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> 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,

by 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?!
friendzis 4y ago
Wellllll.... debatable. This argument of expense rerouting is a bit flawed. Suppose working from home saves one some money that they spend elsewhere. Working from the office they spend that money on fuel, indirectly spend on road maintenance, directly spend on vehicle maintenance where the shop in turn spends on parts and tools and so on. The money one spends circulates in the economy much longer and reaches more actors until it eventually falls back into original pocket. Working from home then they buy more items that have been manufactured in China, spend eating out where restaurants pay mostly wages and farmers, making the chain much shorter. There are different economic health considerations for different spending habits. While not exactly a loss it's not entirely equal too.
- chii 4y ago
  > The money one spends circulates in the economy much longer and reaches more actors until it eventually falls back into original pocket. that's a total assumption being made. Who knows how the money from an office worker's commute gets dispersed. It's likely too difficult to track exactly. And it's irrelevant to the person how this dispersion happens or why. All they need to care about is that they've eliminated a source of inefficiency, and thus have extra money for either investment or different consumption.
  - teamonkey 4y ago
    > All they need to care about is that they've eliminated a source of inefficiency, and thus have extra money for either investment or different consumption. ...or prices rise to balance out the extra money.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  I'd say roads that need less maintenance are a win long term, otherwise we go back to original argument about breaking all the windows. The rest... pure speculation from poster's own limited view, the world is more complex than 'I stay home so just order more stuff from China', definitely not true for me. I can chip in mine - ie during travel restrictions forced to buy in more expensive smaller local shops for whole family. One heck of help for local economy. Spending vacations much closer, meaning tons of money flow back to local economy. Having time to plan and do some home repairs with local workforce. And so on, random tiny examples have little significance in hyper complex situation that is called reality.
- geysersam 4y ago
  The purpose of the economy is to fulfill human desires. The only question we have to ask to understand which situation resulted in higher economic output is: which situation resulted in satisfying more human desires. It's clear that the pointless burning of fossil fuels didn't satisfy any human need. Then the question becomes: is the distribution of currency caused by the buying and burning of the fuels preferable to the alternative distribution if the currency had been spent elsewhere? If it is preferable, does that offset the waste of fuel for no purpose except redistributing currency? Any time I hear these kinds of reasonings the question comes to mind: if some distributions of currency are preferable to others, and we know what such distributions look like, why not let the government do the distribution directly?
  - landemva 4y ago
    > the pointless burning of fossil fuels didn't satisfy any human need. That sentence would have a different meaning if the conclusitory (looking for real word here) word "pointless" was not there. Abundant reliable on-demand energy has enormously improved the human condition. I'm also glad the Dutch no longer dig up peat bogs for dirty fuel.
    - carlosjobim 4y ago
      He or she didn't mean that burning of these fuels is pointless, it was a response to a poster suggesting to pointlessly burn these fuels in order to stimulate the economy.
    - geysersam 4y ago
      Driving to work, when you can/prefer to work from home, is pointless.
  - lelanthran 4y ago
    > It's clear that the pointless burning of fossil fuels didn't satisfy any human need. Yeah, but ... how much of it was pointless? Who decides if a use-case is pointless? You? Me? The government?
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > Working from the office they spend that money on fuel, indirectly spend on road maintenance, directly spend on vehicle maintenance where the shop in turn spends on parts and tools and so on. It's arguable whether all of this is needed everywhere in the world, to such a degree as is presently done. In the cities, the transportation needs of most folks can be covered by public transportation (depending on the country, admittedly) - it is more efficient, more green and also results in fewer traffic jams. Furthermore it scales up and down better: whether at 50% or 80% of capacity it will do its scheduled route, as opposed to all of those people otherwise needing cars and parking spaces for those and so on, which isn't always entirely feasible in densely populated cities. I guess it's just a different take on things, but if there's commute, we might as well make it more efficient, as opposed to spending 1-2 hours per day in traffic, which is essentially wasted time. Or not have the commute altogether. In more rural areas or many places in the US as opposed to EU it's a slightly different story.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I live in Cambridge, MA (a city for sure) and used to work in an office near the Waltham/Lexington line. Not some out in the rural woods places at all. I looked up and wrote up my “what if I tried to commute on public transit to make a 9AM meeting?” It’s ugly to the point where no one would voluntarily choose it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197
    - KronisLV 4y ago
      It probably depends a lot on your circumstances, location and other factors! In my case, in Rīga (the capital of my country, Latvia), it was approximately: - leave apartment at 7:45 - walk to stop in around 5 minutes - wait 5 - 10 minutes for a trolley bus - ride in it for 20 - 30 minutes - walk from stop to work for 10 minutes I think it averaged out to around 40 minutes per trip, and 1 euro per day, given a monthly ticket: https://www.rigassatiksme.lv/en/tickets-and-e-ticket/types-and-prices-of-tickets-1/one-month-ticket/ https://www.rigassatiksme.lv/en/tickets-and-e-ticket/types-a... With a car, the same trip would be around 20-40 minutes. For comparison's sake, walking would mean upwards of 100 minutes for that trip. Regardless of whether in a car, or using public transportation, coming home in the evening often included waiting in traffic jams for close to an hour. In comparison, when coming home before 4-6 PM, the streets were relatively empty and there were no such traffic issues. Fewer cars, fewer issues of that sort. But what holds here true doesn't hold true elsewhere and vice versa. Once you go past a certain scale of the city in question, transfers and other complications become unavoidable. Just how much of an issue it is, depends on many other factors as well (car ownership cost, possibility of accidents, the disadvantage of not being able to easily transport things when not owning a car and so on, lack of freedom without a car, especially when you want to visit less popular rural areas). Neither beats rolling out of bed at 8:45, turning on the computer and brewing some coffee or tea, doing a morning shower and "being at work" 10 minutes later, though.
