Doubly or triply so considering the travel times to their field sites, just look at the timeframe differences quoted for that office meeting vs when he leaves for the survey site otherwise. What an incredible gain in productivity!

Also I hate being at home. Nothing good ever happens there.

Aren’t we talking about private businesses here?

But it doesn't need to be every day, and I also have non-work obligations that are often far easier to accomplish during the week if there's some flexible time.

I'm truly sorry to hear that. :-\

The majority of people where, exactly? Your comment doesn't seem context-aware.

In my case (Buenos Aires, IT work) it used to be the case that people all over the city and surrounding areas had to commute to the city's "microcenter" (what we call the financial/historical district), resulting in typical commute times of 1 to 2 hours. Dreadful.

So your statement doesn't ring true for us in Buenos Aires.

What statistics are you working with to support your point about planet Earth?

Really, you know this for all 3 million people?

It seems that you have some issues going on, no need to drag your colleagues into that.

That means if you want me in the office, I will leave my house at 9AM, if you want me to be close to the office, then increase my pay and I will move closer.

(I don't actually want to do this, but when writing government policies, you have to consider that some people will be aggressively adversarial if it suits them.)

I have certainly worked with more than one person at my workplace who started when they lived locally, but eventually moved to the big city over an hour away, while retaining their employment with the business even after settling into their new home. Them suddenly working 2+ fewer hours each day would be a significant change to their employment.

If the time is set in stone at the time of first hire, then I guess you're incentivized to move as far away as possible that still allows you to be hired, and then on your second day move in next door?

So now you need a tribunal to verify the claims, and what do they go on? With respect to a parallel thread, do the people with the right machining equipment in their garage get to do their manufacturing job at home?

Or is the law only carved out for web developers specifically?

This is would have a bunch of perverse outcomes you probably haven’t considered. Employers would immediately start to consider the commute times of candidates before hiring them. Longer commute times is a feature of cheaper housing, so that would correlate to employers discriminating against candidates of lower socioeconomic standing. Which would in turn correlate to discrimination against the ethnic groups that are over represented in those lower socioeconomic groups.

It’s basically only a good idea if you’re trying to intentionally constrain social mobility.

This already happens, and AFAIK it's not a protected class. "Hmm, they'd be driving an hour each direction, are they likely to stick around?"

Now do college degrees.

That's already a thing in Australia.

> Longer commute times is a feature of cheaper housing, so that would correlate to employers discriminating against candidates of lower socioeconomic standing.

The current system already does that also. Poorer people are traveling more for work, but they aren't getting compensated for the commute time.

I think a strong case can be made for this. For those of us lucky enough to be able to negotiate salaries, we absolutely should be pricing that time into the rates we're negotiating for.

Bigger picture, I've always thought it was insane that we talk about "40 hour workweeks" as if they exist. Realistically, the time it takes me to commute is part of my workday. If my commute takes an hour each way, then I'm working a 50 hour workweek.

Since always? Until Covid, there was no choice. People did it because they had to. Covid just reminded people that there is another way to live and how much quality of life they're actually sacrificing for their job.

That said, there's no question that I personally am much more productive at home vs in the office. Offices seem designed to interfere with productivity.

But, all that said, why does it matter either way? I am a human being. I do not exist to ensure that my employer is operating with the greatest productivity possible.

You literally do if you are employed by someone. You expect money from them in exchange for productive work. You are free to start your own business if you want to be however-productive you feel like that day.

For head-down productivity, sure, you can be better at home. But that's not the entire picture, is it?

In-person collaboration is always better than remote messaging/video calling. It just is, and probably always will be.

It's very disingenuous to pretend remote collaboration is anywhere near as effective as in-person collaboration.

No. You're paid to deliver productive work, not to ensure you're working on the greatest productivity possible at all times. That's a fool's errand, eventually bringing you guilt when you can't perform at that level due to life's twists and turns, turning into a burnout when you aren't able to keep your productivity at 100% but keep trying (and failing). If you are employed by someone there's an expectation of doing your job, delivering value, not of chasing the greatest productivity possible. You are a person, not a fucking machine. Balance is needed to be constantly productive, to be able to be creative.

> In-person collaboration is always better than remote messaging/video calling. It just is, and probably always will be.

> It's very disingenuous to pretend remote collaboration is anywhere near as effective as in-person collaboration.

It is very myopic to state platitudes without any data to support your main argument, based on some "it just is". It might be for you and your colleagues, it might not be that important for a lot of people/processes that adapted to not be in-person.

Stop trying to force others to live how you think people should live, you do you, let others decide what's best for them.

Extremes edges of the space of possibility aren't that interesting, but if you want greater compensation, you probably do want to find ways to deliver greater value for your company (and make sure they know about it).

It's very hard for a company to continue paying out greater compensation to employees than the value delivered by those employees.

Your horizon for "always" is myopic.

This way, we could actually improve the housing situation across the country, because otherwise, it all concentrates in the biggest cities.

