What I Predicted About the Gig Economy in 2019, and What Actually Happened

In 2019 Ryan Vet told USA TODAY that AB5 was "more than a two-sided equation" because consumers would pay too, told ABC10 the bill could push app companies to raise prices, and told the Epoch Times it would play out like "whack-a-mole" and disrupt trucking, "an industry that didn’t need disruption." In January 2020 he told the Financial Times that "California seems to be the incubator state for new laws in new spaces, like the gig economy." Prices rose after Proposition 22, California exempted more than 100 occupations in 2020, truckers protesting AB5 shut down the Port of Oakland in 2022, and Massachusetts and Minnesota adopted California’s pay-floor compromise in 2024.

Mostly. His calls on consumer prices, a cycle of carve-outs, the damage to trucking, and California as the incubator for other states all held. His call that AB5 would "implode the gig economy as we know it today" partly held. The 2019 model ended: Vox Media cut about 200 California freelancers, Uber rebuilt its driver terms within a week of the law taking effect, and Proposition 22 created a new category of contractor with a pay floor and benefits. But the companies did not collapse, and drivers are still independent contractors.

Two things, by his own account. "Implode" was too strong: the app-based model was restructured rather than broken, through a negotiated middle of contractor status plus minimum pay and benefits, first in California and later in Massachusetts and Minnesota. And he argued that gig work was simply better for millennials and Gen Z, which missed what independent contractors lose: a team, belonging, and the sense of mattering to a brand.

He was working in the gig economy as AB5 was written and had spent years studying how millennials approach work. Newsrooms including USA TODAY, the Financial Times, the Epoch Times, ABC10, CBS2 Los Angeles, KRON 4, Newsmax, WOR and KGO booked him to explain the law in 2019 and 2020. The Financial Times described him as "an author and expert on the gig economy."

Ryan Vet published Cracking the Millennial Code, later a USA TODAY bestseller, in November 2019, in the middle of the AB5 fight. He treats AB5 as a generational collision: an employment model built around one employer for a long career, meeting a generation that wanted to choose when, where and for whom it worked.

A futurist studies the forces already changing how people live and work, then makes specific, dated calls about where those forces lead, so leaders can act before the change is obvious. Ryan Vet’s gig economy predictions are an example: in 2019 he made public calls about consumer prices, trucking and other states following California, all of which can be checked against what happened.

A generational futurist forecasts change through the lens of the generations living through it. The same shift, like gig work or AI, lands differently on a 60-year-old and a 25-year-old, because each generation is reacting to how it was raised. Ryan Vet, a generational futurist and USA TODAY bestselling author, calls this pattern the Generational Pendulum.

Look for a public track record: specific predictions, made on the record with dates, that you can check against what actually happened, including the ones that were only partly right. Vague trend lists can’t be wrong, so they can’t be right either. Ryan Vet publishes his checked predictions, including the gig economy calls he made to USA TODAY, the Financial Times and the Epoch Times.

He argues gig work should be real independent contracting, with the rights and autonomy that status carries, rather than a halfway reclassification. He is still bullish that it opened earning access to people who had none, but treats it as one part of the future of work, not the whole of it.