Yet more collaborative consumption aka the sharing economy

There was a brief item on the subject on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Saturday 12 October, headed "Ownership in 2013". There's a podcast at  http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/today/today_20131012-1046a.mp3.

Amongst the online resources mentioned were http://www.thepeoplewhoshare.com - "making sharing mainstream. We're on a mission to build a Sharing Economy and we love to help you discover that sharing is... fun, affordable, easy, accessible, mobile and of course social. We bring it all together on-line, on land and on-the-go."

They seem to be closely related to http://www.compareandshare.com/ - "the world’s one-stop comparison marketplace of the Sharing Economy."

Then there was Find, Invest, Grow which "works with young entrepreneurs, typically undergraduates and graduates of the past five years, to see them crystallise their ideas, support them through the development of their business plans and introduce them to suitable investors".

Googling around for more information, I found an article entitled Sharing is caring  in The (London) Evening Standard. This site mentions to me very well-known resources such as airbnb, but also several currently USA only schemes, the most interesting of which - to me - was Postmate,  a crowd-sourced bicycle courier service.

Sorted - www.sortedlocal.com - was more UK relevant. It offers up people in your area who are willing to do gardening and chores for an hourly rate.

https://sortedlocal.com

https://sortedlocal.com

https://sortedlocal.com

https://sortedlocal.com

https://sortedlocal.com

https://sortedlocal.com

https://sortedlocal.com

https://sortedlocal.com

Creativity and growth

http://audioboo.fm/boos/1298959-is-the-uk-too-posh-to-push-for-growth

Refreshing to hear Tony Greenham of the New Economic Foundation in this discussion on BBC Radio 4s Today programme this morning separaing out GDP growth from the growth we actually want. I wish he'd had more time. Mariana Mazzucato had the lion's share, it seemed to me, but spoke about standard economic stuff without challenging the assumption that increase in GDP is unequivocally good.

Tony pointed out that crime and the destruction of rainforests contribute to GDP, he opined. I would disagree with him that growth in jobs is desirable. It's interesting that he should have that in his list alongside sustainability and equality.

Limits to growth

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9729000/9729574.stm

'Forty years ago, a self-appointed panel of experts called the Club of Rome published a tract entitled the Limits to Growth, a massively influential report that showed how exponential growth in population and resource use, in a world of finite resources, would end very badly.
Bjorn Lomborg, author of the Sceptical Environmentalist, told the Today programme that the 1970s environmentalists were "spectacularly wrong" because they "fundamentally missed innovation".
"Technology can do amazing things," he said. "We have done a lot better than predicted".
"If we're going to tackle future problems such as global warming we need to focus on innovation," he believes.'

As presented here, Bjorn Lomborg's ideas are rather worrying. He is right that (some of) the specific predictions in The limits to growth were wrong and I accept that he is right that the authors underplayed the benefits of technology, but the undisputable  fact is that there ARE limits to growth as resources ARE finite.

At the end of this short interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme (link above) Lomborg says that the idea of telling people that they have to live with less is a hard sell. This is undoubtedly true, but by playing up the mistakes in specifics, and down the key point about finite resources, he makes it seem as if people shouldn't be told the unpalatable inevitable consequence of finite resources even if it is true.

What is living with less? Superficially it sounds like we're all to tighten our belts and live more frugally. That may be so, but one of the benefits of technology is that it aids the separation of services from goods/products, and enables us to get more service from the same physical resource. This is a key tenet of www.natcap.org / the book Natural Capitalism and www.collaborativeconsumption.org lists an increasing number of ways of arranging to derive service benefits from physical resources.

We win all round by doing this. The obvious example of  taxis illustrates. The driver wants his/her taxi to be reliable, so it is in the manufacturer's interest to make it so. The taxi driver wants his/her taxi to be in use a high proportion of the time. This makes maximum benefit from the investment in the taxi, and also provides maximum capacity to the taxi network.

(The technology has not yet yielded up a unified booking system for private hire vehicles. In the main, they operate as separate companies. It should be possible to tell a system that I want to go from A to B, arriving/departing at time xx:xx and for the system to dispatch a vehicle appropriately for the job. The systems exist, but they ae not comprehensive and we still have to choose which company to contact.)

Proper economics

After listening to some standard economic blather abiut how we need to increase spending and how we need people to do low paid jobs on radio 4's Today programme this morning, my ears pricked up at an item (at 07:49) based on the Royal Society's new People and the planet  report.

"The BBC's listen again page says "The Today programme's Tom Feilden reports on the challenge population growth represents and Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sir John Sulston outlines the Royal Society's is major new report,"and Sarah Montague seemed to want to focus onthe issue of trying to reduce population growth, but Sulston was prepared to consider allowing population to grow naturally and criticised our obsession with growth in GDP - which as he pointed out is an attempt to consume more faster when in fact we have a finite amount of resources.

Peer reviewing is not necessarily as serious as it sounds.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9292000/9292853.stm


"Science Correspondent Tom Feilden describes some of the cheerful comments made by scientific papers reviewers. Chief editor of Nature Protocols Chris Surridge and neuroscience professor Colin Blakemore discuss the witty side of peer reviews."

This was an item on Radio 4's today programme on Thursday 16 December. Headed on the website "The scientific sense of humour", the item was presented as a bit of a laugh, but towards the end a key point emerged that was rather a concern. There was reference to scientists being rivals, and later, towards jobs being on the line. The idea that someone's scientific opinion should in any way be influenced by their need to keep their job is really quite a concern. I'm not blaming the individual scientists - I'm blaming the monetary system. What we want from our scientists is pure, objective science. Money distorts objectivity.