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.
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!
.. 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.
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.
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.
Starting wars to fuel arms industry worked just fine so far.
Not neccessarily, people have less costs now, so some people can now just choose to work less - which would shrink the economy.
I believe by classical Keynesian theory that would indeed create economic growth?
Whether that's good or bad is another question, as is the question of whether it even is happening or not.
Omg this is genius! Does Jerome Powell know about this?!
* 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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/
Depends for who. When a studio apartment in a big metro costs as much as a house in a small town, you need to shell out much more for a comparable level of comfort.
I know a couple who paid literally half per unit area just because they chose live a few kilometres from the city, not in it. They both work partially remotely, so ultimately the savings will be greater than the cost of transport, especially now that interest rates have gone up so much in this region of the world.
And that doesn't account for GP's immigrant case at all.
Can you expand on that (or link to more) ?
As always through history, politicians and bankers plunder the country with taxes and interest. This wealth is then distributed by them, from the big cities, but that doesn't mean that the wealth originated there.
I live far, far away from my company, in tiny village while earning salary like people working there
and im spending that money locally, thus supporting local businesses and communities
I imagine my hometown would be a very different place if people didn't have to leave to get decent jobs. Though of course there are plenty of other good reasons to leave.
Maybe it will be more common in the future as a result of remote work. But today it seems hard to create the conditions that result in great school districts - i.e., a relatively high concentration of relatively high-income parents who value education - in a small town that's not within commuting distance of a city with good jobs.
Did I miss something in the comment you're replying to or do I need to read the article?
1500 is a small town for sure. I'd consider 12k to be a small town as well. 1500 is way bigger than the town my dad is from. There's about 100 people there now. Your small town is huge compared to that. He sometimes talks about being on the highschool football team at the school shared by a collection of towns in the county. He says they did pretty damn good in the first half, but by the second they were all so worn out that they'd just get steamrolled. They only had enough players to cover the field you see. The guys all played both offense and defense.
I imagine even a couple folks moving back there and working remotely would be a huge boon for the town. Heck, it'd make a big difference in the county, what with the biggest town only being around 3k people. It's very pretty there, but it's over an hour to the nearest city that has any kind of employment opportunities. If you can't make finances work on the pay from the gas station, your options are move out of town or move out of town. The internet is decent there and being able to work remotely would be the difference between being able to survive in that town or having to move away to find decent-paying work.
There is a pull that cities have, that includes being in close proximity to people who earn a bit more, greater foot traffic, activities, and shops, among millions of other things
I guess if you want to sum up everyone else who was a part of the economic impact you used to have on them as corporations, then we have nothing to talk about
This wouldn't be the case if we optimized for the right set of constraints - all of the places you mentioned being in walking distance. If there were more restaurants in the neighborhood, I'd eat out thrice a week at the very least.
What if you work in a tech park that has few or no amenities, or your work office is in a cruddy bit of town you really dislike? When the house is tidy and the washing done in the 10 minutes an hour I can wander away from the work laptop, I feel a lot happier than worrying about trying to get it done on the weekends or the evenings.
I'd rather quit and find some other job. I'm tired of articles telling me that something I hated to do was somehow a sacrifice I have to make for made up reasons that really don't add up to a hill of beans.
[0]https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-it-s-time-to-get-...
It bothers me that it took a pandemic for companies to embrace remote work.
This is an interesting (and probably the only interesting) point. Normalisation of remote working likely does lead to offshoring. Hard to put that genie back in the bottle.
and you should never be making a sacrifice for someone else, without enough monetary compensation.
The only sacrifice one should make is for enrolling in the armed services.
God no, this isn't the 1940s.
Just like with joining police - in some places it is good thing to do. In others, you are joining another criminal organization.
Which I agree with.
If the answer was "Yes" however, I would question if that's even a bad thing to begin with. If our economy is reliant on people driving to an office and spending their money at a restaurant, then our economy is pretty terrible to begin with.
Maybe labor that needs induced demand shouldn’t shape society at all. Maybe it’s arbitrary makework—maybe the laborers, and the society making arbitrary work, would both benefit more by supporting those humans who’d otherwise do makework.
Per Schumpeter a 100 years ago, the economy is an ever changing process from technological change and entrepreneurship.
Of course remote work is going to have good and bad aspects that come with the change.
