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The decline of serial killers and rise of the sharing economy. The booming market for peer-to-peer business is a reflection of Americans' renewed faith in strangers."
In San Francisco and Los Angeles, fleets of amateur taxi drivers have taken to the streets, using services like Lyft and Sidecar to find fares, ferrying total strangers around to earn extra cash. In New York City, despite legal concerns, there are thousands of apartments available on Airbnb, and many renters allow a never ending stream of visitors to book a spare bedroom for a few nights each week. Across the nation, TaskRabbits fill odd jobs — walking the dogs, carrying the groceries, and cleaning the bathrooms of people they don’t know very well at all.
Collectively these companies have raised over $200 million in funding to power what's known as the "sharing economy." But there was time not so long ago when the idea of interacting so freely with complete strangers would have made many Americans much more uncomfortable. "There was a cultural moment during the '70s and '80s where the dominant boogieman was the serial killer. This figure crystallized our worst fears, and walked among us," says Harold Schecter, a professor at Queens College and a true-crime writer.
The article goes on to say that the trend in serial killings peaked in the 80's and has gone steadily down since then. Which I suppose is another way of saying "the booming market for peer-to-peer could/should boom larger, now that people don't have to be as afraid of strangers. Which begs the question... If the scourge that was serial killing is no longer the specter preventing this flourishing world of tomorrow, here today, thanks to the internet, how come this rent-a-rigmarole has not quite taken over the economy? *
