23 ms·

Is remote work bad for the economy?

140 points by svsaraf 4y ago

Sebguer 4y ago
Maybe dollars spent at local restaurants isn't the metric we should be optimizing for?
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  Maybe those restaurants can simply move to residential areas. People still eat lunch. Regardless we don’t manufacture buggy whips to keep the buggy whip businesses afloat either.
  - cableshaft 4y ago
    Yeah, I live in the suburbs, and I count almost 60 restaurants within a six minute drive of me, most of them centered on two commercial strips surrounded by residential areas. Only a few restaurants around here died since Covid (we lost a Steak n' Shake, a brunch place, and recently a chinese place and a Boston Market), most are still here, and we've gotten several new ones besides that, so I think people are still clearly supporting restaurants around here.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    >Maybe those restaurants can simply move to residential areas. 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.
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      See the parallel comment to yours. I didn’t mean literally buy a house and open a restaurant. But most zoning has commercial zones near residential zones. Come on, it’s all just sim city.
wkdneidbwf 4y ago
i’ve been working remotely for a decade and i’ve never been happier. i also suspect that the population being happier is no doubt bad for corporate profits.
- BizarreByte 4y ago
  Happy people typically don’t spend as much money trying to drown their sorrows in consumer crap, food, and drugs.
  - xwdv 4y ago
    No, but hungry people who don’t want to get dressed and leave the house will order a quick meal on Uber Eats at twice the cost of getting it in-person.
    - grugagag 4y ago
      Or they prepare something at home
      - Spivak 4y ago
        Both are true, it definitely depends on how many spoons I have when lunchtime rolls around and what the leftover situation looks like. For <$20 I can get some real food to my door async and that wins very often compared to canned/frozen.
    - csomar 4y ago
      That's too lazy. No need to get dressed. You can drive to the closest point. You can collect both Lunch and Dinner. People who order Uber Eats at twice the cost are privileged (or maybe in a particular situation but these don't make the economy).
- latency-guy2 4y ago
  I think you should consider more than your own happiness, we're talking about the economy, this includes local markets, hairdressers, restaurants, municipal areas, parks, etc. 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
PLenz 4y ago
No, but it is bad for some rent seeking players with loud voices.
NickBusey 4y ago
The author's answer to the title question seems to be: No. 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.
- thundergolfer 4y ago
  Spending money at restaurants is great, way better than everybody sitting at home eating their own lunches. I suspect massive adoption of restaurants would be more efficient too, if we cared about that primarily. 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
  - galleywest200 4y ago
    Sure, it is fun. But the point of the article and discussion is not to be city-phobic like your quote suggests -- rather why do we need our economy to focus around people commuting? It is not only inner-city folks. A lot of these restaurants in cities rely on all of the people coming in for work.
    - thundergolfer 4y ago
      I was replying to someone who said spending money in restaurants is undesirable. I was not replying to the article.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - lost_tourist 4y ago
    Whose economy are we talking about though? I mean I understand what you're saying but most people I know still prefer eating at home most of the time and going to restaurants occasionally, mainly because meals out cost 3-10x as much as eating at home, unless you start every meal from scratch. this is really important for families.
Awelton 4y ago
I don't care what it does to the economy. The only people against remote work are middle managers fearing for their future and building owners afraid of losing out on rent money. I have been working remotely for 5 years and I will retire and live in a cardboard box before I commute and work in an office again.
- ab8 4y ago
  Middle managers will be needed more, not less.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    This is absolutely true. Their job is harder too. It’s senior managers who take pleasure in people being around them having making back room discussions that can’t imagine a different way of working that are driving this. They are about to become structurally unemployable.
- sshine 4y ago
  > middle managers fearing for their future and building owners afraid of losing out on rent money 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.
  - tempestn 4y ago
    I'm glad you included that last line. I agree with you that managing a remote team or running a remote business has challenges that an in-person one doesn't. (I've been running AutoTempest with an all-remote team for almost 14 years now.) Managers who rely on the 'butts in seats' heuristic will struggle a lot with managing remote employees. 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.
atlgator 4y ago
It's bad for hcol cities that rely on the tax revenue to fund their public services and bad for the politicians that draw power from such. Also bad for corporations that won large tax abatements for fancy, new HQs in exchange for bringing in hundreds or thousands of high paying jobs to an area. 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.
radicalcentrist 4y ago
Great writeup. It seems like a strange variant of the broken windows fallacy to imply that workers need to be shuttling to and from work and spending money on brick and mortar restaurants and stores. Of course remote workers will have extra spending money that's still going into the economy, whether that's delivery services mentioned in the article, local restaurants in their personal time, etc.
calvinmorrison 4y ago
I don't know if it's bad for the economy. It's certainly made my world smaller in a way probably not experienced by my parents for example. 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.
- htag 4y ago
  That's a choice you are making. You could go to the gym, take a class, wework, meet friends, visit family, grab coffee at a cafe, or a dozen other social activities.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  You could make a conscious effort to visit friends, or even coworkers. I also count my video conference interactions as interactions with people, because they are. Frankly I consider interacting with you interacting with a person because you are. But I also grew up with BBS’s and Irc friends the world over and some of the most enduring friendships are irc friends that we’ve moved into a private signal group together. We’ve been close friends for 32 years. I can’t point to a high school or other “regular person” friend that I’m that close to. I don’t feel like I’m socially impoverished. But if god wanted me to have “regular person” friends he wouldn’t have made me a programmer.
