Uber and "The Choice"
The already infamous “Uber Files” are attracting much attention, leading many, especially politicians to raise concerns about the aggressive lobbying practices that companies like Uber are adopting to change the law in favor of the development of their activities. There is actually nothing new under the sun: logrolling and lobbying are part of the functioning of market-based but nonetheless state-driven capitalist economies since the beginning. Further, forms of lobbying activities have existed as soon as human productive activities have been embedded into a political system.
The Uber story is salient because the leaks widely expose the ruthlessness of some business and political actors, but again it would be excessive to say that we are discovering something.[1] The case is taking a special dimension in France because of the apparent implication of Emmanuel Macron who, as the minister of the economy at that time, seems to have pushed with fervor for a change in the legislative framework to facilitate Uber’s implementation in France. Many French politicians in the opposition are speaking their outrage but there is nothing reprehensible here, as long as Macron’s action has not unduly favored Uber against would-be competitors.
The particular significance of this story also comes from the fact that Uber is emblematic of the most recent mutation of capitalist economies. Uber’s economic model is displacing the centrality of the wage relationship that is constitutive of modern capitalism, for the benefit of a market relationship. This strikes a new economic bargain – presumably more in favor of Uber, especially because it puts Uber in a de facto monopsonic situation.
The strong resistance that Uber and other companies that have adopted the same economic model have met is easily explained by the fact that many perceive this model as being conducive to an even more inegalitarian and unfair form of capitalism where workers are deprived of the relative protection of the wage relationship, without any obvious advantage. Now, it would be difficult to contest that the implementation of Uber and other companies of this kind has drastically improved the bargaining terms for the consumer. At least in the Parisian case, before Uber, cabs were a nightmare: too few and so very expensive, dirty, impolite, rude. Not only Uber has provided a cheaper and arguably more qualitative alternative; but Parisian cabs have also somehow improved as a response to this new competition.
Does this establish that the implementation of Uber is an improvement, in narrow welfare terms and from a more global normative point of view? The welfare analysis under partial equilibrium would conclude that while the situation of Parisian cabs has probably worsened, those of the customers and (presumably) of the Uber drivers have improved. We may argue about the results of a general welfare analysis, but my priors tend toward a general improvement. This normative judgment is however based on a narrow comparison of what we can call “adjacent social states”. Even taking into account the second-order changes introduced by the implementation of Uber, we can assume that the new social state (let’s call it U) is better than the initial social state (let’s call it I). On the socioeconomic landscape, I and U are fairly similar, meaning that it is relatively easy to move from one to the other (even though it has necessitated the backstage maneuvers highlighted by the Uber Files). By moving from I to U, we have (collectively) settled for a local improvement.
Opponents to the economic model pioneered by Uber can perfectly admit this claim. Their objection is not (or could not only be) that Uber has not locally improved the situation, but that this change puts us farther away from the “ideal” social state S*. Schematically, S* corresponds to an economic system – presumably not capitalist – that scores the best according to some (set of) evaluative criterion E. According to the very same criterion, U is better than I but still less good than S*, or more formally (supposing that E generates a binary relation) S*EUEI. However, according to some “distance metric” D, it is believed that I is “closer” to S* than U. In other words, the local improvement goes against the search for a global optimum, i.e., the ideal social state S*. Suppose now that we have a fourth social state, V, such that that UEV but with V closer than both U and I to S*. What should we do? In which “direction” on the socioeconomic landscape should we go? This situation corresponds to what the philosopher Gerald Gaus has called The Choice:
“In cases where there is a clear optimum within our neighborhood that requires movement away from our understanding of the ideal, we often must choose between relatively certain (perhaps large) local improvements in justice and pursuit of a considerably less certain ideal which would yield optimal justice”.[2]
Gaus frames The Choice in terms of justice, but it also works well with an all-things-considered evaluative criterion. This is a simple but still insightful principle. Pursuing the ideal has an opportunity cost that is in many cases relatively straightforward to measure. Privileging the local improvement also has one, but it is far more difficult to estimate. The reason is that the further (as measured by D) a social state is from the actual situation on the socioeconomic landscape, the more difficult it is to have a clear view of what this state consists of and the path to reach it. In other words, we should consider that we have imperfect knowledge of the socioeconomic landscape and that, the further we are from our current state, the less we can be confident about the characteristics of alternative social states.
The situation is made more complicated by the fact that people disagree about many things. Let’s call a “perspective” P the conjunction of one or several evaluative criteria E, a “framework” F, and a distance metric D, i.e., P = < E, F, D >. What I call a framework corresponds to the way a person represents the world as she sees it and as she believes it would be (for non-actual social states). This is a very important feature: we evaluate social states depending on our we perceive them; obviously, two persons who share the same evaluative criterion may still disagree on the comparative assessment of two states if they do not perceive them the same way. For instance, a pro-life and a pro-choice person may relatively agree on the relative importance of the freedom of women to dispose of their bodies and of the value of life but still disagree over the moral status of abortion if the former but not the latter perceives the fetus as a human being.
Even if people were to agree on E and D (which in pluralist and diverse societies is obviously not the case), disagreement over F is sufficient to explain many moral and political conflicts. In the Uber case, whether the move from I to U is an improvement or not depends on the perception we may have about the situation of drivers, e.g., whether they are “exploited” by Uber. The more we consider social states further from the actual state, the more this kind of disagreement weighs as it adds up to the inherent uncertainty. The bottom line is that we radically disagree on our conception of what the ideal society should look like.
All this militates for moral and political views that give a premium to local improvements which can be relatively consensual, over the uncertain pursuit of an elusive idea. This is not intended to mean that in the Uber case there is no reason to worry about the generalization of its economic model and that we should go further in the “uberization” of the economy. As we advance in this direction, we see more clearly its drawbacks. But we should not be blind to the local improvements it brings either. The Uber Files are giving many politicians a convenient excuse for overdramatizing Uber’s political influence. Once the emotion has cooled down, we should return to a more rational assessment of the pros and cons of this economic model.
[1] This is not to say that such behavior is not morally objectionable. But moral reprobation is not the point here.
[2] Gerald Gaus, The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society (Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 82.