- aflag 4y ago
  In your example you're actually valuing the local community more than the global community. Ordering something from China probably contributes to more people's wages than commutting. There are the workers in China, land and sea transport, it's a huge infrastructure.
- strken 4y ago
  This is close to the broken window fallacy. We tend to forget the flow of money is an indirect proxy for work performed. If 20% of construction workers are freed up from fixing roads because of lower traffic, they don't just sit around crying, they find other work to do. Same with tech workers, same with everyone. That's a net good because the work they'll move to will by definition be worth paying someone to do. Wasting time fixing stuff that didn't need to be broken is intrinsically bad for the economy, but it's disruptive to suddenly have your now-pointless job taken away.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    Traffic in general is also much more efficient with a small reduction in traffic. If we have 10% fewer people commuting during work hours, then traffic might move twice as efficiently. Of course, that uses less fuel, which is bad for the economy /s
  - Joker_vD 4y ago
    Yeah, people fixate on the money flow so much that they forget that there is another flow, in the opposite direction, the flow of the goods and labour, which is what the economy is actually all about... money is just so much easier to track, and account for, and aggregate (it's all just dollars!) so that the second flow is heavily de-emphasized. Of course, when you look at just the flow of the goods and labour, the organization of a national economy in general seems highly, uh, round-about — the money serves as the main controlling/directing mechanism so without it in the picture things look pretty funky.
  - natoliniak 4y ago
    > are freed up from fixing roads because of lower traffic, they don't just sit around crying, they find other work to do. yes, this holds up when there is something else to do, which is not always the case. I remember during the great recession, building contractors in Florida were praying for a hurricane to put them back to work. There was absolutely no other work to be found.
    - bluGill 4y ago
satoru42 4y ago
It is said that in many cities in China the governments actually did something similar. They broke parts of the roads repeatedly so that they could rebuild them later.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  That's how local corruption works in Eastern European cities. New mayor gets elected, so good streets get torn up and re-paved, so that his friend who runs a local construction company gets a lucrative government contract above market rates. Rinse and repeat every time we get a new mayor. It's a tried and tested way of legally shoveling public taxpayer money into well connected private pockets. I've seen similar corruption scandals in Western Europe as well, since the owners of construction companies and city leaders tend to not be strangers to one another, so I don't expect China to be any different here.
  - dcow 4y ago
    SF too.
  - 988747 4y ago
    Yes, and it's also funny that they will re-pave the street, and then few months later it turns out that some water pipes need to be replaced, so the freshly re-paved street is torn up again. Then, few months later, new fiber cables needs to be put in the ground, so guess what?. Re-paving becomes one of the best businesses in such town :)
    - bluGill 4y ago
      A few cities have someone who's job it is to coordinate between all the groups that have/want something under the streets so when the streets are torn up (which needs to happen every 20-60 years depending on how long the chosen pavement type lasts) everyone with something under the road goes out and does whatever they need. The city I'm in now puts everything in the area between the streets and the sidewalks. I don't have a sidewalk yet because there are some thing that will be going in next summer.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
>Otherwise, why not increase the GDP and economy, by periodically just breaking every window? The replacement is gonna cause huge growth! I believe by classical Keynesian theory that would indeed create economic growth?
- dgb23 4y ago
  Is there a model that incorporates utility outside of “people are willing to pay for it”?
