it's not, because the money that was otherwise spent (wasted) can now be deployed else where.
Otherwise, why not increase the GDP and economy, by periodically just breaking every window? The replacement is gonna cause huge growth!
Rinse and repeat every time we get a new mayor. It's a tried and tested way of legally shoveling public taxpayer money into well connected private pockets.
I've seen similar corruption scandals in Western Europe as well, since the owners of construction companies and city leaders tend to not be strangers to one another, so I don't expect China to be any different here.
The city I'm in now puts everything in the area between the streets and the sidewalks. I don't have a sidewalk yet because there are some thing that will be going in next summer.
This argument of expense rerouting is a bit flawed. Suppose working from home saves one some money that they spend elsewhere. Working from the office they spend that money on fuel, indirectly spend on road maintenance, directly spend on vehicle maintenance where the shop in turn spends on parts and tools and so on. The money one spends circulates in the economy much longer and reaches more actors until it eventually falls back into original pocket. Working from home then they buy more items that have been manufactured in China, spend eating out where restaurants pay mostly wages and farmers, making the chain much shorter.
There are different economic health considerations for different spending habits. While not exactly a loss it's not entirely equal too.
that's a total assumption being made. Who knows how the money from an office worker's commute gets dispersed. It's likely too difficult to track exactly. And it's irrelevant to the person how this dispersion happens or why.
All they need to care about is that they've eliminated a source of inefficiency, and thus have extra money for either investment or different consumption.
...or prices rise to balance out the extra money.
The rest... pure speculation from poster's own limited view, the world is more complex than 'I stay home so just order more stuff from China', definitely not true for me. I can chip in mine - ie during travel restrictions forced to buy in more expensive smaller local shops for whole family. One heck of help for local economy. Spending vacations much closer, meaning tons of money flow back to local economy. Having time to plan and do some home repairs with local workforce.
And so on, random tiny examples have little significance in hyper complex situation that is called reality.
It's clear that the pointless burning of fossil fuels didn't satisfy any human need. Then the question becomes: is the distribution of currency caused by the buying and burning of the fuels preferable to the alternative distribution if the currency had been spent elsewhere? If it is preferable, does that offset the waste of fuel for no purpose except redistributing currency?
Any time I hear these kinds of reasonings the question comes to mind: if some distributions of currency are preferable to others, and we know what such distributions look like, why not let the government do the distribution directly?
That sentence would have a different meaning if the conclusitory (looking for real word here) word "pointless" was not there.
Abundant reliable on-demand energy has enormously improved the human condition. I'm also glad the Dutch no longer dig up peat bogs for dirty fuel.
Yeah, but ... how much of it was pointless? Who decides if a use-case is pointless? You? Me? The government?
Burning fossil fuels can of course also be meaningful.
We're talking about driving to work when you can work from home.
I dunno.
There's a lot of PHBs who have petty tyrant syndrome. They desire their employees in the office.
Then there's a lot of people in the CBD who desire to continue selling their wares to the people working in the CBD.
There's letting companies who desire income from the letting arrangements, landlords who desire income enough to pay the city tax ...
On the whole, I agree with WFH; I just don't think it's a good exercise to justify anything based on what people desire.
Someone selling wares don't usually desire selling wares. They desire income. Everybody wants income. Buying something we don't want/need is waste + redistribution of currency.
Redistribution of currency is a zero sum game unless we have some reason to particularly value the desires of the ones receiving. I don't see why we should particularly value the desires of landlords.
> I just don't think it's a good exercise to justify anything based on what people desire.
What alternative do you propose?
Because this presumes that the people in government will do what is preferable to the masses. My conception of government is that of a tool or weapon that various powers vie for control over. Why should I expect benevolence from such?
It's arguable whether all of this is needed everywhere in the world, to such a degree as is presently done.
In the cities, the transportation needs of most folks can be covered by public transportation (depending on the country, admittedly) - it is more efficient, more green and also results in fewer traffic jams.
Furthermore it scales up and down better: whether at 50% or 80% of capacity it will do its scheduled route, as opposed to all of those people otherwise needing cars and parking spaces for those and so on, which isn't always entirely feasible in densely populated cities.
