reason why there is a lot money to spend on.

> housing

Accepted

> and entertainment.

May I tell you something: As a graduate student I have so much work to do that I hardly have any time for entertainment. Thus rather little money is spent on it. Could this be a hint for curbing the expenses for this kind of people?

> May I tell you something: As a graduate student I have so much work to do that I hardly have any time for entertainment. Thus rather little money is spent on it. Could this be a hint for curbing the expenses for this kind of people?

No, it is a hint that you are making the wrong choices in life.

Entertainment in the form of television is cheap and widely available. Somehow people still like to argue that the poor should sell their televisions and stare at the wall.

Children also have a pretty constant demand for entertainment.

PBS alone is reason enough not to sell your TV.

Entertainment is a necessity. It has always been this way. From the Colosseum of Rome to Shakespearean theatres to television. People need it to relieve stress.

A little money is still money.

> There is so much educational stuff available on the internet and public libraries that I can't see a reason why there is a lot money to spend on.

> As a graduate student

You've presumably spent money on college, textbooks, etc.

> You've presumably spent money on college, textbooks, etc.

First: You have to distinguish between learning stuff (which can be done mostly freely or at least in a rather cheap way) and getting social recognition for it (the latter is why you go to college and pay masses of money for tuition).

Thus: You don't have to pay a lot for education but for getting social recognition for it.

Otherwise: I admit that in Germany, university is nearly tuition-free. I only bought few textbooks, since many of them were either available in the library or the lecture notes were pretty good. If no "official" lecture notes were available, students often agreed that everybody TeXes notes for one week to make an unofficial student-made lecture notes.

Thus: Yes, some money was spent, but there are options to keep the spending down.