The Old New Business Model of Uber and Ola

uber

Cars were a luxury in the early twentieth century. Their production was a slow and an expensive process. And this basically meant that the prices at which they were sold were also very high.

At the same time the car makers employed skilled craftsmen to produce cars. As Ryan Avent writes in The Wealth of Humans—Work and its Absence in the Twenty-First Century: “The automakers employed skilled craftsmen, who often had to shape these individual components to fit the peculiarities of the car’s handmade frame. In 1908 Ford Motor Company sold only about 10,000 vehicles. Most of its 450 employees at the time were highly skilled mechanics and craftsmen.”

This changed when Henry Ford came up with the assembly-line system of producing a car. This system was inspired from the meat processing industry in the United States. In this system, known as the ‘disassembly line’, the animal’s carcass hanging from a hook attached to a powered belt moved from one butchery station to another.

At each station, workers hacked off specific cuts of meat. As the animal moved through the disassembly line, its carcass grew smaller as the meat kept getting hacked from it. Ford thought that a system in reverse could be used to produce cars.

In Ford’s system, the chassis (i.e. the base frame) of the car was moved by power lines through various production stages. Various parts of the car kept moving towards the chassis at the same time. The workers were arranged at specific positions and they attached these parts on to the car. Hence, as the chassis moved through various stages of the production process, it became bigger and bigger.

In that sense, it was the opposite of the disassembly line and came to be referred as the assembly line. The assembly line was a major innovation and rapidly reduced the number of hours needed to produce a car from more than 400 working hours to less than 52 hours decades later.

At the same time, the cost of producing a car fell as well. This led to car prices falling and a boom in demand for cars. In the process, the production of cars went up as well. This led to an explosion in employment in car production even though the labour needed to produce each car had come down.

Also, the employees needed to produce cars on the assembly line did not need to be exceptionally skilled, as was the case earlier. As Avent writes: “The people working on the line were not especially skilled, for the most part. But Ford’s clever system meant that they were nonetheless fantastically productive.”

Cut to the 21st century. App based taxi services like Uber and Ola, are working around similar lines. Take the case of the traditional cab driver (or an auto-rickshaw driver in India). He was protected by laws and regulations. Most cities do not issue permits to drive a cab or an auto-rickshaw, on tap. Hence, there are a limited number of permits going around.

Also, more importantly, the drivers need to know their way around the city. If they don’t, they won’t be able to do their jobs. Uber and other app-based cabs have simply taken these things out of the equation.

As Avent writes: “Uber entered markets with a new business structure that took advantage of technology – smartphones equipped with GPS – that made the prior knowledge much less important… In doing so it allowed relatively unskilled drivers to enter the business in vast numbers.”

The point being that many more people could operate the smartphone than know the way around big cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, New Delhi, New York or London, for that matter. Like in case of the assembly line, the cleverness of GPS technology, has essentially ensured that many more people can now become taxi drivers than was the case in the past. This has put the traditional taxi-drivers in trouble.

The question is how long will this last? As Avent writes: “New business models that open opportunities for unskilled workers by simplifying the tasks done in an industry arguably pave the way for the eventual automation of those tasks.”

The column originally appeared in the Bangalore Mirror on November 2, 2016.

 

'Most stimulus packages have been far too small'