Practically the golden rule of economics is that everything is a trade off.
Inner city areas full of people chatting in restaurants and cafes at lunchtime and after work are the best.
> Then you get these articles about how unhealthy life is in the city. You know; mobile phone tumours - far more likely in the city. Well you know what, so is everything else! Including sex, coffee and conversation. - Dylan Moran
It's fun, but spending time with my kids is the best.
> I suspect massive adoption of restaurants would be more efficient too, if we cared about that primarily.
Not sure I agree - I can whip up an inexpensive, healthy, and satisfying meal with food from the supermarket in less time than it takes to walk a couple blocks to a restaurant.
You forget the business owners who fear they'll lose direction of the work.
It's not so much whether you put in the hours at home, but whether your work is directed towards a common goal.
Remote work requires a higher degree of communication, and some business owners don't possess the skill or interest to maintain out-of-office communication.
However, the opportunities are also massive. For one thing, the owners/managers get to work from home too, which I certainly wouldn't give up! You can also hire from anywhere, which is huge in terms of finding talented people. Most importantly though, I think, all the things you need to do to manage a remote team effectively are things you really should be doing anyway. Yes, maybe some of the communication would be face to face instead of Slack or whatever, but for the most part if you're managing well, it's not going to be too hard to translate that to a remote environment. It's about actually knowing what people are working on, not just making sure they're putting in the hours. Knowing the goals of the team, and the individual goals of the team members. Fostering communication and collaboration (whatever the medium). And then continuously reviewing and refining the processes by which you do all those things.
If “the economy” doesn’t like it, it needs to adapt.
The economy should support people, not the other way around.
I'd argue it's great for people. In general. I don't have family, I can spend more time with my dog, I can make morning or afternoon walk longer, I can get better at cooking cause I have more time, I have more time for hobbies, to deal with personal stuff, I can go to public institution or a doctor if I have to, without taking a day off since I can start 30min early, go after work and still get there before closing.
The only downside to remote work IMO is lack of human contact and that it requires much more effort to actually be included.
I've just started a new job for an enterprise company. It is proving insanely hard getting in contact with folk. Myself having to introduce myself every-time. Trying to find someone to give me basic mentoring, even trying to understand the hierarchy.
Not only does communications break down over email, messenger, people get the wrong intention of the email, if I wish to add input I have to encounter where it doesn't feel like I'm the bulldozer. Many skills are lost WFH.
Code reviews suck over webcam, sharing knowledge is insanely hard and I'm not lucky to have a house with a spare room where I can dedicate to work. My own personal space is not an office nor I do I want it to be.
The trip to and from work allows me to break work mode and have my own freedom without having a work laptop stashed underneath the desk. It may cost me £ to get in the office each day but heck do I prefer it. I'm 33. WFH is not for me, I find it hell.
1. Is there less restaurant business?
2. Does it hurt city real estate?
3. People spend more time with family.
I'm much more interested in other points about how remote work has an impact on the economy.
* How do cities and states attract well paid remote workers? Who are the winners and losers of this transition.
* How does remote work impact wages? A programmer in Nashville was probably paid less than one in San Fransisco. How is remote work impacting that discrepancy?
* How is remote work impacting residential real estate? Are home owner rates climbing as people flee the expensive cities? How is it impacting which homes are more desirable?
* How is remote work impacting energy usage?
* How is remote work impacting in office jobs for the same type of work? Are in office jobs paying a premium for labor over remote? Do employers see the increased investment as paying off? Do investors?
To me WFH aligns the incentives exactly right in this case. You attract workers by being a good place to live. Have stuff human people care about -- parks, playgrounds, schools, restaurants, nightlife, recreation, arts, theater, music, food, yada yada. Instead of right now where the strat is to get a critical mass of well-ish-paying businesses and then everything else is extra. Communities will form based on what people do outside work which sounds like actual heaven.
Something that seems similar that comes up often around here is when there are proposals to improve the road system to move traffic out of towns. Currently the main highways run through a bunch of small towns, so they get lots of non-local traffic. Frustrating for drivers due to the extra time, and its a safety issue. But whenever changes are happening businesses in those towns are up in arms omg we'll lose our passing trade, don't build the road. They've capitalised on some inconvenience, we don't owe them to keep it around.
