We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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There should be room in our hearts for pity… …for the striking London black cab drivers whose hard won skills have been rendered obsolete by Uber and Addison Lee, just as we should remember with pity the thousands of drivers of hansom cabs whose hard-won skills with horses were rendered obsolete by the coming of the internal combustion engine. I am not being flippant or sarcastic. To lose one’s accustomed livelihood to new technology is a tough spot to be in, and there will be many reading this, some of them highly paid at present, who should look at Trevor Merralls’ situation and tremble.
But that pity should not extend to offering to keep Mr Merralls forever in the style to which he has become accustomed simply because he was born working class, or to stifling the opportunity for self-employment that Uber offers to its drivers (also working class), or to depriving Londoners who could not afford black cabs of the ability to take a cab at a reasonable price at any time day or night, and which will, as one of the Guardian commenters put it, “actually go to exotic destinations like Lewisham”.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Rent-seekers seek rents.
I heard about something similar in Detroit- real estate agents were discombobulated when people used the Internet to by-pass Real Estate agents and their fancy licenses- so they had a law passed requiring people to use a licensed Real Estate agent!
keep in mind, the next step of the narrative will be about gender.
“women get raped by fake cabbie” is the next step in harming this example of free enterprise. it’s already been done, but the volume will get cranked up.
Several of my family members in London back in the day were printers on Fleet Street. Working in hot metal on the Linotype machines was a skilled job, and well paid. The jobs tended to be kept in families and passed down from father to son. But no newspapers are made in this way any more, and those jobs have gone. It was a shame for the people who did the jobs, and the end of a way of life. But it happened and we move on.
Store clerks, newspaper and book people, taxi drivers- the internet is killing a lot of trades. Steel workers, miners, and car builders have already had their murrain. Like you, I feel for them.
My grandfather was the fifth generation building horse drawn wagons. In about 1910 he and his brother figured out that trucks would drive them out of business and converted their factory to truck bodies. They prospered, but as a child I still remember his sorrow for the displacement of an entire way of life. He was especially saddened by the men who were too old to learn a new trade, how lost and defeated they were*. He made it a point to hire them to do some job whenever he could, even if it was just sweeping up.
So I learned at least those four lessons from him- outside events could destroy even the greatest skill’s value, always look for those profession-smashing clouds on the horizon, get an umbrella, and there but for fate go you.
*I have always wondered how the redundancy of skilled workers made by the industrial revolution affected the rise of crazy ideologies and our willingness to fight mad wars. A man who is used to being independent and suddenly, through no fault of his own, can’t feed his family is truly lost.
I don’t know enough about London cabs to venture an opinion from all the way across the Atlantic, but here is a question for you: As I understand it London black cab drivers must pass a thorough examination testing their knowledge of London streets. Is an Uber driver equipped with a GPS fully a match for that knowledge? The first time I used Uber, the driver had no idea how to get to my destination and even had trouble finding it on his GPS. (So yes, my question implies an opinion, but it is an extremely tentative–dare I say uber-tentative [grin]–mere speculation.)
Staghounds’ footnote poses a very interesting question, one probably worth its own discussion thread.
Ned Lud didn’t just mope around- he did something about it! Whatever happened to him afterwards? His ‘retro’ movement didn’t succeed, but what else happened?
I was going to say Staghounds’ comment is a really interesting one and I’d like to hear more about it, but Laird beat me to it. So I second Laird.
As for Uber, I’ve only used it once and wasn’t impressed. I had to wait ages for the car and then had to direct the driver. But N = 1 isn’t much of a statistical sample.
Perhaps the ultimate irony is that technology made globalisation possible and now globalisation is destroying technology as a career – at least in the West. Huge numbers of information technology jobs have been shipped overseas, mainly to India, but places like China and the Philippines are catching up fast. I suspect some of those ex-cabbies may soon be experiencing a certain amount of schädenfreude.
For a larger statistical sample, I use Uber several times a week, and my experiences have been very close to ideal. The longest it has ever taken me to get a car was 7 mins, with 3 mins being more typical. The only time I had a driver with a navigation problem was getting to Michael Jenning’s house as the final stage is *not* obvious… so I really did not hold it against the driver and gave him a 5-star anyway as he was quite apologetic.
“Working class”
Since the idea that only the subsistence-living “proletariat” class actually WORK for a living is absurd, defunct Marxist nonsense, can’t we agree to retire that fucking stupid phrase…please?
Nope. bludgers. can’t feed their families. can’t feed themselves. expect to live off US.
The taxi driver’s trade is not being destroyed by Uber: there’s nothing stopping him driving for a living still. It is his employment arrangement that is changing. This is a lot different from a horse carriage driver being put out of business by the motor car.
Paris banned Uber some time back, and now the app is pretty useless at peak times, I.e. When you want a car. That’s progress, apparently.
Estate agents in Detroit? Is there still any real estate there?
Yes, everybody is looking to sell and nobody is buying.
I’m astonished none before me on this thread has mentioned all those mediaeval scribes whom Caxton deprived of their elite status. Their (sometimes violent) attempts to prevent the spread of the printing press were unsuccessful – as the fact that I’m typing this reminds me. 🙂
I’m with Natalie in noticing that the sense of loss is real to those affected. As unlikely a person as Stalin (!!!) is occasionally recorded* as telling a story (believed to be about his father) of an independent artisan who was obliged to take subordinate employed work but never became truly reconciled to his changed status. Historians of the Victorian Royal Navy note how much the captains loved the old sailing technology and disliked their new-fangled steamships; as a yachtsman, I can very much sympathise.