I guess it's just a different take on things, but if there's commute, we might as well make it more efficient, as opposed to spending 1-2 hours per day in traffic, which is essentially wasted time. Or not have the commute altogether.
In more rural areas or many places in the US as opposed to EU it's a slightly different story.
I looked up and wrote up my “what if I tried to commute on public transit to make a 9AM meeting?”
It’s ugly to the point where no one would voluntarily choose it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197
In my case, in Rīga (the capital of my country, Latvia), it was approximately:
- leave apartment at 7:45
- walk to stop in around 5 minutes
- wait 5 - 10 minutes for a trolley bus
- ride in it for 20 - 30 minutes
- walk from stop to work for 10 minutes
With a car, the same trip would be around 20-40 minutes.
For comparison's sake, walking would mean upwards of 100 minutes for that trip.
Regardless of whether in a car, or using public transportation, coming home in the evening often included waiting in traffic jams for close to an hour. In comparison, when coming home before 4-6 PM, the streets were relatively empty and there were no such traffic issues. Fewer cars, fewer issues of that sort.
But what holds here true doesn't hold true elsewhere and vice versa. Once you go past a certain scale of the city in question, transfers and other complications become unavoidable. Just how much of an issue it is, depends on many other factors as well (car ownership cost, possibility of accidents, the disadvantage of not being able to easily transport things when not owning a car and so on, lack of freedom without a car, especially when you want to visit less popular rural areas).
Neither beats rolling out of bed at 8:45, turning on the computer and brewing some coffee or tea, doing a morning shower and "being at work" 10 minutes later, though.
The best way to beat traffic right now without having to wait for anybody else to change is to get a motorcycle - if the climate where you live permits.
> That you think the car is always better
Make your arguments without inventing what other people say and you will make better arguments.
It seems to me it would be preferable to have mass transit for regular commuting, combined with perhaps some sort of rental system for those times when you need greater flexibility, or need to haul lots of stuff, etc.
Wasting time fixing stuff that didn't need to be broken is intrinsically bad for the economy, but it's disruptive to suddenly have your now-pointless job taken away.
If we have 10% fewer people commuting during work hours, then traffic might move twice as efficiently. Of course, that uses less fuel, which is bad for the economy /s
Of course, when you look at just the flow of the goods and labour, the organization of a national economy in general seems highly, uh, round-about — the money serves as the main controlling/directing mechanism so without it in the picture things look pretty funky.
yes, this holds up when there is something else to do, which is not always the case. I remember during the great recession, building contractors in Florida were praying for a hurricane to put them back to work. There was absolutely no other work to be found.
I believe by classical Keynesian theory that would indeed create economic growth?
For example if an oil tanker sinks you should be able to calculate the loss of value the environmental damage represents as well as the additional value that replacing that ship represents.
Can't remember much beyond that though.
Starting wars to fuel arms industry worked just fine so far.
But as mentioned that's the taxpayer getting fleeced, not the broken window fallacy.
.. Now if people were saving any money previously spent on commuting and eating out, then that would reduce GDP expenditure. The high levels of inflation suggest this isn't the case.
They could get away with this because they had a captive group which was previously forced to be in that location with relatively few options.
This may depend on your area but this hasn’t been my experience. I used to commute into downtown Portland for work and we had a great selection of options for lunch and happy hours, a plethora of food cart options which were great and affordable, and a number of decent bars where you could meet a friend for drinks afterwards.
Now I work from home in the suburbs and, while I wouldn’t trade being remote for anything, the food options here mostly consist of bland fast food and chain restaurants. One of the things I miss the most is grabbing a decent lunch with a coworker and breaking up the monotony a bit.
Not neccessarily, people have less costs now, so some people can now just choose to work less - which would shrink the economy.
Lower costs could have other consequences, other than people working less: general inflation; inflating rents/property prices; lower salaries for the same job; longer working hours (officially or not)
I think what you mention is one possible effect, but there are many and it is not clear which one dominates.
that's good - they're able to recover some of their time. Just because this "own time" doesn't count towards official GDP, doesn't mean it isn't an improvement.
This can be shown in absolute clarity: we are paid to work and not paid to not work.
