The IEA Book Club will be hosting renowned libertarian scholar Michael Munger, who will be discussing his forthcoming IEA Book about the sharing economy, “Platforms: Perils and Promise”. The webinar will be taking place on Tuesday 2nd June at 18:00 BST, and will be chaired by Professor Syed Kamall, the IEA’s Academic and Research Director.

Michael is an economist and teaches political science, public choice theory, and political economy at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he was also Department Chair for a decade. He made a number of contributions to libertarian scholarship, alongside having ran as a Libertarian Party Candidate for Governor of North Carolina in 2008.

In his forthcoming book for the IEA, Michael looks to address the theme of disruptions of the sharing economy platforms, less ownership and more rental. In the past two decades, the physical locations in which transactions take place, such as the city market or shopping centre, have increasingly been replaced by online platforms. This revolutionary change makes new forms of sharing, or assigning access to different people at different times, convenient. The shared feature of these new markets is that they enable profitable means of commodifying excess capacity that until now could only be wasted. We pay for storage twice: wasted space, and forgone capital value. The platform economy is making more intensive and efficient use of resources that are otherwise idle. In the long run, the consequence will be a sharp increase in the durability and average life of those resources as they are replaced. The changes may be good, or bad, and likely some of both. But they are happening, whether we like them or not.

If you would like to sign up please follow the link here. If you have any questions please get in touch with the IEA Book Club at bookclub@iea.org.uk