- topspin 4y ago
  "Past that I can't quote a regular person I interact with on weekly basis." The establishment promulgated term for this is "social distancing."
htag 4y ago
The author talks about three data points: 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?
- Spivak 4y ago
  > How do cities and states attract well paid remote workers. 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.
  - maxfurman 4y ago
    You do see the irony that jobs at places like restaurants and theaters cannot be done remotely, right?
    - simoncion 4y ago
      There's no irony there... either those businesses that require local staff exist because they place they're in is a interesting and/or good place to live, or the place they're in is an obscenely-expensive shithole and they just won't exist.
    - 4y ago
tempestn 4y ago
There's an economic flipside to the 'death of the city' aspects too though, which is that the ability for companies to hire from outside of big cities, and the ability of people to take jobs with companies based anywhere, opens up a ton of economic opportunity. There's clearly an opportunity for a much more efficient system if where you live and where you work don't need to be geographically coupled.
briga 4y ago
Bad for which economy? Countless programmers over the years have packed up their bags and moved away from their small towns to live in big expensive tech hubs. This has certainly been beneficial for the economy of large metros--they didn't pay to educate these workers and in many cases these workers (including myself) were raised and educated in completely different countries. So these metros have a huge pool of high-skilled young working age adults bringing billions into the economy just in taxes. But what about the towns these people are from? They essentially get nothing out of the bargain, unless one day one of those workers decides to plop down a retirement home there, which by then their economic contributions have already peaked. The way I see it remote work reverses this trend and offers a far more equitable way of doing things. It takes the strain off the big metros and allows wealth to be spread more equally across the country.
- gladiatr72 4y ago
  Heh. Well, methinks your idea and mine as to what constitutes a small town are somewhat different. The small town (pop.~1500 at the time) canceled pre-calc my senior year; the district contacted, individually, the 3 of us that had enrolled. Something about being the only person who had enrolled, so they couldn't justify a regularly scheduled class. I guess they might have thought that nerds didn't talk to each other. While I don't doubt there are many non-mega-urban environments that fit your descriptions, the number of small (wee?) towns that might lay claim to such a tax would kill such a program in its crib.
  - msrenee 4y ago
    >would kill such a a program in the crib. 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.
mannerheim 4y ago
'We are suffering from the intolerable competition of a foreign rival, placed, it would seem, in a condition so far superior to ours for the production of light that he absolutely inundates our national market with it at a price fabulously reduced. The moment he shows himself, our trade leaves us — all consumers apply to him; and a branch of native industry, having countless ramifications, is all at once rendered completely stagnant. This rival, who is none other than the sun, wages war mercilessly against us, and we suspect that he has been raised up by perfidious Albion (good policy nowadays), inasmuch as he displays toward that haughty island a circumspection with which he dispenses in our case. 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.'
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  The Petition of the Candlemakers by Frederic Bastiat, (1845).
kaicianflone 4y ago
It seems that the same people who are trying to politicize what economy would benefit from restricting remote work are the same population benefitting from keeping the federal minimum wage at $7.25 for the last 15 years. 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.
paulpauper 4y ago
No, the opposite. Look how much tech stocks boomed after Covid. WFM unlocked considerable productivity that was wasted at the office. People were wasting money and time on commuting, which resulted in fatigue and less productivity.
Krisjohn 4y ago
I would suggest that the current economic crises are a massive ocean swell on which WFH is a tiny ripple. 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.
toomanyrichies 4y ago
It’s been great for my economy. I used to schlep an hour each way on MUNI, 5 days a week, to an open-plan office where the sound of ping-pong games in the background drives me nuts with distraction. Now I’m taking a year to do a work-remote tour of the food capitals of Latin America. I’m currently in La Paz, Bolivia, where a 10-course tasting menu at one of the region’s 50 best restaurants[1] runs $70 USD, with wine pairings. Anyone who thinks they can put the toothpaste back in this tube is kidding themselves. 1. https://www.theworlds50best.com/discovery/Establishments/Bolivia/La-Paz/Gustu.html https://www.theworlds50best.com/discovery/Establishments/Bol...
jemmyw 4y ago
The economy is for the people, the people aren't for the economy, ideally. If you run a business that relies on particular behaviour, like people commuting the office, then I'm sorry things are hard but we do not owe you our business. 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.
- klodolph 4y ago
  > The economy is for the people, the people aren't for the economy, ideally. If you run a business that relies on particular behaviour, like people commuting the office, then I'm sorry things are hard but we do not owe you our business. 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.
  - chii 4y ago
    > The restaurant goes bankrupt and the landlords get paid from the liquidated assets. 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?
jezzamon 4y ago
Seems like a significant amount of commenters are arguing against the title without realising the content agrees with them :)
- mannerheim 4y ago
  I read it, I'm just peeved that after two centuries, enough people are still convinced by broken window fallacies that articles like this are even necessary.
- seydor 4y ago
  Most people would expect the answer to be "No" accordig to Betteridge's law of headlines
- yakubin 4y ago
  That happens much more often when authors use shallow click bait titles, like here; so it’s not unfair to the author.
gepardi 4y ago
Remote work is great for: - People who want more quality time with family - Environment. Less pollution. - Businesses who can save money by not needing an office. If “the economy” doesn’t like it, it needs to adapt. The economy should support people, not the other way around.
- atraac 4y ago