You are forced to work, because you have expenses that you must pay: food, shelter, healthcare. If you do not work, you die.
You buy stuff to try to maximise your enjoyment in each unit of time, or to maximise your time: dishwashers to do the dishes, air fryers to cook food quicker. An apartment closer to work. A nanny, a cleaner, an accountant.
Some people use that extra time to... do more work. And because they do, the economy rewards them; inflation and expenses rise, and now everyone else needs to spend more time working too.
The exception to this is that it's possible to hit a threshold where your projected wealth is greater than your projected expenses for the rest of your life, and this allows you to work less. This threshold is unreachable for the vast majority of people in the world, and even the US, at least until the few last years of their lifes.
Whether that's good or bad is another question, as is the question of whether it even is happening or not.
I understand arguments about people not eating business lunch near the office. Although it looks like home delivery and extra home office snacks, coffee, etc. would also cause spend, just in different areas as before.
Additionally, in places where the state pays for healthcare, having less stressed workers, having less traffic accidents (I assume, since less commutes) might overall decrease the amount of money spent on health and save some money for the state too.
It is not an easy thing to model IMO.
In the office I work in, walking past anybody's desk you see procrastination window and tabs quickly disappear. Either that, or people don't even bother hiding it (except from management).
Remote or in-person work isn't the main argument I think. More-so it's the working hours. Working 9-5 (if you're lucky to work that) 5 days a week is insane, even for something you're passionate about (which most aren't).
There's way more distractions at home and not everyone can handle it. It's just wild what people find appropriate to do during meetings that they're supposed to be paying attention to. In office yeah maybe someone would read emails but you wouldn't be fully immersed in doing something else like cooking a full meal.
It's hard to say how much my coworkers actually work. But I strongly suspect that it's much less than in office. Yeah people would pop over to Reddit or whatever. But that's far less engaging then going anywhere you want or doing anything you want. Feel like for most people if you're stuck in the office you might as well do some work.
The biggest distractions in the office are the coworkers. Random hallway conversations, loud talkers in neighboring cubes/offices, people walking up to your desk with a question that should've been an email/chat (but really they are too lazy to check the ticket system/wiki/doc store for the answer). The level of distraction varies with each type of job, but for many quiet focus time is important. Working from home provides that quiet focus time.
20 years ago my boss ordered me to work from home one day when I had an urgent task to get done. Most of the time though I was better off in the office - while I couldn't get as much high concentration work done, I was doing more useful work because I was in sync with the office.
The above assumes that a significant number of people are in the office everyday. A pure work from home environment works because people figure out how to use other means to communicate important things. However communication is much harder, and thus takes more effort. As a shy person I would be much better off in the office all the time as I don't put enough effort into communication.
Also, I find it pretty aggressive that you call 9-5 5days a week "insane" and go to extra length to emphasis that you think people who do that have a mental illness. Its fine to have different viewpoint on a matter, but to call someone insane and unable to assertain their own situation just because you like a different way of spending your time, is pretty condescending.
For the record, I work 9-5 5days a week for 22 years now, and I still like it.
I hope you found a modus that makes you happy, so happy that you dont have to look down at other people and lecture them about what is best and what is insane.
I'm not calling people insane who work those hours. I'm saying it's insane that this behaviour is considered normal.
You like your job, and that's good. And hopefully you will feel the same way in another 10/20/30/40 years.
Many, many people don't, yet because of the way our world works they have to keep plugging away at something they don't like, losing a phenomenal amount of their life, with a couple of gaps (holidays, weekends) thrown in as a treat. Not many of those gaps are really sufficient for pursuing anything of significant value. And the biggest gap, being at the end of life, when the bodys and minds best years are behind it.
People who work in under-stimulating jobs, and people who work with something they're interested in/passionate about or something they trained all of their life for, all feel this way at some point. Such a working schedule (which as I said is lucky, as many people work more than that) takes away so many other opportunities in life.
If you gave most people the choice to cut their working hours down, or to cease working entirely, I think they would take it (unless they needed money). I think most people would want to work to some degree (3/4 days a week), but if we started from scratch, nobody would choose to work 5 of 7 days a week, half of the daily waking hours (plus travel and the other bits, as well as the hours lost to rest and recuperate for the next day).