So if everyone with a job that's possible to do remotely distributed themselves across the country, I think that would actually result in more people, proportionally, in in-person service-industry jobs, since each employee of those businesses would be serving fewer other people per day. (Which would be less stressful for a lot of people, probably! But it's very short-sighted to think anything like "100% work from home" is realistic for that many people.)

But I'm also not convinced by the main claim, here. Bigger, denser cities are more expensive. That's because they're more in demand. Some of that is "because that's where the jobs are." But a lot of that is things like weather, entertainment, shopping, availability of services... so I think you also open up the possibility of someone who was working in-person for an employer in Tulsa, say, now being able to move to Dallas instead for more free-time options.

In the last hundred years in the US the most effective ways of distributing people were two things: weather (sun belt vs cold-ass winters) and in-person work that got geographically distributed for big-govt/strategic reasons (e.g. let's make sure our new defense project is going to employ people in as many states as possible to get votes, or let's spread out our industry to be more robust against Soviet bombs, etc).

It's mainly because they don't build enough housing. There's no fundamental reason it would happen otherwise; they use land more efficiently and have lower energy costs than suburbs do, and that should matter more than the higher competition.

Of course, there's also a selection effect; more interesting things to spend money on causes people to spend more money. (That's why people who earn more per hour tend to work more, not less.)

Ok. So why does that happen? It happens basically everywhere in the world: the dense cities are more in demand and more expensive than the middle of nowhere.

If nobody can build "enough housing" in their cities, to make their cities as cheap as their rural land, I think that tells us something. We can' simply take demand entirely out of the picture, since adding more supply is both (a) a lagging process and (b) a process that itself helps promote more demand by necessitating more service business, more jobs at those businesses, etc. I.e., if you make the land more attractive to everyone, everyone who wants to use that land for their business or residence has more competition for securing a spot on it.

This is a great observation, if a problem is occurring all over the place maybe the solution isn't simple.

The cool stuff in these cities is highly centralized and just building more housing a little further out doesn't spread it automatically.

If you build a high rise apartment tower in Yonkers it might not sell. Move much loser to Manhattan and you run into all the problems of building in an area that's already pretty dense.

Maybe cities are just more productive economically, so people earn more, so they can pay more.

I think where having more housing helps though is making your city more diverse. If you have fancy housing for doctors and grungy housing for artists, your city will have a better art scene than if you only have fancy housing.

If you're in a city that's doing well, you have a lot of residents with money to spend. Enough to incentivize a lot of development aimed at those residents. But that jut further chokes out anything that would only serve those with incomes in the lowest percentiles.

Building housing helps, certainly, but there's a differnence between "building housing that keeps the growth engine running" and "building housing that keeps the bottom-tier population served and keeps people from being pushed into homelessness" (especially when redevelopment is financially most practical in cheaper parts of town which can cause more displacement of more economically precarious people - replacing that grungy housing, for instance), and I don't think market-based approaches will ever be enough since the financial incentives to serve the bottom of the market naturally are much smaller than to serve the middle or the top. And I think this is demonstrated by how the densest first-world-cities across the world often have affordability issues.

Grungy housing was new fancy housing - decades ago.

I guess if the government is willing to build Soviet style grey blocks then you can have new but modest, relatively cheap housing.

Some physical factors that might matter are underlying land value, single stair laws and similar things making building layout worse, how many 1br vs 3br units there are… not whether it looks old or not though.

You can't identify affordable (subsidized) housing from the outside in cities where it exists.

But the "just build more" path of least resistance is to bulldoze today's grungy housing to build tomorrow's new housing, and most of the time that doesn't make it easy for the existing displaced residents find enough replacement grungy housing at rates they can afford.

So I think there needs to be something more than just laissez-faire building.

Although if they were homeowners before, they probably didn't mind selling their house, seeing as they did it.

Tokyo is the main example that isn't in this situation.

Conversely, companies will sometimes locate themselves in suburbs just to make it harder for employees to leave. IIRC that's why IBM is in Armonk.

Some people like living in big cities, usually because they're young and starry eyed about the "possibilities" of them being interesting. Quite often they grow out of this, and get to hate the big cities and their stress and uglyness....

Big cities are built for many ppl. Allowing 100% remote work makes it possible to move to smaller towns/cities, which are not prepared for the extra intake.

Many towns struggle with this exact issue in Australia. You can view it as just a temporal issue as it will settle on the long term. But on the short term many of the locals can not afford to live in the town they grew up and the same goes for their children too.

Remote work allows people that work in exporting services to live anywhere. They bring cash into the economy, and any town with a good sense of economics should be trying to bring those people in. Might they temporarily raise prices in the town they move to? Yeah, but they moving out of a big city also lowers prices in that big city, what about the folks that were outpriced there, and now might have some breathing room?

I don't think cities are actually out of room. Maybe they are, but it's not obvious to me that this is the case.