  > Remote work is great for: - People who want more quality time with family 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.
  - doublerabbit 4y ago
    I'll argue it's not and that the better alternative would be to have your own chosen days off. 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.
    - atraac 4y ago
      > better alternative would be to have your own chosen days off. Sure, I'll just let my dog sit for 10 hours straight on those other days. It might be a better alternative for YOU, but I doubt it's true for most peole who want fully remote work. > It is proving insanely hard getting in contact with folk. (...) Trying to find someone to give me basic mentoring, even trying to understand the hierarchy. Sounds like a company issue, not a problem with WFH in particular. I work remotely while my whole team is hybrid in another country, we're doing perfectly fine, hell they even praise me for actually getting in touch all the time. You need a certain type of personality to be able to thrive in remote work. You need to be able to get people to talk and point you in the right direction, get the information you need yourself. Most people are not like that, most people need someone standing over their head to show them the way. > 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. Sounds like a YOU issue. Emails are meant to be purely async. Messaging like Teams/Slack are meant to be more of an actual conversation. If people get wrong intentions from your emails or messages then you should work on your writing, not sure what does this have to do with WFH. They'll have the same bad impression from your emails even if you write them while sitting at the office. > Code reviews suck over webcam Who on earth does code review while calling with webcams? The whole idea of code review is for it to be asynchronous so you don't bother other people with context switching. If you meant pair coding, then yes, it's a bit more of a hassle. Still never an issue for me, we either whip out vscode/Rider, or simply share screen. Worked ok so far, but sure, sitting next to each other is always going to be better. > sharing knowledge is insanely hard Again, organizational issue, remote work encourages actually documenting stuff, not just saying openly in a meeting room "I will X because of Y" and proceeding to write meaningless code because "well... everyone noded in the room". I almost forced people at my new company to write comments both in code and Jira tasks, describe what was talked through during meetings or one on one calls. Everyone loves it after a while, refining tasks is much easier, finding a reason for why certain decisions were made is also suddenly much easier. > 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. Great for you, but I don't have to stash anything. If you work fully remotely you learn to divide business and pleasure. I do work and play from the same desk, my work laptop is gone after the day. Organizing your workplace is another issue that is more of a 'you' rather than WFH-bad. Again, remote work is not suited for everyone, but your arguments don't really explain why WFH would be bad. They just explain why you or your org is not suited for remote work. I started full remote fairly recently, I get paid much more because I can pick from many more offers(central EU), I have much more time for myself, my SO and my dog, I do many more things during the day that I otherwise wouldn't. It's amazing and at this point I will rather switch careers than go back to the office, especially since at current rate I will be mortgage free by the time I'm 35.
michaelteter 4y ago
This applies everywhere: just because a job or business has existed does not mean it has a right to exist forever. This is not being harsh on people; it's just a reality. 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.
- chii 4y ago
  > This obviously is a financial loss for the economy 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!
  - amalgamated_inc 4y ago
    > Otherwise, why not increase the GDP and economy, by periodically just breaking every window? The replacement is gonna cause huge growth! Omg this is genius! Does Jerome Powell know about this?!
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
the economy should adapt to the needs of the time and society why is always the plebs that must adapt to every inconvenience and illogical irrationality...just because that's is how it always was :/
smackeyacky 4y ago
There was another article in the Sydney Morning Herald [0] behooving everybody to get back to the CBD because...mental health...cafes will close... 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-back-to-the-office-20230127-p5cfvq.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-it-s-time-to-get-...
- loudandskittish 4y ago
  I find it odd that for decades, people were shamed for wasting money at cafes ...but then as soon as people stopped going to cafes, it's suddenly an economic disaster?
  - smackeyacky 4y ago
    It depends on who you are shaming. The whole "ZOMG stop eating avocado toast and buy a house already" thing directed at young people is disgusting.
    - perceptronas 4y ago
      I think there is some truth to that. My parents went to eat out like once a year for quite a while. They saved as much as they could and succeeded at that.
      - saiya-jin 4y ago
        Generation of our parents lived much more frugal lives from current perspective. Less traveling, adventures, exciting matters and more grind of work & kids care. I utterly respect them for that, but its not a life I would call ideal and strive to have. Financials now for buying real estate became ridiculous for many places globally. It can be counted from ie how many salaries of similar jobs you need to buy a house in same place before and now. Not exact, but this shows how things skyrocketed due to cheap debt and speculation.
neilwilson 4y ago
Remote work is bad for the 'people are there to serve business' economy. 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.
seydor 4y ago
The thing about remote work is like Entropy (or some religions): you can't go back , it's a self-reinforcing thing. So it really isnt very useful to ponder whether it's 'bad for the economy', but what economy will result when people adapt to an increasingly popular reality.
akomtu 4y ago
Who cares about economy? It is to serve us, not the other way around. Economy is just the motion of money and debts.
Lacerda69 4y ago
when a headline is phrased like this the answer is always: No
- theshrike79 4y ago
  Betteridge's Law.
hknmtt 4y ago
starlink and covid were gamechangers for WfH. People can now move outside of big cities and enjoy better lives while still being able to make good money. less traffic, less pollution(if you are into that), less garbage, less waste in general. billions of hours saved on commuting. more time to spend with your family, to relax...
carabiner 4y ago
