What Would Be The Social Cost If Uber Vanishes?

Uber, the popular ride-hailing app, may be popular among its users but not so much among lawmakers.

Uber has been banned in Austin, Texas and has been banned or barred from entry in Barcelona, Spain, Buffalo, New York, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Vancouver, Canada, and Frankfurt, Germany.

Uber reached a last-minute deal this week to avoid having its services shut off completely across Quebec, Canada.

Meanwhile, Uber faces legal troubles across many countries, including France, Spain, Germany and India.

So what would happen if Uber simply gave up and vanished overnight? Bloomberg took a look at a study which answered this interesting question.

A paper, written by "Freakonomics'" author Steven Levitt and others, came up with a "pretty good, dollars-and-cents measure" of how much UberX, Uber's main service which allows ordinary people to join the ride sharing app, is improving the lives of its users.

For starters, every dollar spent by an UberX consumer receives $1.60 worth of gain.

Bloomberg noted this represents an "unusually high" amount of "consumer surplus" and implies there aren't "many close substitutes for Uber at prevailing prices."

UberX also produces a daily social value of around $18 million and $6.8 billion a year.

"The real lesson here is an old one, namely that the fight between progress and protection never goes away," the Bloomberg report concluded. "Progress is painful to some precisely because it is a big step forward for all the others."