What if gig workers quit and break ride-hail economics?
A reclassification ruling plus falling pay drives drivers off platforms, breaking ride-hail/delivery unit economics — the clean trade is short Uber/Lyft/DoorDash/Instacart on margin and supply, not broad risk. Rhymes with California AB5 / Prop 22 (2019-20), when reclassification fears repriced gig names sharply before Prop 22 reprieved them. The roots are wrong: labor_surplus with risk-on tailwinds (growth/consumer/inflation easing) implies a bullish labor-supply story, but this is a cost-shock that breaks specific business models — it should be mildly risk-off and platform-specific, not a generic positive-labor cascade.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A reclassification ruling plus falling pay drives drivers off platforms, breaking the unit economics of ride-hail and delivery. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Job displacement ▲ · Consumer spending ▼ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.