But I’d still rather be typing this than be a scribe in a little-changed-from-mediaeval world.
[* The details and background – insofar as it is known – are recounted in Robert Conquest’s biography of Stalin.]
In most accounts I’ve read of Stalin, as told by his contemporaries, he was a good story teller and a very good singer (he learned the latter when training to become a priest). He was a bit of a nightmare at dinner parties (and he liked parties) because he used to force his subordinates to eat and drink a lot and then make them dance until the early hours (and these guys put in 20-hour days: not for nothing was Molotov nicknamed “Iron Arse”). But the old brute was pretty entertaining. One of the accounts mentions how difficult it was being part of his inner circle in those days, as there were dinner parties every night, they got very little sleep, and the slightest slip of the tongue could result in their being shot.
“The Inner Circle” is a good movie about that very subject. Thank you all for the compliments! I’ll do a blog post with my idea and I’ll put it here on Monday, if you like.
The answer would seem to be to scrap the regulation of cabs immediately, thereby saving the black cabbies the cost of the “plate”, and such like. They could then compete on the basis that they are more experienced, better insurance, etc.
Of course, that won’t happen, the bureaucrats need their wages….
Patriarchal landmine: “the next step of the narrative will be about gender”
Yes, and we should be pointing out that women are safer when they aren’t wandering around the town centre after hours wondering how they are going to get home.
I am not very sympathetic. Most people run a risk of their professions either disappearing or their wages falling, due to technology/competition. I know that if my profession were to disappear I have sufficient general knowledge to find employment somewhere in a role that just requires good English and maths knowledge, and some people skills. I may not enjoy the role but I would not starve. I am also probably young enough to start a new profession, even if that means going back to school for a year. I have managed my finances prudently enough so that meeting the mortgage shouldn’t be an issue even at a drastically reduced salary.
Sure, lots of people don’t plan well enough, and stretch their finances too much. But why is that anybody’s problem but their own?
The anti Uber campaign is indeed absurd Natalie.
Tim Newman is correct: nothing has changed about the need for cabs and drivers; all that has changed is the method of hailing them. This isn’t so much like candle makers losing out to electric lights as it is like secretaries switching from typewriters to word processors. Those drivers could all sign up with Uber tomorrow.
Laird: I don’t know the London regulatory system, but in the US, the anti-Uber complaints are driven more by the medallion (i.e. license) owners than by the actual drivers, who are mostly hires by the hour + tips or salary. And big city taxi medallions cost anywhere from $ 75000 to well over $ 250000.
The drivers could sign with Uber, but who will take care of the poor poor investors in medallions?
The answer would seem to be to scrap the regulation of cabs immediately
that is always the answer to any question (except international relations, where the answer is “nukes”)
nothing has changed about the need for cabs and drivers; all that has changed is the method of hailing them
No, no, the “needs” of drivers have changed: able to follow GPS and be polite, yes; able to nagivate around London by memory: no. But let’s face it: all forms of “public” transportation, including Taxis and Uber, are fundamentally communist.
Sure, lots of people don’t plan well enough, and stretch their finances too much. But why is that anybody’s problem but their own?
Right.
The navigational skills of the London cab drivers have been directly superseded by technology. I first heard of “the Knowledge” via press reports about the taxi driver who won Mastermind one year. From the Wikipedia link:
I was always interested and admiring when I saw the guys studying for the test going around London on mopeds or motorbikes with a map mounted on a clipboard. It is still true that a good cab driver armed with the Knowledge can beat a satnav. But not by enough to justify all that time and effort.
Angry Tory says,
Sorry, but this is wrong. You should have put this first and the remark about nukes last, to finish on the punchline.
There will be some form of regulation coming for cabs in London for one reason, Traffic! There has been a big growth spurt in cars in Central London and it’s nearly all cabs, if it’s not halted soon, then gridlock approaches. I can’t remember the figures but they appear astonishing. No wonder the Black Cab drivers are pissed. But obviously much lower prices stimulates demand.
I suspect higher congestion charge fees on all licensed cabs and mini cabs.
FWIW, I heard anecdotally of an Über driver in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a fairly new city to them, taking £600 in 4 days after starting. I dare say that that will drop as new entrants come in, and I don’t know how the franchisor rations drivers. ONe of the customer service tips is to keep a range of phone chargers in the car for passengers’ use.
pst314
Given that GPS and satnav may not always be up to date and able to improvise a route around London, I would expect than an experienced London cab driver, particularly given the narrow turning circle of a London cab would probably be a fair bit faster, if he wanted to be.
Mr Ed and pst314, satnav versus the Knowledge is a bit like crossbow versus longbow. Longbows were better weapons – but a longbowman had to be trained to use one almost since childhood and keep in regular practice. Any fool could use a crossbow.
The taxi was destroyed by the mobile phone, the uniqueness of being the only service available to be (legally) hailed from the street was removed as an advantage, the advent of smartphone and GPS technology have just been another step in hastening the death throws of the industry.
satnav versus the Knowledge is a bit like sniper rifle versus longbow
Corrected, as you can fire a rifle at a target south of the river at any time of night.
I recently used Uber for a week in Oklahoma City, as a consumer. It was FAR superior to cab service; a man at my hotel was complaining that he had called a cab and had no idea how long it was going to take to get there. Meanwhile I was watching my Uber car on my phone map approach, 3 minutes away. Without exception, every driver I encountered was cheerful and glad to be working. Meanwhile cab driver I have used was surly and resentful. Uber service is a win for everyone except rent seekers.