> Being able to share that growth with towns that have plenty of room to expand seems like a huge win.

Not for the people who live in smaller towns because they prefer living in smaller towns.

> And preventing people with money from coming to your poor town is an excellent way to make sure the people who live there stay poor.

Not all small towns are poor. And regardless, a lot of people with money coming into a town very often causes prices for everything (especially housing) to increase, pricing poor people out of the area. And if you're poor, you probably can't afford to move elsewhere.

Not saying that these problems are inevitable, but there are certainly lots of examples of them happening. What I am saying is that this is a very complicated thing with no clear outcome for any particular place.

Different parts of US, Australia, or Europe will respond differently even when subjected to the same policy. So I don't think any one answer is correct as a general rule. But I am afraid in some places some will try to blindly replicate success stories from other places, with dire consequences.

...or more effectively, by abandoning the flawed concept of single-family zoning, thereby allowing market forces to increase housing supply where it is needed.

I've had coworkers who lived and worked in Beijing without cars - they still had 40+ minute each direction commutes. And that's a city that was extremely aggressive in expanding its transit. It's just a basic queuing/graph problem, though.

If people only make cases for transit by straw-manning the worst part of cars and ignoring the worst part of mass transit it's gonna take a long time to convince enough people to spend the billions needed to make it happen, since most people aren't stupid and they know that there are cons of public transit too, not just unalloyed pros.

USA Population growth rate is now at about the lowest it has ever been. All the previous generations had to also build houses and the supporting infrastructure. It's not rocket science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...

Wow. This is the opposite of the US where most small towns have depressed real estate values and negative growth rates. What is Australia doing differently?

During COVID some people left the biggest cities to live somewhere without lockdowns. This was a fairly small number in absolute terms but it pushed prices up in specific desirable local market and really stretched services. That's slowly reversing now.

This is happening everywhere. My hometown in Europe is by the sea and has nice weather. Since remote work, housing has become ridiculous, both in price and availability. Locals can hardly afford it anymore. But I do think this whole situation will balance out eventually, we're really just at the beginning of a new global trend.

The benefit of concentrating people together is that it also concentrates capital, which makes people rich, which allows them to do things like buy expensive homes.

Spread people around and the sticker price will be lower, but the capacity to buy the homes will be reduced commensurately.

If that ever gets developed, it will revolutionize the world.

Also, some jobs were moved online during COVID (eg. teaching) but it is clearly demonstrated that they work better in person.

Less concentrated human habitation is not without cost…

Hedonistically, everyone wants to live on a big lot on a low-traffic road... with friends, family, and work/shopping/services a short distance away. If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours.

The costs of concentrated habitation are less than the benefits - there's enough tax base and density to support roads and (emergency or mundane) services and businesses. The costs of distributed habitation are higher, and don't work if the entire nation switches to that kind of housing.

Environmentally and sustainably speaking, the "productivity" of big cities is zero.

Cut from the outside, a city like New York would die in a few months when food dissapears, with people eating one another. Cut from urban centers, rural towns and villages will continue to be able to drink and feed themselves just fine.

They only exist because the people living there are subsidized, for water, food, and other such essentials, from outside. Even factory production lives outside those cities.

That's how they started actually, when the rural production because so larger, as to be able to sustain not just itself, but also a parasitic, mediating and administrating, urbal class.

>If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours.

There's nothing inevitable about this, it's just how US suburbs were designed, to be car-centered.

In decentralized suburbs with local walkable distance shops (walkable as a stronger condition as opposed to merely "a short distance away"), and with local jobs and more extended work from home, it doesn't matter if they "spread out", because you don't have to drive a "a big, polluting car fast through", as the need to go elsewhere is less frequent: work, socializing, shopping is nearby.

Add a good public transportation service, and you don't even need a car.

I know someone who does Den Haag-Amsterdam every day but he's Japanese so he is trained in the art of salary man.

[0] https://www.anwb.nl/verkeer/nieuws/nederland/2023/juli/filez...

At various times it's been train, bus, cycling, walking.

When people are allowed to live wherever they want they choose the biggest, best, most expensive cities.

*for some particular jobs

That bit is always ignored. We're arguing for a right, but that right can only possibly apply to a small subset of the entire workplace.

There will never be remote gas station attendants. There will never be remote mechanics. There will never be remote construction contractors. There will never be remote warehouse receiving clerks.

So this can't possibly be a right. Rights apply to humankind, regardless of where you exist or your job situation.

So... what people are arguing for is a privilege, for some particular industries, and protected by government regulation.

Seems like that's just never going to happen. Instead, people need to negotiate for remote work. And if an employer wants you to go to an office in exchange for a paycheck, well, get over it or find somewhere else to work.

personally I wouldn't work from an office so would basically skip on applying to those places but that is the excuse I've heard most often

More realistically many only know "asses in seats" as a metric for their employees working.

The same is true for most office jobs. It might appear to happen in the office, but that's because computers and desks are in the office.