“eBay’s impact hasn’t been on the thousands of tech jobs it created for eBay,” Sundararajan says, “but on the hundreds of thousands of sellers it created.”

Excerpted from EMILY BADGER:

Image from Etsy

“The sharing economy, however, is not exactly like economic disruptions that came before it. More complex technology typically demands more complex skills. And, in the past, major technological change in the economy has been accompanied by a shift toward higher-skilled work. Initially, there’s a shortage of those high-skilled people. Their wages go up, while wages go down for the people who are steeped in the old technology.

The sharing economy is fundamentally premised on new technology, and it’s creating new jobs exactly like this for the developers and programmers on the back end of Etsy’s platform or SideCar’s app. But that’s not the most interesting part of this story.

eBay’s impact hasn’t been on the thousands of tech jobs it created for eBay, but on the hundreds of thousands of sellers it created.

That’s where the real economic impact here lies, and it’s not actually clear if all of those people – Uber drivers, Etsy sellers, Airbnb hosts – need more complex skills than what was required of them a decade ago. If you sell furniture on Etsy that you built with a Makerbot 3D printer that you keep in your living room, your skills probably have grown more advanced.

But, for the most part, the sharing economy is not creating new machines that people must learn to use to produce more stuff. It’s creating new marketplaces to access familiar things in better ways.

“There’s something a little different going on with the sharing economy,” Sundararajan says. And he doesn’t yet know the broader implication of this.

He’s wary of all the estimates he sees of the size of the sharing economy, or any projections for its future growth, because we also don’t know how quickly this new kind of consumption will become “normal.” This is a question of culture, not public policy. Everyone knows how to behave when you walk into a hotel. But most of us are still a little uncertain about what’s supposed to happen when we arrive in someone’s else apartment to rent a room for the night. That’s a sign that an idea like Airbnb hasn’t yet become legitimized. And the growth of the whole sharing economy – and its economic ripple effect – depends on the speed at which that happens.

Sundararajan also suspects that many of these platforms are quietly operating as “finishing schools” for tentative entrepreneurs, another effect that so far hasn’t been measured. You can test out selling some of your crafts on Etsy, for example, without quitting your job and cashing in your 401K to open a brick-and-mortar store. Whole new companies will start this way, he predicts. And that would have an impact on the economy, too, that would be inarguably positive.

“I don’t know how it can’t be,” Mitchell says, “simply because in using things like Daily Grommet, Etsy, these platform technologies that are out there, that’s allowing people in small towns that have been impacted by business closures to actually make and sell things online to customers they’re never going to meet or see.”