The Business of Sharing

The Economist doesn't name their writers, and their regular columnists have pen names. Their economics columnist is Shumpeter, named after the inventor of the theory of "creative destruction," which some think is a good thing. He looks at something that is dear to the heart of Planet Green, The Business of Sharing.

He then gets it a bit wrong, comparing sharing with renting, which still has advantages over owning, writing:

Renting is not a new business, of course. Hotel chains and car-hire firms have been around for ages, and the world's oldest profession, one might argue, involves renting.

But eventually he gets around to what he calls "Collaborative Consumption," and lists some Planet Green and TreeHugger favourites:

Some help people sell their spare capacity in everything from parking spaces to energy. CouchSurfing connects people who have a spare sofa with travellers who wish to sleep on it, on the tacit understanding that the travellers will do the same for someone else in the network some day. There are 2.3m registered couchsurfers in 79,000 cities worldwide. Other groups have created barter economies. thredUP specialises in exchanging children's clothes, but also has exchanges for everything from make-up to video games. Freecycle helps people give things away so that they do not end up in landfills: its website has 7.6m members.

But in the end, after joking that only tramps and journalists will want to wear recycled underpants", he gets it, and the connection between new technology and the very old idea of sharing:

The internet may be synonymous with novelty, but by encouraging people to reuse the same objects rather than buy new ones, it may revive the old virtue of building products that last.

Collaborative Consumption is, I think, a better term than the one we have used forever, calling them Product Service Systems, which we have covered ad nauseum: