Nomen est omen.

It is easy to understand what the sharing economy represents. You have to take words literally. It is an economy that is obsessed with sharing, rather than creating. How shared products are produced is not important. Products grow on trees! What is important is that “we” share them. Rooms, cars, travels, tools, … “just are” – and then they are shared. Money grows on trees; we do have only one issue to solve: how to share it. Stalin’s wet dreams.

The fascination with the sharing economy shares the same ideology as a circular economy, as well as many other posts on this page. It is an evolved communist tool disguised under a soft form of “as-if-it-was-an-upgraded-economy-step”. As such, a disguised tool, it is not only repulsive but also perilous, for it is difficult to unveil the real agents who are propagating it.

However, there is a significant distinction between the “sharing economy” and the “circular economy.” The first one is phony in all respects, while the other is essential yet poorly understood.

Sharing is an act of affection towards family members, friends, and all those yoy do not expect something in exchange. This means that sharing cannot be part of the economy if the economy is meant to be a particular transaction model of society.

When I share something with my friends, a particular transaction model comes into play, yet the one that does not care about exact values. When I share something of particular value with friends, I do not expect to receive something of the same value in return. What I usually expect is a sense of affection, bonding, or something else that deepens our friendship. And, as we know, friendship has no transactional value.

On the other hand, when we enter the economic transaction model, we expect something of similar value in exchange for the product or service we are trying to exchange. We do not share within the economic transaction model, but exchange. The terminology that combines “sharing” with “economy” is misleading and phony. It is purposely misleading, stemming from the ideology of communism. 

The circular economy, on the other hand, embodies a self-evident principle. The economy cannot be but circular. Nature cannot be but circular. The output of one agent is the input of another one. And if intellectuals who try to teach birds to fly have waste in mind when preaching circular economy, they are again teaching something that any rational agent knows in advance. Waste is something that comes as an output with a negative outcome. Every rational agent tends to minimize negative outcomes, as they negatively impact the added value produced. Every rational agent thus tries to reduce waste or to find a way to put that waste into the downstream value chain so that some other agents find such a not-anymore-waste valuable as an input for their value chain. 

I’m sorry to bother you with something so trivial that even a five-year-old child understands. Yet, surrounded by “intellectuals” who try to sell the circular economy as a recent discovery that needs to be taught, one has to show that “the Emperor has no clothes.” I do not mind being a child shouting, “But he isn’t wearing anything.”