It may feel like a small consolation now, but all this new technology did make us better off. Even without the subsidy of low interest rates, we still have more choices and cheaper services than we did 20 or 30 years ago. Perhaps people hate loss so much that it’s worse to lose a subsidized Uber than to have never Ubered at all. But I don’t think so.
Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.