There's a pattern of restaurant closures. People want food from restaurants, but the demand shifted to different locations and restaurants were forced to close for some time. When a restaurant re-opens, it now owes tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in back rent. The restaurant goes bankrupt and the landlords get paid from the liquidated assets.
That's nothing short of wealth transfer from restaurant owners to landlords. We can say "the economy is for the people" all we want, but in situations like this, the economy favors some over others. Increasingly, the economy favors capital + rent seeking, and does not favor labor.
what assets? If the restaurant is renting, their assets are just the equipment they own. The landlord will only get what they by selling those equipment for rent owed. I don't see how a transfer of wealth is happening in this scenario.
If the restaurant's location is owned by the proprietor, then they're their own landord. Their creditor would have a claim on the property, if they borrowed money to run the restaurant. But calling this a transfer of wealth is misleading - the owners of the restaurant signed up for the debt. Businesses and investments are not guaranteed to succeed, and using leverage increases the risks of losing more. How is this a transfer of wealth, except for the lenders recovering what they could, as is their right to do for lending out the capital in the first place?
Is that what actually happens?
"That's nothing short of wealth transfer from restaurant owners to landlords."
You're arguing that the owners of commercial real estate are winners here?
On a weekly basis, ranked by frequency I see - my wife, my dog, my mailman, and the attendant at the gas station. Past that I can't quote a regular person I interact with on weekly basis.
The establishment promulgated term for this is "social distancing."
In the US and other places with Euclidean zoning, that's illegal. Restaurants have to be kept far apart from residences. It's better in such places for all the restaurants to go out of business, and people can just stay at home and cook microwave meals.
Coffee breaks, social media, reading HN, which in WfH means walking the dog, spending a few minutes with your family, doing some yoga stands after a meeting.
And that is perfectly fine. Unless you're very focused and enjoying a particular task, no unassisted human being is capable of being 100% productive 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. I might be an outlier, but in my experience, max focus can be held for up to 4 hours a day, the rest is low focus work and faffing about.
I've been doing full remote for six years now and it's wonderful, especially when you have good asynchronous workflows in your team to rid of "working hours" concept entirely. (Though possibility of that heavily depends on the role and team composition).
Three months later, the same administration sent out a package against the depopulation of small towns (we live in the Alps so that's a real issue)
This is the short-sightedness of our administrators. Instead of giving the people the freedom to work where they want, they spend public resources to marginally attempt to reduce a problem they refuse to acknowledge in the fist place, for the gain of temporary consensus.
Lay optic fiber everywhere and let people work from where they prefer. We would still have dense cities and alive satellite towns.
I consider that as a win-win, supporting local businesses.
Cities have many innate advantages so long-term I’m not expecting disaster but it’s happening almost everywhere at the same time, and we have a bigger problem looming in climate change. That’s going to be more permanently disruptive but it’ll work in favor of cities’ lower environmental footprint if the leaders don’t screw up the transition.
What we pray for is that it may please you to pass a law ordering the shutting up of all windows, skylights, dormer-windows, outside and inside shutters, curtains, blinds, bull's-eyes; in a word, of all openings, holes, chinks, clefts, and fissures, by or through which the light of the sun has been in use to enter houses, to the prejudice of the meritorious manufactures with which we flatter ourselves that we have accommodated our country — a country that, in gratitude, ought not to abandon us now to a strife so unequal.'
Are some city cafes likely to go under because people aren't coming into the office? Probably.
Are people being forced to eliminate every single discretionary expense so they can pay their bills and eat in the same month? Yes, absolutely. Are some households only surviving because WFH is letting them avoid transport expenses, and reduce food costs? Also yes.
Our mortgage + insurances + rates + mobile/internet + utilities + basic food = almost what we're bringing in this month. And the last payment on the bathroom reno we started five interest rate rises ago will probably be due this month too.
So, define "economy". This bit of the economy would probably run out of money to put fuel in the car if I couldn't work from home.
It’s sure to only benefit a select few. We should let the free market decide what we collectively value in cities. With remote work in particular, it feels like there is more value placed on the standards of humanity than being close to a “hub” to make larger sums of money. For me, I love great weather and not spending a tenth of my day in traffic.
But good for the workers and good for the US economy as a whole as it redistributes higher paying jobs to increasingly rural areas as internet connectivity allows.
Anyone who thinks they can put the toothpaste back in this tube is kidding themselves.
