![]() “That makes it possible for people to rethink the way they consume.” “We now have hundreds of millions of consumers who are carrying in their pockets powerful computers that are always connected to high-speed networks,” Arun Sundararajan, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business and an expert on the sharing economy, told me. The effect has been to make sharing a much more plausible business model. But digital technology has made it much easier for buyers and sellers to find each other quickly, and to evaluate the people they’re trading with. So if you borrowed a lawnmower it was typically from your neighbor. In the past, this was hard to pull off, because the transaction costs involved in borrowing and lending were high: there was no easy way to find someone who had what you were looking for and no easy way to know if someone was trustworthy. If you can connect the people who have the assets to people who are willing to pay to rent them, you reduce waste and end up with a more efficient system. ![]() Assets sit idle-the average car is driven just an hour a day-and workers have time and skills that go unused. But beneath all the hype is a sensible idea: there are a lot of slack resources in the economy. The flood of new money into all these new businesses feels like a mini-bubble in the making. Just a couple of weeks ago, Uber (which also runs services allowing you to book livery cars and cabs) disclosed that it had raised more than a quarter of a billion dollars in venture-capital funding, most of it from Google. It may not be too long before you’re able to pay to sit in a stranger’s living room and “share” his home theatre. SnapGoods makes it possible for people to borrow consumer goods from other people in their neighborhood or social network. Boatbound offers boat rentals, Desktime office space, ParkatmyHouse parking spaces. RelayRides and Getaround let you rent cars from their owners (rather than from Hertz or Avis). Many other companies are trying to cash in on what’s often called “the sharing economy.” Airbnb now features more than three hundred thousand listings from people making their apartments and homes available for short-term rentals. Instead, they sign up ordinary car owners: when you need a ride, you can use their apps to find a driver near you and ask to be picked up. Ride-sharing companies such as Lyft, Sidecar, and, in some cities, UberX, own no cars themselves. But these days a host of new companies are trying to disrupt the paradigm-offering the benefits of consuming without the costs of ownership. ![]() And usually consumption has meant ownership: just before the Great Recession, the average American household owned 2.28 cars, and had more television sets than people. For most of the past century, Americans have been the world’s greatest consumers.
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