Tim_Harford_in_2012
Vivek Kaul


Tim Harford is a senior columnist for the 
Financial Times. His long-running column, “The Undercover Economist”, reveals the economic ideas behind everyday experiences. Tim’s first book, “The Undercover Economist” has sold one million copies worldwide in almost 30 languages. He is also the author of “The Logic of Life“, “Dear Undercover Economist”, “Adapt” and most recently “The Undercover Economist Strikes Back.” In this free-wheeling interview to Forbes India, Tim discusses the ideas he explores in his latest book The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, from why he feels that stimulus packages to revive the sagging economies in the Western world have been far too small to why money does buy happiness to why Henry Ford was the man who invented unemployment.
One of the most interesting parts of your book is where you talk about the baby sitting recession. What is that all about?
The babysitting recession was first discussed in an article published by Joan and Richard Sweeney in the 1970s, but it has been made famous by Paul Krugman. There was a babysitting co-op in Capitol Hill, Washington DC, that suffered a severe and lasting depression. Couples would keep track of who was babysitting for whom by exchanging babysitting tokens; however, there weren’t enough tokens in the economy. Almost everybody wanted to babysit for other people, accumulating a few more tokens, as a reserve, before they spent any tokens themselves. But of course the arithmetic does not work: somebody has to go out or this no economy at all.
So what drew you this example?
A number of things are interesting about this example – notably that a total economic breakdown could be fixed by a simple policy tweak: printing more tokens. (Paul Krugman has more recently tended not to mention the end of the story: the co-op printed too many tokens and ended up suffering from a serious inflation problem. But that is more of an interesting sting in the tale than a refutation of the entire example.) In The Undercover Economist Strikes Back I use the babysitting recession as a nice simple example of a Keynesian recession; in a Keynesian recession there is some dysfunction in the way the economy works, a dysfunction that can be fixed by governments printing money or perhaps borrowing and spending money. Some commentators believe Keynesian recessions are logically impossible; this is nonsense and it is nice to have a simple counter-example.
Another interesting part is about the prison camp recession. What is that all about?
The prison-camp I talk about was in Germany during the Second World War. The economic activity in the camp – a bit of production, but mostly trading items sent to prisoners by the Red Cross – was analysed in a quite brilliant article by one of the prisoners, Robert Radford, who published his findings a few months after the war ended.
And what did Radford find?
The prison camp is almost the perfect counter-weight to the baby-sitting co-op. Trade in the prison camp worked amazingly well. There were well-understood prices and middlemen ensuring that prices in different parts of the camp tended to converge to similar levels. At one stage, coffee was worth more outside the camp in the cafes of Munich than it was inside the camp, that meant gains from trade, and coffee began to go “over the wall” – the prison camp had an export trade! Despite various attempts from the senior officers to regulate trade and particularly to fix prices at levels they regarded as fair, prices were flexible and refused to respect any social or ethical conceptions of the “just price”. This was close to a perfect market. And yet… and yet the prisoners nearly starved to death.
Oh, why was that?
Why they starved is not hard to understand. The parcels from the Red Cross began to dry up as the war progressed. Food and cigarettes both became scarce. In the last, desperate days, there were few goods and prices fluctuated wildly. Finally the US Army arrived and liberated the prisoners.
But what does all this have to do with a modern economy?
The point is that there are two conceptions of what a recession really is. One conception is Keynesian, like the babysitting co-op: some internal malfunction that needs fixing. But another conception is Classical: that economies fluctuate not because of anything wrong within the economic system itself, but because of policy errors or external shocks. Of course the prison camp is an extreme example of a recession caused by an external shock, but modern economies are subject to technological changes, fluctuations in the price of basic commodities, and of course financial shocks from a banking crisis.
Where do the baby sitting recession and the prison camp recession meet? What are the policy lessons one can draw from them?
A Keynesian, baby-sitting co-op recession invites a role for government intervention – most famously through fiscal policy (cutting taxes or boosting spending) but also through monetary policy (cutting interest rates or even printing new money). A Classical, prison-camp recession invites a more fatalistic response: there’s nothing the government can do to make things better, and plenty of things it can do to make things worse. The huge argument that has raged in many economies about fiscal stimulus versus austerity is really a debate about whether recent recessions have been mostly Keynesian, or mostly Classical. If Classical, then austerity is the right response: we’re poorer and we need to get used to it. If Keynesian, then fiscal stimulus is the right response: we’re only poorer if the government gives up and allows us to be!
So are the recent recessions Keynesian or Classical?
In a book you can give black-and-white examples and in life, nothing is black and white. But in my view the recent recessions have been at least partially Keynesian and governments – especially in the UK and US, where they had a choice – should have postponed austerity measures.
The western world has been running stimulus programmes. Do they really work?
It’s interesting that this is your perception. I think most stimulus packages have been far too small – although the US has at least tried. The evidence on such things is always tricky because macroeconomists (unlike microeconomists) cannot run controlled trials. But we can try our best.
Can you elaborate on that?
The International Monetary Fund at first estimated a modest effect from fiscal stimulus – that is, government spending does make the economy larger in the short run, but only a bit. But the Fund later recanted and argued that in the recent recession, fiscal stimulus was far more effective than they’d believed at first.