Such a straw man article. He ignores the main argument against WFH which is that people are walking their dogs or doing yoga instead of actually working. I take long naps. I know I'm less productive but I can't help it.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  That's an argument against you working from home. My experience was that I worked just as effectively at home and had two hours a day extra that I could use for exercise, relaxing, and in fact a bit of extra work.
  - sph 4y ago
    Also an argument against work in general: the vast majority of people were not doing work the entirety of their 8 hour work days. 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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- neoromantique 4y ago
  How do you measure your productivity? Personally my working hour after a walk or a nap is much more productive than anything I could ever achieve in the office. 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).
thefz 4y ago
Heard the "but what will restaurants in the city centre do?" argument while discussing with a local politician. I argued that this way maybe restaurants, grocery shops and other activities can flourish back in small towns that are now relegated as dormitory. 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.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  All the money I spent on lunch in the city centre restaurants I've spent on restaurants close to my home. I consider that as a win-win, supporting local businesses.
- acdha 4y ago
  I’ve increasingly been thinking of this similarly to technical debt where city planners made decisions for a long time which weren’t inherently bad but made things less robust against a shock. Having your downtown focused on, say, financial companies is great (tons of taxes, minimal pollution, etc.) until the office workers can stay home and there’s nobody else filling in their shopping or dining. 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.
qwerty456127 4y ago
I think its great unless this means almost all (a part is good) the jobs are outsourced to abroad.
Dave3of5 4y ago
I'm not reading another article about remote work because they all make my mind bleed but when anyone is reading remember this: 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.
janosdebugs 4y ago
Do cars reduce the need for horses? Yes. Does remote work reduce the need for restaurants? Yes. Does this mean there will be fewer jobs for carriage drivers / waiters? Yes. Is this good for the economy / the planet / humanity? YMMV.
onion2k 4y ago
The only way it'd be worse for the economy would be if remote working somehow caused people to hoard money in cash in their house. So long as people are still spending, or saving/investing their money in institutions that reinvest, then all that happens is a shift in where people's economic work is done. Restaurants in cities might suffer from losing the lunch time crowd, but people will spend that money somewhere else in the economy instead. Remote work is obviously not bad for the economy because the economy is basically a closed system.
ElevenLathe 4y ago
To summarize the article: Some people benefit, and some don't. 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.
whiddershins 4y ago
The way in which remote work could be bad for the economy would be reduced creativity (or “work output” in business speak) which would make us produce less, invent less, generally make less awesome happen. 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.
ggm 4y ago
Some value is latent in listed property trusts. If that value ceases to exist, at scale, if we have a massive revaluation of commercial property of all kinds, depending how that happens then yes, it would be enormously destructive of wealth at large. It's part of billions of workers future pension income, as well as an asset class backing other forms of investment which in turn makes economic value. 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.
klondike_klive 4y ago
It's been a disaster for the burgling community, I can tell you that.
college_physics 4y ago
It is actually not easy to decide this question. We can at least try to formulate a framework to think about it rationally. Remote work is not a new economic category but just a reconfiguration of what we call the knowledge economy (The total economy (TE) being the sum of the real economy (RE) and the knowledge economy (KE)) 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
factorialboy 4y ago
Concisely put: It's redistribution of wealth. 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.
INGSOCIALITE 4y ago
The issue is that middle managers are being proven as ineffective and useless. The guy who wanders around the office synergizing everyone now has a spotlight on them, because its been proven over the last few years that people can be efficient and productive without Lundberg stopping by and asking for a progress report. The only part of the industry that has now been proven unnecessary are the ones clawing and fighting to get everyone back into the office.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  I agree with this a lot, and I've started defining this phenomenon with 'B.S. Jobs': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs Not to say that the people currently doing the middle-management synergizing should be banished from society, but that the job function itself shouldn't exist at all.
- Steltek 4y ago
  There are ineffective managers but there are also ineffective ICs. With WFH, there are definitely people trying to do as little as possible. Objectively measuring people's effectiveness at work is hardly a solved problem.
lucidguppy 4y ago
Broken window fallacy + slippery slope fallacy 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.
snorrah 4y ago
Nope.
snorrah 4y ago
> Is remote work bad for the economy? Nope.
jeffwask 4y ago
Is banning child labor bad for manufacturing?
twh270 4y ago
We need to get rid of "what's good for the economy" (aka corporate revenue/profits and high employment) as the sole yardstick for making policy decisions. It is very, very clearly not working. 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.
ramijames 4y ago
How about we start caring less about what is good for the economy and start caring more about what is good for the workers. I'm tired of society's sole focus being on maximum efficiency and profit extraction.
adverbly 4y ago
Solutions to nonexistent problems don't generate any GDP. Not fighting off aliens is bad for the economy. 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.
friend_and_foe 4y ago
Who gives a shit. Saving your money is bad for the economy. The real question is, is it good for the population? Or individuals? The answer is clearly yes.
foxyv 4y ago
I blame open offices. I used to love coming into work and having my own space to work. Then open offices came around and I nope'd the heck out of there. I no longer had my own desk. The pleasant quiet cubical became a loud PITA. There was no longer even the little privacy I had when I first started working. 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...

