This is simply hard to believe. There are over a million driving for Uber. An overwhelming majority of them must be making money, because the idea that any significant fraction of a million of people is in the red at the end of a year simply is ludictious. Sure, they might be making less than they think after accounting for operating costs, insurance and depreciation, and they might be making less than they would had they got a regular job, but they cannot possibly be actually losing money.

> This is simply hard to believe. There are over a million driving for Uber. An overwhelming majority of them must be making money, because the idea that any significant fraction of a million of people is in the red at the end of a year simply is ludictious.

I think the error you're making is the assumption that everyone in the market is a rational actor with good information and understanding, so that evidence of particular market behavior is evidence that it's rational and beneficial to the person doing it.

It's very believable to imagine gig economy jobs where the workers typically lose money doing them, but it takes them a a long time to figure that out, because the pay is obvious but much of the expense is obscured. Fresh, naive marks take over for those workers who get wise and drop out, maintaining the population of workers. The combination of corporate marketing and desperate hope then help maintain a supply of fresh, naive marks.

Look, the costs with Uber are pretty straightforward: you have car payments, insurance, periodic maintenance and finally gas. People really aren’t too stupid to realize that their Uber income doesn’t cover their car payment.

IRS has a nice estimate of average cost of driving, it’s 58 cents per mile. If you are doing more than that, you are making money, and at Uber you make significantly more than that.

There is room for profit I am sure, but also lots of ways to wear out your car many years earlier than you had expected to.

Usually it boils down to simply believing that "standard of living" is a silly concept.

It's true, the demand for labor is essentially infinite, but having a minimum wage effectively puts a cap on the number of actual jobs. If people could hire maid services for $1 per hour, there'd be a lot of maid service jobs and nearly everyone would have clean homes.

But the standard of living would hit the floor.

Eliminating minimum wage would eliminate unemployment, for sure. But it would also mean rising homelessness or people cramming 5+ people into 400 sq foot studio apartments as the people at the bottom could no longer afford to pay rents on their own. And let's not pretend that only minimum wage workers would be affected, people near minimum would likely wage cuts as well.

Eliminating minimum wage creates a race to the bottom for low-skill jobs as people become more and more desperate for money.

Why do you assume there are enough maids to clean everyone's house at such a low rate?

If you're wondering how low a wage can be and still retain employees, the answer is pretty close to zero. Even baring the no/very low wages that predominated human history, in the 20th century mining companies were able to avoid paying their employees money at all and instead provided tokens serviceable in stores the mining companies owned. The goods in those stores were sold with inflated prices, essential making the cost of labor close to zero.

The case against minimum wage is largely based off of highly isolated factors typically favoring shareholder economics.

These economists say what they need to say to get paid.