1. https://www.theworlds50best.com/discovery/Establishments/Bol...
It is good for the 'business is there to serve the people' economy.
The latter distributes people across the country rather than concentrating them in megacities and forces business to go where the people want to live. It favours social capital over financial capital.
We need to decide politically which of these economies we want.
Remote work as existed for a long long time.
The pandemic made more people and companies go remote but it's been there like forever.
In context of ycombinator almost all start-up companies that have ever existed will have extensively used remote workers are the start phase of their companies.
To editorialize: This is how all economic exchange works, and any talk of "the economy" being "good" or "bad" is mystification. The powers that be are cranking up rates hoping but not really expecting to avoid a recession. In their view, a recession (i.e. more pain for working people) is acceptable collateral damage when weighed against the risk of continued labor inflation (i.e. more pain for asset owners).
Not everything is some technocratic spreadsheet puzzle to be balanced. There are winners and losers.
RE is 1) material stuff being extracted, processesed and moved around by people and 2) physical services provided by people. The size of RE is constrained on the supply side i) by material scarcity, environmental considerations etc, and on the demand side by ii) saturation of material consumption needs by the average human
In contrast, the knowledge economy is essentially information: collated, processed, transmitted etc by people's brains and digital artifacts [0]. Given the zero marginal cost of reproduction, the size of KE is constrained by i) intellectual property enforceability and ii) saturation of information consuption needs by the average human
Back to the original question, remote work is making KE more efficient and is entirely natural. In fact the work-from-office pattern is mostly a historical relic of how RE was organized. Remote work can be judged as positive or negative contribution towards TE in the context of a point-in-time analysis (i.e. here and now) or the overall balance of RE/KE in a sustainable economy. Moving millions of brains around in massive 2 ton exoskeletons that consume enormous resources in order for them to type into inane powerpoints and spreadsheets is not exactly "a good economy".
In any case, it could be that a sustainable economy (where KE is mostly WFH could be "smaller" in monetary units, especially if it has a major collaborative and open source component) but it is by no means clear it would "worse".
[0] KE obviously requires some RE, which is for example why the pandemic induced bloated hardware inventories
That aside, there are so many upsides. Not the least of which are the reduction in time and energy waste, and pollution. Or less reductive sexist models of childcare and home duties. Work life balance, employment and unemployment and underemployment and mental/physical health could all improve at scale. Sure, some people suffer. Were talking aggregate here. Many sad special cases exist.
Work needs redefining but radical redefinition without planning is not sensible unless revolution is a goal.
Rate of profit, investment in people is complicated.
why is always the plebs that must adapt to every inconvenience and illogical irrationality...just because that's is how it always was :/
I miss being able to hang out with work friends at the office, but not enough to go back to the open floor plan horror show. Not to mention living downtown near 3 freeways and having to dodge traffic just to get some groceries...
Rather than public transport and commuting, folks will spend elsewhere.
Rather than office real estate, companies will spend / invest elsewhere.
Some will benefit, others will have to adapt to survive.
I wonder why we never see slippery slope arguments about unaffordable housing.
Even if remote work is bad for the economy - its good to have the option and to not enforce it on people who don't need to do it.
It relieves pressure on roads. It gives people time back they lost in commutes. If people insulate their homes properly - it will lower carbon emissions. It relieves rent pressures in the city.
That’s the root of what the economy is … how much useful stuff gets done.
Whether remote work has that effect remains to be seen. Certainly in the short term there’s a lot of evidence it has. That would make it very unlike other examples of change we have, such as switching from horse and buggy to cars.
All the other considerations are merely moving money from one area to another. This is irrelevant to a “good economy.”
In the end, the total wealth available to all participants in the economy is a function of the resources available and the meaningful work done.
That’s it.
The economy should exist for (benefit) as many as possible. This doesn't mean tearing down the entirety of the existing system, but some changes are clearly needed.
Even if remote work does end up being less than optimal for the economy, the benefits to many/most remote employees in work/life balance, health, and family life is easily worth it.
Remote work is obviously not bad for the economy because the economy is basically a closed system.
IMO way too much attention goes to beating around the bush when we need to take a step back and ask some more abstract questions about exactly what our goal as a society should be. There are some hard questions out there that are not getting enough attention.
The real question is, is it good for the population? Or individuals? The answer is clearly yes.
Nope.
