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).
If people working from home didn't manage the same workload at home, it would hopefully be noticed in a competently run company. If those gents can fit in a few more hobbies in that time as well, power to them. If the company is run so incompetently that they don't notice you're not meeting goals/project deadlines, or providing low quality work, then that's the managements fault.
Remote or in-person work isn't the main argument I think. There's more to it, which makes remote/in-person a good start for improving things. 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). Our views on employment, notably:-
- The amount of time it takes out of our days and lives (70%+ of your adult life)
- The mundanity and pointlessness of (let's face it) most jobs
- The additional time lost to commuting to an office to sit amongst a 50/50 cast of people you like/dislike.
- The damage many jobs do to your health, both physical (back, eyes) and mentally from lack of stimulation or burnout.
When you take a step back to analyse it all, to accept this is like a form of mental illness. If I took my favourite hobby and treated it the same way that a job is treated, after a couple of years it wouldn't even be a hobby anymore.
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.