140 points by svsaraf 4y ago

Sebguer 4y ago

Maybe dollars spent at local restaurants isn't the metric we should be optimizing for?

fnordpiglet 4y ago
Maybe those restaurants can simply move to residential areas. People still eat lunch. Regardless we don’t manufacture buggy whips to keep the buggy whip businesses afloat either.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  Yeah, I live in the suburbs, and I count almost 60 restaurants within a six minute drive of me, most of them centered on two commercial strips surrounded by residential areas. Only a few restaurants around here died since Covid (we lost a Steak n' Shake, a brunch place, and recently a chinese place and a Boston Market), most are still here, and we've gotten several new ones besides that, so I think people are still clearly supporting restaurants around here.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >Maybe those restaurants can simply move to residential areas. 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.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    See the parallel comment to yours. I didn’t mean literally buy a house and open a restaurant. But most zoning has commercial zones near residential zones. Come on, it’s all just sim city.

wkdneidbwf 4y ago

i’ve been working remotely for a decade and i’ve never been happier. i also suspect that the population being happier is no doubt bad for corporate profits.

BizarreByte 4y ago
Happy people typically don’t spend as much money trying to drown their sorrows in consumer crap, food, and drugs.
- xwdv 4y ago
  No, but hungry people who don’t want to get dressed and leave the house will order a quick meal on Uber Eats at twice the cost of getting it in-person.
  - grugagag 4y ago
    Or they prepare something at home
    - Spivak 4y ago
      Both are true, it definitely depends on how many spoons I have when lunchtime rolls around and what the leftover situation looks like. For <$20 I can get some real food to my door async and that wins very often compared to canned/frozen.
  - csomar 4y ago
    That's too lazy. No need to get dressed. You can drive to the closest point. You can collect both Lunch and Dinner. People who order Uber Eats at twice the cost are privileged (or maybe in a particular situation but these don't make the economy).
latency-guy2 4y ago
I think you should consider more than your own happiness, we're talking about the economy, this includes local markets, hairdressers, restaurants, municipal areas, parks, etc. 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

PLenz 4y ago

No, but it is bad for some rent seeking players with loud voices.

NickBusey 4y ago

The author's answer to the title question seems to be: No. 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.

thundergolfer 4y ago
Spending money at restaurants is great, way better than everybody sitting at home eating their own lunches. I suspect massive adoption of restaurants would be more efficient too, if we cared about that primarily. 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
- galleywest200 4y ago
  Sure, it is fun. But the point of the article and discussion is not to be city-phobic like your quote suggests -- rather why do we need our economy to focus around people commuting? It is not only inner-city folks. A lot of these restaurants in cities rely on all of the people coming in for work.
  - thundergolfer 4y ago
    I was replying to someone who said spending money in restaurants is undesirable. I was not replying to the article.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- lost_tourist 4y ago
  Whose economy are we talking about though? I mean I understand what you're saying but most people I know still prefer eating at home most of the time and going to restaurants occasionally, mainly because meals out cost 3-10x as much as eating at home, unless you start every meal from scratch. this is really important for families.

Awelton 4y ago

I don't care what it does to the economy. The only people against remote work are middle managers fearing for their future and building owners afraid of losing out on rent money. I have been working remotely for 5 years and I will retire and live in a cardboard box before I commute and work in an office again.

ab8 4y ago
Middle managers will be needed more, not less.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  This is absolutely true. Their job is harder too. It’s senior managers who take pleasure in people being around them having making back room discussions that can’t imagine a different way of working that are driving this. They are about to become structurally unemployable.
sshine 4y ago
> middle managers fearing for their future and building owners afraid of losing out on rent money 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.
- tempestn 4y ago
  I'm glad you included that last line. I agree with you that managing a remote team or running a remote business has challenges that an in-person one doesn't. (I've been running AutoTempest with an all-remote team for almost 14 years now.) Managers who rely on the 'butts in seats' heuristic will struggle a lot with managing remote employees. 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.

atlgator 4y ago

It's bad for hcol cities that rely on the tax revenue to fund their public services and bad for the politicians that draw power from such. Also bad for corporations that won large tax abatements for fancy, new HQs in exchange for bringing in hundreds or thousands of high paying jobs to an area. 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.

radicalcentrist 4y ago

Great writeup. It seems like a strange variant of the broken windows fallacy to imply that workers need to be shuttling to and from work and spending money on brick and mortar restaurants and stores. Of course remote workers will have extra spending money that's still going into the economy, whether that's delivery services mentioned in the article, local restaurants in their personal time, etc.

calvinmorrison 4y ago

I don't know if it's bad for the economy. It's certainly made my world smaller in a way probably not experienced by my parents for example. 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.

htag 4y ago
That's a choice you are making. You could go to the gym, take a class, wework, meet friends, visit family, grab coffee at a cafe, or a dozen other social activities.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
You could make a conscious effort to visit friends, or even coworkers. I also count my video conference interactions as interactions with people, because they are. Frankly I consider interacting with you interacting with a person because you are. But I also grew up with BBS’s and Irc friends the world over and some of the most enduring friendships are irc friends that we’ve moved into a private signal group together. We’ve been close friends for 32 years. I can’t point to a high school or other “regular person” friend that I’m that close to. I don’t feel like I’m socially impoverished. But if god wanted me to have “regular person” friends he wouldn’t have made me a programmer.
topspin 4y ago
"Past that I can't quote a regular person I interact with on weekly basis." The establishment promulgated term for this is "social distancing."

htag 4y ago

The author talks about three data points: 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?