Let’s assume this is correct (I think it is). How did the Fund make their original mistake? The problem was that they were looking at historical evidence on stimulus spending, and the historical evidence incorporated much milder recessions in which monetary policy was a good alternative to fiscal stimulus. Those mild recessions weren’t a good guide to recent experience, alas.
What is the best way to make a stimulus work?
As for how to make stimulus work, I argue in my book that the best bet is advanced planning: governments should have a list of well-planned infrastructure projects, and should accelerate those plans in case of a downturn. That way, we carry out the investment we were intending to anyway, but at a time when it will have nice macroeconomic side-effects.
Economists have been criticised for having too much faith in GDP growth. Even Simon Kuznets, the man who invented GDP never saw it as a measure of welfare. You write that “they rely on the popular misconception that much of what is wrong with the way the economy is organised is wrong because we collect GDP statistics, and that the way to fix our economic problems is to measure something else. I think that is a mistake”. Why is that a mistake?
Because it isn’t the measuring of GDP that has caused the problems. We had economic growth – and inequality, environmental degradation and other problems – long before we could measure it. Of course there are thoughtful critics of GDP who suggest additional things we could measure, or ways to make GDP a better measure of economic activity. But the more radical critics seem to assume that our economy is organised the way it is because some sinister force is trying maximise GDP. And that’s just crazy.
A lot of recent thinking talks about happy economics (or what you call happynomics). Does money buy happiness?
Money does buy happiness, it seems – or at least having more money, within a particular society, is correlated with being happier (or rather, with telling surveyors that you are more satisfied with your life). The big contested question in happynomics is whether that’s also true across countries: so, is a richer country such as the US happier than a poorer country such as India?
Is that the case?
Early research from Richard Easterlin suggested that richer countries aren’t happier – hence the phrase “the Easterlin Paradox”: if money buys happiness for individuals but not for countries which are collections of individuals, what’s going on? Two possible explanations: one is that what really counts is relative income. Indians compare themselves to other Indians; Americans compare themselves to other Americans. If Americans compared themselves to Indians they’d feel rich and would be happier. But they don’t, so they don’t. An alternative explanation – favoured by economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson – is that Easterlin is just wrong: at the time of his research, the data were of poor quality. Now we have better quality data and we see that money is correlated with happiness both across and within countries. It will be interesting to see this debate play out.
Can economic growth carry on forever?
In principle, yes. Quite a few environmentalists and physicists have pointed out that the planet simply cannot support exponential growth – sooner or later (and, with exponential growth, sooner than we think) we will reach environmental limits.
You don’t buy that?
I regard myself as an environmentalist myself but I think this is just a simple conceptual error. Of course we cannot continue to use more resources or energy at an exponential rate. But economic growth is just growth in the market value of output. So it can continue forever – at least in principle. There are already signs that energy growth is being decoupled from economic growth: in countries such as the UK, the US, Germany and Japan, energy consumption per capita has been falling for a long time now. Population growth is also low or negative in many rich countries. I believe that we need to focus on practical environmental questions – for instance, how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now – rather than these very abstract concerns about exponentiation.
One of things that you write about India is that “there simply isn’t enough money in India yet for it to be unequal”. What do you mean by that? Do you see it changing in the years to come?
The World Bank economist Branko Milanovic has this idea of the “inequality possibility frontier”. Imagine an extremely poor subsistence society. Then imagine some class of plutocrats, who somehow confiscate wealth and spend it themselves. How much can they take? The answer is: not much if the society is to survive, because the poor cannot dip below the average income because the average income is barely enough to keep you alive. Now imagine a much richer society. This, in principle, could be far more unequal because the poor could still survive on a tiny fraction of the average income. Milanovic and co-authors were interested not only in how unequal a society is, but how unequal it is relative to how unequal it could possibly be. My point was that despite important gains over the past twenty years, India is still a very poor society. There’s a limit to how unequal it can get until it gets richer – which should make us worry about the inequality we do see.
Why was Henry Ford the man who invented unemployment?
Ah yes, this is one of my claims – and I should say that it’s an exaggeration, of course. But here’s the puzzle: Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company raised wages at his factory to such a level that men were queuing round the block for jobs, being hosed down by police in a sub-zero Chicago January. Why have such high wages? Why not cut them and save money, given how much demand there was for jobs?
The idea here is “efficiency wages” – that it can be efficient for an employer to pay well above the market rate because it gives him the pick of applicants, and a fiercely loyal group of workers who will do almost anything to keep their jobs. And of course, that describes many – perhaps most – jobs in the formal sector today. That means, in turn, that we’ll always have unemployment, not because of some macroeconomic slump, but because individual profit-maximising companies prefer efficiency wages.
You quote a lot of John Maynard Keynes all through the book. One of the things you quote in the last chapter is “the master economist must posses a rare combination of gifts…He must be a mathematician, historian, statesmen – in some degree….” Do you see that in current day economists?
Not enough. But that challenge is what makes economics such a marvellous subject to study. Everything is there in the subject, waiting to challenge us. Despite all the difficulties, economic remains a wonderfully important and rich topic to explore – and it’s still a great time to be an economist.
The interview originally appeared in the Forbes India magazine dated December 13, 2013