I can't see many people dropping work entirely, as it's a good way to have a sense of purpose. But it's hard to find a purpose in many jobs, increasingly so as everything gets automated. Remember, for every person that is lucky enough to work with something interesting, many more people are sat bored out of their mind waiting for the end of the day. There really isn't enough stimulating work to go round everybody.
You might be a good hard working person, but many people procrastinate simply because they don't enjoy their job. They'll procrastinate working from home, and they'll procrastinate at the office. The average office isn't a high surveillance environment. Many of your colleagues are probably browsing Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, news websites etc. right now.
And to add to that, the physical and mental health implications and other points I mentioned, as well as points others have made about environmental damage from car commuting / congestion.
None of this should be normal. If we started from a point in time of people working less, as opposed to almost all the time (in the Industrial Revolution), it would be considered crazy if somebody suddenly came up with the idea to get everybody in an office 5 days a week. But it's considered normal and acceptable because it's a step down from the insane working practices of the times that came before (Industrial Revolution, 6 days a week, kids working in factories).
Plus I can offer a High COL rate, Mid COL rate, and Low COL rate, and recruit talent from all over. Yeah my boy doing node.js in Des Moines or Nashville might not be as good as the shit-hot MIT grade in NYC, but I can pay him 60% less, and he's 80% as good as that MIT kid.
Problem is you gotta re-tool and be equipped for that kind of management, and the Boomer / old Gen-X crowd running the show isn't.
I can get behind the idea that remote work is not as effective especially when forming a new team or assimilating new team members. However the thing that the ‘remote work is bad’ crowd get wrong is the distribution of collaborative work and deep individual work.
My experience is that in person collaborative synchronization is needed far less than even once a week. In person touch points with a white board and plenty of getting to know each other as humans time is super valuable… and in my opinion 2-4 times a year in needed, not 3-5 days per week.
In my opinion IRL is more needed for negotiation, handling uncertainty, new team formation, business development, etc.
Omg this is genius! Does Jerome Powell know about this?!
A job isn't just a financial transaction. It's part of a person's identity and a social outlet. There is a career progression that they had planned on, they made choices about where to live and all kinds of other things based on this career they thought they were going to have.
So even if they are making the same money, they might be very unhappy and this unhappiness may end up being expressed in antisocial ways that end up costing society money. In the transition from wagons to cars, the increased productivity of cars papered over all these losses. Eventually everyone had to admit it was for the best.
I'm not sure remote work will do the same thing. We'll see, but in any planning it's important that we look at externalities and factors that are difficult to quantify because otherwise we risk running roughshod over what really matters to people.
This was arguably a major long-term mistake but I understand why mayors all over are panicking at the thought of that system crumbling, leaving them with all of the costs and half the downtown economy. I don’t think the entire country is turning into Detroit but it’s going to be bad anywhere that they can’t take a different path. Setting up some kind of larger tax zone to pay for at least the broader infrastructure costs could help but many suburbs were specifically designed to prevent that and few have enough slack in their budgets to help in any case.
It doesn’t have to be. For hundreds of years in a large part of the world, a job for most people was whatever the local lord told you to do. Before and during that, it was whatever you were born into. History does noy dictate the present or the future.
I'm not arguing against working from home, I think working from home is great. I'm arguing that to make progress we need to consider things like "now that so many people are working from home, what do we do to help the people who have been affected negatively by this change?" People like baristas, gas station attendants, auto mechanics, people whose livelihoods depended on everyone commuting.
In prior changes, a wave of economic growth took care of their needs. I'm not sure that's going to happen here, so I think we will need to be more intentional about it.
Thank God a massive amount of workers left the hospitality industry during the pandemic, never to return to that line of work. And they are much better off for it, because they would never have any good return for their work and effort in that industry. They got the shake up they needed to move sectors, and realized that any other sector will reward them better.
For some, sure. But certainly not for everybody.
Dinosaurs prospered for million years, you know? And only global scale mass extinction ended their reign.
So, though it appears we do are well on the road for such a huge collapse, I’m not sure your analogy was the best one here. :D
Look up the equivalent of the Department of Workforce Development for your state and find the employment and training section.
