There’s a lot of uncertainty about how much money Uber drivers make and whether being an Uber driver is, as the company says, an ideal part-time job. Uber released a research paper on Thursday that claimed to give clear answers to those questions. It didn’t quite.
The paper’s biggest claim is simple, and headline-grabbing: Uber drivers make more money than regular taxi drivers. This, along with flexible hours, makes being an Uber driver a good part-time job, in the paper’s judgment.
On close reading, however, none of the data provided by the authors of the paper — Uber Head of Research Jonathan Hall and Princeton economist Alan Krueger, working “under contract” with Uber — support such claims.
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This is a chart of increasing predictability: The more hours you work, the more accurately you can estimate your gross pay. The less you work, the less you know. Extremely variable and unpredictable pay is not anyone’s idea of a good part-time job.
Another question is how realistic the figures are on a month-to-month basis. Krueger told The Huffington Post that the study does examine how drivers’ hourly wages vary from month to month, and concluded they were “fairly steady across months.” However, the standard deviation in the study is 19 percent — that means that assuming a normal distribution, 68 percent of drivers saw earnings swing somewhere between positive and negative 19 percent month to month. The rest of the drivers saw their earnings change even more dramatically.
All of this leaves us pretty much where we were before the paper was released. Uber’s latest report offers plenty of information, without revealing anything important.