What Team Anna can learn from Nirma, Sony, Apple and Ford


Vivek Kaul

The decision by Team Anna to form a political party has become the butt of jokes on the internet. A Facebook friend suggested that they name their party, the Char Anna Party and someone else suggested the name Kejriwal Liberal Party for Democracy (KLPD).
The jokes are clearly in a bad taste and reflect the level of cynicism that has seeped into us. Let me paraphrase lines written by my favourite economist John Kenneth Galbraith (borrowed from his book The Affluent Society) to capture this cynicism. “When Indians see someone agitating for change they enquire almost automatically: “What is there for him?” They suspect that the moral crusades of reformers, do-gooders, liberal politicians, and public servants, all their noble protestations notwithstanding are based ultimately on self interest. “What,” they enquire, “is their gimmick?””
The cynicism comes largely from the way things have evolved in the sixty five years of independence where the political parties have taken us for a royal ride. Given this the skepticism that prevails at the decision of Team Anna to form a political party isn’t surprising. Take the case of Justice Markandey Katju, who asked CNN-IBN “Which caste will this political party represent? Because unless you represent one caste, you won’t get votes…Whether you are honest or meritorious nobody bothers. People see your caste or religion. You may thump your chest and say you are very honest but you will get no votes.”
Former Supreme Court justice N. Santosh Hegde said “Personally, am not in favour of Annaji floating a political party and contesting elections, which is an expensive affair and requires huge resources in terms of funds and cadres.”
Some other experts and observers have expressed their pessimism at the chances of success of the political party being launched by Team Anna. Questions are being raised. Where will they get the money to fight elections from? How will they choose their candidates? What if Team Anna candidates win elections and start behaving like other politicians?
All valid questions. But I remain optimistic despite the fact that things look bleak at this moment for Team Anna’s political party.
I look at Team Anna’s political party as a disruptive innovation. Clayton Christensen, a professor of strategy at the Harvard Business School is the man who coined this phrase. He defines it as “These are innovations that transform an existing market or create a new one by introducing simplicity, convenience, accessibility and affordability. It is initially formed in a narrow foothold market that appears unattractive or inconsequential to industry incumbents.”
An excellent example of a home grown disruptive innovation is Nirma detergent. Karsanbhai Patel, who used to work as a chemist in the Geology & Mining Department of the Gujarat government, introduced Nirma detergent in 1969.
He first started selling it at Rs 3.50 per kg. At that point of time Hindustan Lever Ltd’s (now Hindustan Unilever) Surf retailed for Rs 15 per kg. The lowest-priced detergent used to sell at Rs 13.50 per kg. The price point at which Nirma sold made it accessible to consumers, who till then really couldn’t afford the luxury of washing their clothes using a detergent and had to use soap instead.
If Karsanbhai Patel had thought at the very beginning that Hindustan Lever would crush his small detergent, he would have never gotten around launching it. The same applies to Team Anna’s political party as well. They will never know what lies in store for them unless they get around launching the party and running it for the next few years.
Getting back to Nirma, the logical question to ask is who should have introduced a product like Nirma? The answer is Hindustan Lever, the company which through the launch of Surf detergent, pioneered the concept of bucket wash in India. But they did not. Even after the launch of Nirma, for a very long time they continued to ignore Nirma, primarily because the price point at which Nirma sold was too low for Hindustan Lever to even think about. And by the time the MBAs at Hindustan Lever woke up, Nirma had already established itself as a pan-India brand. But, to their credit they were able to launch the ‘Wheel’ brand, which competed with Nirma directly.
At times the biggest players in the market are immune to the opportunity that is waiting to be exploited. A great example is that of Kodak which invented the digital camera but did not commercialize it for a very long time thinking that the digital camera would eat into its photo film business. The company recently filed for bankruptcy.
Ted Turner’s CNN was the first 24-hour news channel. Who should have really seen the opportunity? The BBC. But they remained blind to the opportunity and handed over a big market to CNN on a platter.
Along similar lines, maybe there is an opportunity for a political party in India which fields honest candidates who work towards eradicating corruption and does not work along narrow caste or regional lines. Maybe the Indian voter now wants to go beyond voting along the lines of caste or region. Maybe he did not have an option until now. And now that he has an option he might just want to exercise it.
While there is a huge maybe but the thing is we will never know the answers unless Team Anna’s political party gets around to fighting a few elections.
The other thing that works to the advantage of disruptive innovators is the fact that the major players in the market ignore them initially and do not take them as a big enough force that deserves attention.
