I recently got an Uber ride from Paul, a voluble middle-aged guy who is typical of the drivers you get from the ride-sharing app. Paul lives in a rented apartment with his son. His main job, a couple days a week, is for a carpet-cleaning company, which covers the rent but little else. He also offers a tax-accounting service from his apartment, not legally (his credentials are from another country and not recognized here, he says); it provides extra income a couple months a year. Last year he and his son scraped together enough to buy a black Lexus, on seven-year financing, which they hope will become their main earner, through hookups generated by Uber and other apps, but also through a private limo service they hope to get licenced.

If it all works out, Paul and his family will have a stable income, enough to save for retirement and get his son a place of his own. At the moment, he spends some months below the poverty line, faces frightening amounts of debt, finds Uber's payments and terms "really awful, just impossible," and works day and night to juggle his many, precarious, income sources.

We are in the midst of a worldwide debate about bad jobs, low wages and the incomes generated through the new online "sharing" economy. Are services such as Uber and the apartment-rental service Airbnb "employers" who are exploiting their employees? Should low-wage employers be made to pay a "living wage?"

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People like Paul help explain why we're approaching these questions from the wrong angle.

We now know that few people on low incomes today have "a job" that is responsible for their well-being or, if it pays badly, for their poverty. A great many people get by on a chaotic combination of jobs, buying-and-selling opportunities, small businesses, self-employment arrangements, services and trades.

This is true around the world, even for the very poorest people. Mainstream thinking about employment and income was changed dramatically six years ago with the publication of the landmark study Portfolios of the Poor, by the economic scholars Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford and Orlanda Ruthven. After spending a decade studying the household budgets of hundreds of families around the world with household incomes below $2 a day, Dr. Collins and her colleagues found that most poor families create diversified "portfolios" of sales, farming, small jobs, hustles, trade opportunities, seasonal employment and shared work arrangements, and that they tend to hold these together using complex, usually informal, borrowing and saving arrangements – "borrowing to save" being a very commonplace, and risky, practice.

But it's not just the poor of Asia and Africa – it's people around you. During the past five years, Dr. Morduch and Rachel Schneider of the Center for Financial Services Innovation have expanded this research into the "low- and moderate-income households" of North America through their U.S. Financial Diaries project – and they have found similar patterns becoming very widespread.

Typical of the hundreds of families they've examined are the Hosseins of New York, who make between $1500 and $3000 a month from running a coffee shop and a dry-goods store, from collecting rent on a spare room, from the husband driving a taxi periodically (possibly by way of Uber), and from his part-time income at a cheque-cashing shop. Most months, their income exceeds their family expenses; sometimes it doesn't, so they both borrow and save.

There are several lessons from this new patchwork-quilt understanding of low-income life. First, that services such as Uber aren't acting as primary employers. It's extremely rare to meet anyone who considers such services (or, in fact, old-fashioned taxi-fleet companies) as their main source of income.

Second, that even more important than absolute annual income is income stability: the ability to even out the peaks and troughs between multiple income sources. While people living this way may benefit from higher minimum wages, they are even more in need of non-exploitative saving and borrowing tools. This has led the finance analyst Hugh Sinclair to propose that what low-income people need is "income smoothening" – bank accounts with substantial overdraft protection, which are easier to manage than credit cards or payday-loan debts.

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And finally, we need to rejig our social-assistance and unemployment-insurance systems to recognize that life is no longer a matter of having or losing a job, but of stitching together a comfortable and secure quilt from a colourful range of fabrics. We could save a lot of money and heartbreak if we helped people keep the seams from fraying.