Oh. Hello and welcome to upstream part of the Economics for Transition Project.

Today we're speaking about the sharing economy with Doug Henwood, an author, radio host, and columnist for Harper's, the Nation, and Jack Open. So just to start making sure we're all talking about the same thing because I know that people use different words to talk about the sharing economy.

I'm wondering if you use the word sharing economy when you talk about

Airbnb, Uber and Lyft or is there another term that you use just so we can be on the

same page? Well I use that because the term that people know and it's kind of hard to make up

your own terminology given that language is a social thing. So yeah, I use it, but I hope you can hear the air quotes when I do use it because it's a strange concept of sharing.

You know, we learned that sharing is a good thing, but the way that sharing

operates in the Uber AirB&B world isn't exactly the selfless thing that we all aspire to back in kindergarten.

But yes, it's the term I use, but then quickly go into an explanation of what it's all

about.

Can you talk a little bit about your background and what brought you to particularly writing and talking about the sharing economy?

Well, my background is, my academic background, if we go back into ancient history was in English.

I was an English major in college and did three years of graduate work in English and was going to write about American poetry.

And then one of the things I was going to do... write about American poetry.

And then one of the things I was going to do with my dissertation was look at some of the

psychological changes underlying a lot of economical American poetry and related to the

changes in the economy and the move from a small scale competitive capitalism in the early 19th century to a large scale finance

bureaucratic capitalist of the 20th.

And I had studied economics in college, so I wasn't completely naive about the subject, but I was like a said English major and didn't really spend a lot of time studying, you know, critical theory and this sort of thing and

poetry much less so fiction and when I was starting to write the dissertation I

started reading more economic history to be about that side of my study and realized I found

that a lot more interesting than writing a dissertation about the modern and then 19th century American poetry.

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