A great example is the Apple personal computer. As Clayton Christensen told me in an interview I carried out for the Daily News and Analysis (DNA) a few years back “Apple made a wise decision and first sold the personal computer as a toy for children. Children had been non-consumers of computers and did not care that the product was not as good as the existing mainframe and minicomputers. Over time Apple and the other PC companies improved the PC so it could handle more complicated tasks. And ultimately the PC has transformed the market by allowing many people to benefit from its simplicity, affordability, and convenience relative to the minicomputer.”
Before the personal computer was introduced, the biggest computer available was called the minicomputer. “But minicomputers cost well over $200,000, and required an engineering degree to operate. The leading minicomputer company was Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which during the 1970s and 1980s, was one of the most admired companies in the world economy,” write Clayton Christensen, Michael B Horn and Curtis W Johnson in Disrupting Class —How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.
But even then DEC did not realise the importance of the personal computer. “None of DEC’s customers could even use a personal computer for the first 10 years it was on the market because it wasn’t good enough for the problems they needed to solve. That meant that more carefully DEC listened to its best customers, the less signal they got that the personal computer mattered — because in fact it didn’t — to those customers,” the authors explain.
That DEC could generate a gross profit of $112,500 when selling a minicomputer and $300,000 while selling the much bigger ‘mainframe’ also didn’t help. In comparison, the $800 margin on the personal computer looked quite pale.
Another example is Sony. “In 1955, Sony introduced the first battery-powered, pocket transistor radio. In comparison with the big RCA tabletop radios, the Sony pocket radio was tiny and static laced. But Sony chose to sell to its transistor radio to non-consumers – teenagers who could not afford big tabletop radio. It allowed teenagers to listen to music out of earshot of their parents because it was portable. And although the reception and fidelity weren’t great, it was far better than their alternative, which was no radio at all,” write Christensen, Horn and Johnson. Sony went onto to come up with other great disruptive innovations like the Walkman and the CDMan. But did not see the rise of MP3 players.
The point is that incumbents are so clued in to their business that it is very difficult for them to see the rise of a new category.
So what is the learning here for Team Anna? The learning is that their political party may not take the nation by storm all at once. They might appeal only to a section of the voters initially, probably the urban middle class, like Apple PCs had appealed to children and Sony radios to teenagers. So the Team Anna political party is likely to start off with a limited appeal and if that is the case the bigger political parties will not give them much weight initially. Chances are if they stay true to their cause their popularity might gradually go up over the years, as has been the case with disruptive innovators in business. The fact that political parties might ignore them might turn out to be their biggest strength in the years to come.
Any disruption does not come as an immediate shift. As the authors write, “Disruption rarely arrives as an abrupt shift in reality; for a decade, the personal computer did not affect DEC’s growth or profits.” Similarly, the Team Anna political party isn’t going to take India by storm overnight. It will need time.
Business is littered with examples of companies that did not spot a new opportunity that they should have and allowed smaller entrepreneurial starts up to grow big. The only minicomputer company that successfully made the transition to being a personal computer company was IBM. “They set up a separate organisation in Florida, the mission of which was to create and sell a personal computer as successfully as possible. This organisation had to figure out its own sales channel, it had its own engineers, and it was unencumbered by the existing organization,” said Christensen.
But even IBM wasn’t convinced about the personal computer and that is why it handed over the rights of the operating system to Microsoft on a platter. Even disruptive innovators get disrupted. Microsoft did not see the rise of email and it’s still trying to correct that mistake through the launch of Outlook.com. It didn’t see the rise of search engines either. Nokia did not see the rise of smart phones. Google did not see the rise of social media. And Facebook will not see the rise of something else.
Team Anna is a disruptive innovation which can disrupt the model of the existing political parties in India. There are three things that can happen with this disruptive innovation. The Team Anna political party tries for a few years and doesn’t go anywhere. That doesn’t harm us in anyway. The Team Anna political party fights elections and is able to build a major presence in the country and stays true to its cause. That benefits all of us. The Team Anna political party fights elections and its candidates win. But these candidates and the party turn out to be as corrupt as the other political parties that are already there. While this will be disappointing but then one more corrupt political party is not going to make things more difficult for the citizens of this country in anyway. We are used to it by now.
Given these reasons the Team Anna political party deserves a chance and should not be viewed with the cynicism and skepticism which seems to be cropping up.
(The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on August 4,2012. http://www.firstpost.com/politics/what-team-anna-can-learn-from-nirma-sony-apple-and-ford-404843.html)
(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at [email protected])