Spivak 4y ago
> How do cities and states attract well paid remote workers. 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.
- maxfurman 4y ago
  You do see the irony that jobs at places like restaurants and theaters cannot be done remotely, right?
  - simoncion 4y ago
    There's no irony there... either those businesses that require local staff exist because they place they're in is a interesting and/or good place to live, or the place they're in is an obscenely-expensive shithole and they just won't exist.
  - 4y ago

tempestn 4y ago

There's an economic flipside to the 'death of the city' aspects too though, which is that the ability for companies to hire from outside of big cities, and the ability of people to take jobs with companies based anywhere, opens up a ton of economic opportunity. There's clearly an opportunity for a much more efficient system if where you live and where you work don't need to be geographically coupled.

briga 4y ago

Bad for which economy? Countless programmers over the years have packed up their bags and moved away from their small towns to live in big expensive tech hubs. This has certainly been beneficial for the economy of large metros--they didn't pay to educate these workers and in many cases these workers (including myself) were raised and educated in completely different countries. So these metros have a huge pool of high-skilled young working age adults bringing billions into the economy just in taxes. But what about the towns these people are from? They essentially get nothing out of the bargain, unless one day one of those workers decides to plop down a retirement home there, which by then their economic contributions have already peaked. The way I see it remote work reverses this trend and offers a far more equitable way of doing things. It takes the strain off the big metros and allows wealth to be spread more equally across the country.

gladiatr72 4y ago
Heh. Well, methinks your idea and mine as to what constitutes a small town are somewhat different. The small town (pop.~1500 at the time) canceled pre-calc my senior year; the district contacted, individually, the 3 of us that had enrolled. Something about being the only person who had enrolled, so they couldn't justify a regularly scheduled class. I guess they might have thought that nerds didn't talk to each other. While I don't doubt there are many non-mega-urban environments that fit your descriptions, the number of small (wee?) towns that might lay claim to such a tax would kill such a program in its crib.
- msrenee 4y ago
  >would kill such a a program in the crib. 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.

mannerheim 4y ago

'We are suffering from the intolerable competition of a foreign rival, placed, it would seem, in a condition so far superior to ours for the production of light that he absolutely inundates our national market with it at a price fabulously reduced. The moment he shows himself, our trade leaves us — all consumers apply to him; and a branch of native industry, having countless ramifications, is all at once rendered completely stagnant. This rival, who is none other than the sun, wages war mercilessly against us, and we suspect that he has been raised up by perfidious Albion (good policy nowadays), inasmuch as he displays toward that haughty island a circumspection with which he dispenses in our case. 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.'

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kwhitefoot 4y ago
The Petition of the Candlemakers by Frederic Bastiat, (1845).

kaicianflone 4y ago

It seems that the same people who are trying to politicize what economy would benefit from restricting remote work are the same population benefitting from keeping the federal minimum wage at $7.25 for the last 15 years. 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.

paulpauper 4y ago

No, the opposite. Look how much tech stocks boomed after Covid. WFM unlocked considerable productivity that was wasted at the office. People were wasting money and time on commuting, which resulted in fatigue and less productivity.

Krisjohn 4y ago

I would suggest that the current economic crises are a massive ocean swell on which WFH is a tiny ripple. 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.

toomanyrichies 4y ago

It’s been great for my economy. I used to schlep an hour each way on MUNI, 5 days a week, to an open-plan office where the sound of ping-pong games in the background drives me nuts with distraction. Now I’m taking a year to do a work-remote tour of the food capitals of Latin America. I’m currently in La Paz, Bolivia, where a 10-course tasting menu at one of the region’s 50 best restaurants[1] runs $70 USD, with wine pairings. Anyone who thinks they can put the toothpaste back in this tube is kidding themselves. 1. https://www.theworlds50best.com/discovery/Establishments/Bolivia/La-Paz/Gustu.html https://www.theworlds50best.com/discovery/Establishments/Bol...

jemmyw 4y ago

The economy is for the people, the people aren't for the economy, ideally. If you run a business that relies on particular behaviour, like people commuting the office, then I'm sorry things are hard but we do not owe you our business. 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.

klodolph 4y ago
> The economy is for the people, the people aren't for the economy, ideally. If you run a business that relies on particular behaviour, like people commuting the office, then I'm sorry things are hard but we do not owe you our business. 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.
- chii 4y ago
  > The restaurant goes bankrupt and the landlords get paid from the liquidated assets. 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?

jezzamon 4y ago

Seems like a significant amount of commenters are arguing against the title without realising the content agrees with them :)

mannerheim 4y ago
I read it, I'm just peeved that after two centuries, enough people are still convinced by broken window fallacies that articles like this are even necessary.
seydor 4y ago
Most people would expect the answer to be "No" accordig to Betteridge's law of headlines
yakubin 4y ago
That happens much more often when authors use shallow click bait titles, like here; so it’s not unfair to the author.

gepardi 4y ago

Remote work is great for: - People who want more quality time with family - Environment. Less pollution. - Businesses who can save money by not needing an office. If “the economy” doesn’t like it, it needs to adapt. The economy should support people, not the other way around.

