Can We Afford the Ownership Economy?

Of course, the "own a stake in what you use" argument might apply in some domains rather than others. There are probably more people excited to get equity in an app than equity in their local waste management company. But that brings up another problem: for large platforms, the value created is often a function of small amounts of value per user mu... See more

Holding the cost structures of the user-owned and non-user-owned services constant, the user-owned service will have a higher price point because what's being bought is a bundle of the service and equity. An ownership economy is implicitly a high-savings economy, which means a lower-demand one; the money that would be buying goods and services is n... See more

In some places, this has worked fairly well; Uniswap is worth $11bn, for example. But does it extend to the rest of the economy? Will we reach a point where we can do business mostly or entirely with companies that we're simultaneously investing in, so the next Zuckerberg won't be able to create nearly a trillion dollars in market value from our ca... See more