For example: https://dwd.wisconsin.gov/det/ and https://dwd.wisconsin.gov/dislocatedworker/
I think it's very unfortunate though that we have an economy where redundant pieces attempt not to disappear even if society is worse off. If people replaced by X technology could be assured that their QoL would not drop noticeably after being made redundant, we could likely forgo much unnecessary conflict between the worker class and upper class. Maybe it's impossible to do it while making sure the dislocated workers can be productive elsewhere, as I imagine many might not want nor be able to go through education again.
* removing an outlet for socializing for people that are new to the area / country and don’t have friends.
* lack of face to face team bonding for new employees.
* lack of personal social contact for an activity we typically spend 1/3 of our day on.
* reduced ability to learn by absorbing what happens around oneself.
* higher competition for junior and mid-career positions from other countries.
New employees, particularly at the beginning of their careers are disproportionately negatively affected by remote work. And while many of the disadvantages I’ve mentioned above can be mitigated, remote work nudges all these aspects towards the negative. These nudges when applied at large scale add up.
Like anything, remote work has downsides which are often downplayed by those with an interest to gain an advantage for themselves.
On the flip side, a former shop basically treated remote workers as if we were robots. Everything was about 'productivity'. One of the most inhumane places I've been.
If remote-first workers are able to stay at home, demand decreases. Prices drop. More early-career folk can actually afford to live in the city, including artists and not-developers, meaning more friendships and business relationships can bloom.
This means needing to substitute using a co-working space or local professional organizations for social time instead of the experience being automatically built into a job. Nonetheless, this is a useful sorting function so young professionals can select into the type of mentoring they want, instead of being forced into mentors-of-convenience.
The idea is to decouple "the company you work for" from "the place you work at" for everyone, including those who want to work in an office. Basically, coworking places everywhere. You sign a contract with the company. You either work from home, or find a coworking place where you rent a desk, or coordinate with some of your colleagues to rent a desk at the same place. You could make a different choice on different days.
> removing an outlet for socializing for people that are new to the area / country and don’t have friends
The coworking places would have quiet desks, and also rooms to chat, with sound isolation. Whenever you want to get social, you walk to the room, and socialize. You can meet people who work at the same company, or people who work at different companies. When you feel like working again, walk back to your desk.
> lack of face to face team bonding for new employees
People working at the same company could agree to spend one day in a week at the same coworking place. This could be flexible, like if the company has 1000 employees, but your team has 10, only those 10 people need to coordinate together.
> reduced ability to learn by absorbing what happens around oneself
Either coordinate with your colleagues, or share the screen remotely. I learned a few things by watching my colleagues do things on their computers in a different country.
> higher competition for junior and mid-career positions from other countries
Well, yes. More opportunities for someone means more competition for someone else. That said, many companies found out that hiring people from other countries has its own challenges, so you will always have an advantage of being local.
Thanks for this comment - I think the economic point is spot on. I think the fear of losing control is a fair summary - unfortunately there is some evidence of a selection effect that might mean employers do have something to fear. https://www.fractional.work/p/showing-face-is-more-important...
The blacksmiths in the horse and buggy days saw demand for their services fall when time and technologies changed. The coal miners began losing their jobs when we realized that coal as fuel was more harmful than it was beneficial. History is full of valid jobs which later became unneeded or "invalid".
Remote work can increase efficiency by eliminating artificial inefficiencies. Not having to drive to work reduces fuel consumption and lengthens the time between car repairs or replacement. This obviously is a financial loss for the economy because it shifts the balance back from money to time. The same goes for office space: less office space need reduces demand which reduces rents (and amount of space leased). However, that cost can be offset some as home working can increase demand for larger homes. Even so, a slightly larger home is still probably less cost than a commercial space which goes unused for 12+ hours per day.
It smells like much of this anti-remote-work conversation (not TFA, but the topic in general) is because the people accustomed to being in charge have a fear of losing control. The manager who rules by force or threat has much to fear of subordinates who are out of sight. However, the manager (leader) who works together with a group of people toward a common goal has little to fear. Some companies operate very successfully even when management cannot observe the workers. The alarms and complaints we hear are almost certainly from the bad group. Eventually that group will be like the dinosaurs.