Uber is a fact of urban life today. But not too long ago, summoning a cab through a smartphone app was a newfangled concept that threatened the status quo of tightly regulated, uncompetitive, unreliable, and often corrupt local cab sectors throughout the country.
In Disrupting D.C., Katie J. Wells, Kafui Attoh, and Declan Cullen take us back to that time — telling Uber’s story not as a triumph of technology over sclerosis but as a warning about what happens when governments offer poor services, provide inadequate welfare benefits, and lack the spine to enforce the law when a flashy company promising innovation comes to town.
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Wells et al. are a trio of unabashedly left-wing academics, the type of people who talk about “neoliberalism” like it’s a bad thing, and no conservative or centrist will change his entire worldview after reading this book. However, the strength of Disrupting D.C. lies in its most straightforward parts, in which the authors explain how Uber came to power in Washington and report what they learned by interviewing countless political players and Uber drivers.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Washington Examiner
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