atraac 4y ago
> Remote work is great for: - People who want more quality time with family 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.
- doublerabbit 4y ago
  I'll argue it's not and that the better alternative would be to have your own chosen days off. 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.
  - atraac 4y ago
    > better alternative would be to have your own chosen days off. Sure, I'll just let my dog sit for 10 hours straight on those other days. It might be a better alternative for YOU, but I doubt it's true for most peole who want fully remote work. > It is proving insanely hard getting in contact with folk. (...) Trying to find someone to give me basic mentoring, even trying to understand the hierarchy. Sounds like a company issue, not a problem with WFH in particular. I work remotely while my whole team is hybrid in another country, we're doing perfectly fine, hell they even praise me for actually getting in touch all the time. You need a certain type of personality to be able to thrive in remote work. You need to be able to get people to talk and point you in the right direction, get the information you need yourself. Most people are not like that, most people need someone standing over their head to show them the way. > 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. Sounds like a YOU issue. Emails are meant to be purely async. Messaging like Teams/Slack are meant to be more of an actual conversation. If people get wrong intentions from your emails or messages then you should work on your writing, not sure what does this have to do with WFH. They'll have the same bad impression from your emails even if you write them while sitting at the office. > Code reviews suck over webcam Who on earth does code review while calling with webcams? The whole idea of code review is for it to be asynchronous so you don't bother other people with context switching. If you meant pair coding, then yes, it's a bit more of a hassle. Still never an issue for me, we either whip out vscode/Rider, or simply share screen. Worked ok so far, but sure, sitting next to each other is always going to be better. > sharing knowledge is insanely hard Again, organizational issue, remote work encourages actually documenting stuff, not just saying openly in a meeting room "I will X because of Y" and proceeding to write meaningless code because "well... everyone noded in the room". I almost forced people at my new company to write comments both in code and Jira tasks, describe what was talked through during meetings or one on one calls. Everyone loves it after a while, refining tasks is much easier, finding a reason for why certain decisions were made is also suddenly much easier. > 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. Great for you, but I don't have to stash anything. If you work fully remotely you learn to divide business and pleasure. I do work and play from the same desk, my work laptop is gone after the day. Organizing your workplace is another issue that is more of a 'you' rather than WFH-bad. Again, remote work is not suited for everyone, but your arguments don't really explain why WFH would be bad. They just explain why you or your org is not suited for remote work. I started full remote fairly recently, I get paid much more because I can pick from many more offers(central EU), I have much more time for myself, my SO and my dog, I do many more things during the day that I otherwise wouldn't. It's amazing and at this point I will rather switch careers than go back to the office, especially since at current rate I will be mortgage free by the time I'm 35.

michaelteter 4y ago

This applies everywhere: just because a job or business has existed does not mean it has a right to exist forever. This is not being harsh on people; it's just a reality. 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.

chii 4y ago
> This obviously is a financial loss for the economy 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!
- amalgamated_inc 4y ago
  > Otherwise, why not increase the GDP and economy, by periodically just breaking every window? The replacement is gonna cause huge growth! Omg this is genius! Does Jerome Powell know about this?!

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

the economy should adapt to the needs of the time and society why is always the plebs that must adapt to every inconvenience and illogical irrationality...just because that's is how it always was :/

smackeyacky 4y ago

There was another article in the Sydney Morning Herald [0] behooving everybody to get back to the CBD because...mental health...cafes will close... 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-back-to-the-office-20230127-p5cfvq.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-it-s-time-to-get-...

loudandskittish 4y ago
I find it odd that for decades, people were shamed for wasting money at cafes ...but then as soon as people stopped going to cafes, it's suddenly an economic disaster?
- smackeyacky 4y ago
  It depends on who you are shaming. The whole "ZOMG stop eating avocado toast and buy a house already" thing directed at young people is disgusting.
  - perceptronas 4y ago
    I think there is some truth to that. My parents went to eat out like once a year for quite a while. They saved as much as they could and succeeded at that.
    - saiya-jin 4y ago
      Generation of our parents lived much more frugal lives from current perspective. Less traveling, adventures, exciting matters and more grind of work & kids care. I utterly respect them for that, but its not a life I would call ideal and strive to have. Financials now for buying real estate became ridiculous for many places globally. It can be counted from ie how many salaries of similar jobs you need to buy a house in same place before and now. Not exact, but this shows how things skyrocketed due to cheap debt and speculation.

neilwilson 4y ago

Remote work is bad for the 'people are there to serve business' economy. 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.

seydor 4y ago

The thing about remote work is like Entropy (or some religions): you can't go back , it's a self-reinforcing thing. So it really isnt very useful to ponder whether it's 'bad for the economy', but what economy will result when people adapt to an increasingly popular reality.

akomtu 4y ago

Who cares about economy? It is to serve us, not the other way around. Economy is just the motion of money and debts.

