August 30, 2015, 1:52 pm

We had a private tour in Vienna from a very good tour guide. Apparently, to become a tour guide in Austria requires that one study for years and take a special government test to get a government license. It does not matter if one wants to just focus on, say, giving special Klimt-only tours at the Belvedere or if one wants to give comprehensive cross-city tours, one still must pass the same test to practice tour-guiding. This, by the way, is entirely parallel to how most US states require one to get a full dental license after a bajillion years of school whether one wants to repair cavities or just whiten teeth.

As a result, tour guides seem to get 80 Euros an hour and up.

Anyway, as we walked we were chatting with her as she called a cab. We asked if they had Uber in Vienna, suspecting that they had the same conflicts with it as in, say, Paris. But she had never heard of it, so we explained the concept to her.

To her credit, she immediately got it, so much so that she immediately thought about it in the context of her job. She said, "Can you imagine, if any housewife could give tours and charge 30% (of her rate)? I would be looking for work the next day."

I am not totally sure that is true -- there is more differentiation in quality of tour guides vs. cab drivers. But she recognized that a portion of what she earned came because the license she had gotten from the government excluded a lot of potential competition.