Notre Dame Law Review Volume 94 | Issue 1 Article 7 11-2018 The hS aring Economy as an Equalizing Economy John O. McGinnis Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr Part of the Law and Economics Commons, Law and Politics Commons, and the Law and Society Commons Recommended Citation 94 Notre Dame L. Rev. 329 (2018). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Notre Dame Law Review at NDLScholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Notre Dame Law Review by an authorized editor of NDLScholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. \\jciprod01\productn\N\NDL\94-1\NDL107.txt unknown Seq: 1 19-NOV-18 13:05 THE SHARING ECONOMY AS AN EQUALIZING ECONOMY John O. McGinnis* Economic equality is often said to be the key problem of our time. But information technol- ogy dematerializes the world in ways that are helpful to the ninety-nine percent, because informa- tion can be shared. This Article looks at how one fruit of the information revolution—the sharing economy—has important equalizing features on both its supply and demand sides. First, on the supply side, the intermediaries in the sharing economy, like Airbnb and Uber, allow owners of housing and cars to monetize their most important capital assets. The gig aspect of this economy creates spot markets in jobs that have flexible hours and monetizes people’s passions, such as cooking meals in their home. Such benefits make these jobs even more valuable than the earnings that show up imperfectly in income statistics.