Sundararajan: India's mobile phone access grew from 10% to 80% in two decades
Arun Sundararajan · a16z Podcast | An Economics Take on the Sharing Economy · Jan 2, 2019 · at 3:54
NYU Stern Professor Arun Sundararajan explains how standard GDP metrics fail to capture significant reductions in inequality of access driven by technological expansion.
0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“About 80% of India now has access to a mobile phone. A couple of decades ago that was just 10%, and so we've not just seen an increase in consumer surplus here, but we've seen, like, a tremendous reduction in inequality of access that just doesn't get picked up by GDP.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Arun Sundararajan
Sundararajan: Gig Economy Capital Ownership Could Reduce Long-Term Income Inequality
“So by the same argument, if we increase the fraction of the population who are owners, if we shift people away from being labor providers and towards being owners of tiny short-term accommodation businesses on Airbnb, of tiny retail operations on Etsy, of like…”
Sundararajan: Sharing economy value growth will skew toward below-median income earners
“My own research has shown that if you project what the sharing economy is doing forward, a significant fraction of the value creation is captured by people below median income. In fact, the rate of growth of the value creation for people below median income is…”
Sundararajan: Top platform earners make $1.20 per $1 bottom earners make
“They find that the top 20% of income earners are earning a little more through the sharing economy than the bottom 20%. But you look at that distribution, you compare that to the actual income distribution, and you see that it's redistributive, which is that P…”
Sundararajan: Regulatory responsibility should be delegated to data-holding platforms
“I think the most exciting potential comes from looking where the data to solve a problem is, And then delegating regulatory responsibility to the party that holds the data.”
Sundararajan: Sharing economy will force a paradigm shift away from GDP
“As crowd-based capitalism goes mainstream, it's going to highlight how there's a big disconnect between what we're measuring, which is GDP, And what we value as the things that really point to progress. And so as this gap starts to grow, I think much like ther…”
Sundararajan: Sharing economy creates millions of entrepreneurs alongside tech billionaires
“Alongside each tech billionaire that the sharing economy creates, it also creates millions of small entrepreneurs, and this distinguishes the sharing economy from some of the technological advances that preceded it.”