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    How Progressive Cities Fight Innovation
    How Progressive Cities Fight Innovation
    How Progressive Cities Fight Innovation
    Ebook48 pages44 minutes

    How Progressive Cities Fight Innovation

    By Jared Meyer

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    About this ebook

    Technology continues to unlock new ways for Americans to live and work. To illustrate these changes, this broadside explores the promise of online platforms such as Uber and Airbnb. Unfortunately, instead of embracing innovation, many cities insist on applying antiquated regulations or completely banning these new services to protect special interests—at the expense of workers and consumers.




    These fights go far beyond the sharing economy. To promote the benefits of new technology, it is time for states to step up and overrule cities when local policies threaten innovation. If cities are going to remain a driving force for economic progress, then states need to save so-called progressive cities from themselves.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEncounter Books
    Release dateJun 13, 2017
    ISBN9781594039522
    How Progressive Cities Fight Innovation

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      Book preview

      How Progressive Cities Fight Innovation - Jared Meyer

      ENCOUNTER BROADSIDES

      Inaugurated in the fall of 2009, Encounter Broadsides are a series of timely pamphlets and e-books from Encounter Books. Uniting an 18th century sense of public urgency and rhetorical wit (think The Federalist Papers, Common Sense) with 21st century technology and channels of distribution, Encounter Broadsides offer indispensable ammunition for intelligent debate on the critical issues of our time. Written with passion by some of our most authoritative authors, Encounter Broadsides make the case for ordered liberty and the institutions of democratic capitalism at a time when they are under siege from the resurgence of collectivist sentiment. Read them in a sitting and come away knowing the best we can hope for and the worst we must fear.

      Table of Contents

      Cover

      The Twenty-First Century Economy

      Some Cities Can’t Handle Innovation

      The Rent Is Too Damn High

      A Tech Capital without Uber

      Unions Can’t Stand the Sharing Economy

      The Politics of the Sharing Economy

      Copyright

      FOR GOOD REASON , millions of people who have taken an Uber, shopped on Etsy, found a professional’s help on Thumbtack, or booked a place to stay through Airbnb love the sharing economy. These services, and countless others like eBay, TaskRabbit, Rent the Runway, and GoFundMe have a common theme—they connect people though online platforms. Often, the sharing economy enables transactions that used to be infeasible, time consuming, or cost prohibitive.

      Others see the sharing economy as an enemy to be eliminated. It is true that the work done in the sharing economy does not look much like that of 1950s-era taxi drivers, artisans, repairmen, or hotel managers, but a twenty-first century economy cannot flourish under a decades-old policy framework. As technology continues to disrupt established business models, fights between innovators and special interests will only intensify.

      Opponents of the sharing economy do not want to promote innovation; they want to protect themselves from change and competition. And political opponents refuse to understand that the fundamentally different businesses of the new economy require a modern regulatory model to thrive and fulfill their potentials. Instead of embracing these advances, these groups resist any change that threatens their short-term economic interests.

      To fight back, it is critical to illuminate the new economy’s benefits and reveal the motives and tactics of those who desperately want to kill it. Change is central to economic growth, and Americans should not remain quiet while policy makers limit innovation to protect the politically powerful.

      THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ECONOMY

      Before highlighting political opposition to the sharing economy, it is important to understand the recent economic developments that are behind the business models of companies like Uber and Airbnb.

      Underpinning these changes is the economic concept of transaction costs. Nobel Prize–winning economist Ronald Coase explains that transaction costs are what it takes to bring together buyers and sellers, exchange information, negotiate prices, and enforce contracts.

      In the past, transactions were heavily influenced by businesses. But all that has changed in today’s economy because technology has put information in the hands of consumers.

      As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Iain Murray argues, the sharing economy is made possible by the

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