An Uber autonomous car with no driver picks up a power drill from maybe it's an owner or contractor who's not using it. "This is the future," he says. The result is that instead of having 110 million adequate power drills, we have something like 10 or 12 million at any given time.
Economist and author Michael Munger of Duke University talks about his book, Tomorrow 3.0, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Munger analyzes the rise of companies like Uber and AirBnB as an example of how technology lowers transactions costs. Users and providers can find each other more easily through their smartphones, increasing opportunity. Munger expects these costs to fall elsewhere and predicts an expansion of the sharing economy to a wide array of items in our daily lives.