Lacerda69 4y ago

when a headline is phrased like this the answer is always: No

theshrike79 4y ago
Betteridge's Law.

hknmtt 4y ago

starlink and covid were gamechangers for WfH. People can now move outside of big cities and enjoy better lives while still being able to make good money. less traffic, less pollution(if you are into that), less garbage, less waste in general. billions of hours saved on commuting. more time to spend with your family, to relax...

carabiner 4y ago

Such a straw man article. He ignores the main argument against WFH which is that people are walking their dogs or doing yoga instead of actually working. I take long naps. I know I'm less productive but I can't help it.

kwhitefoot 4y ago
That's an argument against you working from home. My experience was that I worked just as effectively at home and had two hours a day extra that I could use for exercise, relaxing, and in fact a bit of extra work.
- sph 4y ago
  Also an argument against work in general: the vast majority of people were not doing work the entirety of their 8 hour work days. 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.
  - deleted 4y ago
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neoromantique 4y ago
How do you measure your productivity? Personally my working hour after a walk or a nap is much more productive than anything I could ever achieve in the office. 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).

thefz 4y ago

Heard the "but what will restaurants in the city centre do?" argument while discussing with a local politician. I argued that this way maybe restaurants, grocery shops and other activities can flourish back in small towns that are now relegated as dormitory. 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.

theshrike79 4y ago
All the money I spent on lunch in the city centre restaurants I've spent on restaurants close to my home. I consider that as a win-win, supporting local businesses.
acdha 4y ago
I’ve increasingly been thinking of this similarly to technical debt where city planners made decisions for a long time which weren’t inherently bad but made things less robust against a shock. Having your downtown focused on, say, financial companies is great (tons of taxes, minimal pollution, etc.) until the office workers can stay home and there’s nobody else filling in their shopping or dining. 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.

qwerty456127 4y ago

I think its great unless this means almost all (a part is good) the jobs are outsourced to abroad.

Dave3of5 4y ago

I'm not reading another article about remote work because they all make my mind bleed but when anyone is reading remember this: 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.

janosdebugs 4y ago

Do cars reduce the need for horses? Yes. Does remote work reduce the need for restaurants? Yes. Does this mean there will be fewer jobs for carriage drivers / waiters? Yes. Is this good for the economy / the planet / humanity? YMMV.

onion2k 4y ago

The only way it'd be worse for the economy would be if remote working somehow caused people to hoard money in cash in their house. So long as people are still spending, or saving/investing their money in institutions that reinvest, then all that happens is a shift in where people's economic work is done. Restaurants in cities might suffer from losing the lunch time crowd, but people will spend that money somewhere else in the economy instead. Remote work is obviously not bad for the economy because the economy is basically a closed system.

ElevenLathe 4y ago

To summarize the article: Some people benefit, and some don't. 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.

whiddershins 4y ago

The way in which remote work could be bad for the economy would be reduced creativity (or “work output” in business speak) which would make us produce less, invent less, generally make less awesome happen. 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.

ggm 4y ago

Some value is latent in listed property trusts. If that value ceases to exist, at scale, if we have a massive revaluation of commercial property of all kinds, depending how that happens then yes, it would be enormously destructive of wealth at large. It's part of billions of workers future pension income, as well as an asset class backing other forms of investment which in turn makes economic value. 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.

klondike_klive 4y ago

It's been a disaster for the burgling community, I can tell you that.

college_physics 4y ago

It is actually not easy to decide this question. We can at least try to formulate a framework to think about it rationally. Remote work is not a new economic category but just a reconfiguration of what we call the knowledge economy (The total economy (TE) being the sum of the real economy (RE) and the knowledge economy (KE)) 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

factorialboy 4y ago

Concisely put: It's redistribution of wealth. 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.

INGSOCIALITE 4y ago

The issue is that middle managers are being proven as ineffective and useless. The guy who wanders around the office synergizing everyone now has a spotlight on them, because its been proven over the last few years that people can be efficient and productive without Lundberg stopping by and asking for a progress report. The only part of the industry that has now been proven unnecessary are the ones clawing and fighting to get everyone back into the office.

wildrhythms 4y ago
I agree with this a lot, and I've started defining this phenomenon with 'B.S. Jobs': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs Not to say that the people currently doing the middle-management synergizing should be banished from society, but that the job function itself shouldn't exist at all.
Steltek 4y ago
There are ineffective managers but there are also ineffective ICs. With WFH, there are definitely people trying to do as little as possible. Objectively measuring people's effectiveness at work is hardly a solved problem.

lucidguppy 4y ago

Broken window fallacy + slippery slope fallacy 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.

snorrah 4y ago

Nope.

snorrah 4y ago

> Is remote work bad for the economy? Nope.

jeffwask 4y ago

Is banning child labor bad for manufacturing?

twh270 4y ago

We need to get rid of "what's good for the economy" (aka corporate revenue/profits and high employment) as the sole yardstick for making policy decisions. It is very, very clearly not working. 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.

ramijames 4y ago

How about we start caring less about what is good for the economy and start caring more about what is good for the workers. I'm tired of society's sole focus being on maximum efficiency and profit extraction.

adverbly 4y ago

Solutions to nonexistent problems don't generate any GDP. Not fighting off aliens is bad for the economy. 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.

friend_and_foe 4y ago

Who gives a shit. Saving your money is bad for the economy. The real question is, is it good for the population? Or individuals? The answer is clearly yes.

foxyv 4y ago

I blame open offices. I used to love coming into work and having my own space to work. Then open offices came around and I nope'd the heck out of there. I no longer had my own desk. The pleasant quiet cubical became a loud PITA. There was no longer even the little privacy I had when I first started working. 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...