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    I can't remember her name but there was an economist who IIRC was Australian and made a critique of classical Keynesian economics based on an accounting model that you need a debit column to be able to balance out loss of raw materials, environmental degradation etc. For example if an oil tanker sinks you should be able to calculate the loss of value the environmental damage represents as well as the additional value that replacing that ship represents. Can't remember much beyond that though.
f6v 4y ago
> Otherwise, why not increase the GDP and economy, by periodically just breaking every window? Starting wars to fuel arms industry worked just fine so far.
- danuker 4y ago
  Bonus points if you loot oil or some other resource.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  Sounds like Zorg’s speech: https://youtu.be/KXwqUMkXFiI?t=50 https://youtu.be/KXwqUMkXFiI?t=50
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  The distinction is breaking someone else’s windows. Plus you need to win, not just start the war, and extract some resources from the someone else.
  - pokepim 4y ago
    [dead]
  - ilostmyshoes 4y ago
    That's why wars that don't involve the US are a cash cow. Just sell them weapons! Ez money
- chii 4y ago
  The war in afghanistan (and to a degree, iraq 2nd invasion) was largely a waste, but these are not the same as the broken window fallacy.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    Waste? Depends who you ask. All of the counties around Washington DC are the richest in the US. Like, literally, search for "richest counties in the US" and notice how many DC 'burbs are in the top 10 (and top 20). But as mentioned that's the taxpayer getting fleeced, not the broken window fallacy.
red_trumpet 4y ago
Sure. Just like planned obsolescence causes more growth for those who produce appliances.
antihipocrat 4y ago
Exactly, the local suburban businesses are loving the extra foot traffic, at the expense of less foot traffic in downtown areas. I'm sure home delivery services are benefiting too. The suggestion that the general economy is suffering because of people WFH doesn't make much sense, spending is just reallocated. .. Now if people were saving any money previously spent on commuting and eating out, then that would reduce GDP expenditure. The high levels of inflation suggest this isn't the case.
- bequanna 4y ago
  Right, and in my experience urban retail is often high cost, low quality. Some of the dirtiest stores/restaurants you see are in urban centers. They could get away with this because they had a captive group which was previously forced to be in that location with relatively few options.
  - thatsamonad 4y ago
    > Right, and in my experience urban retail is often high cost, low quality. Some of the dirtiest stores/restaurants you see are in urban centers. This may depend on your area but this hasn’t been my experience. I used to commute into downtown Portland for work and we had a great selection of options for lunch and happy hours, a plethora of food cart options which were great and affordable, and a number of decent bars where you could meet a friend for drinks afterwards. Now I work from home in the suburbs and, while I wouldn’t trade being remote for anything, the food options here mostly consist of bland fast food and chain restaurants. One of the things I miss the most is grabbing a decent lunch with a coworker and breaking up the monotony a bit.
  - dumpsterlid 4y ago
    [dead]
- wink 4y ago
  Not exactly sure how representative I should feel, but before, working in the city center, a lot of shops/restaurants got my foot traffic, and since I've been WFH it's mostly my local grocery store that gets all the money.
badpun 4y ago
> it's not, because the money that was otherwise spent (wasted) can now be deployed else where. Not neccessarily, people have less costs now, so some people can now just choose to work less - which would shrink the economy.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  Having less costs is not clear to me. Might be assuming commute with a car (very US-centric). Paying for all the coffee, snacks, lunch, proper office setup might not always be expensed by the employer and incur extra costs. But let's say, on average, it is true that now employees have less costs because of working remotely. Lower costs could have other consequences, other than people working less: general inflation; inflating rents/property prices; lower salaries for the same job; longer working hours (officially or not) I think what you mention is one possible effect, but there are many and it is not clear which one dominates.
- chii 4y ago
  > so some people can now just choose to work less that's good - they're able to recover some of their time. Just because this "own time" doesn't count towards official GDP, doesn't mean it isn't an improvement.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  Working less is the purpose of the economy.
  - teamonkey 4y ago
    This is a scorching-hot take. Would you care to elaborate?
    - badpun 4y ago
      That's easy. We work to get stuff. The better the economy, the more stuff we get for less work input. The ideal that we're slowly getting asymptotically closer to is a world where we get everything for no work at all.
HPsquared 4y ago
It's not really about the money itself but the amount of work done. If people get less work done, that's less value added. Less 'stuff' is produced but the same wage is paid - regardless of what happens with inflation. Whether that's good or bad is another question, as is the question of whether it even is happening or not.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  It seems false to assume that people work less when working remotely. That is far from obvious. I personally think it is false, and have not seen any justification of it. I understand arguments about people not eating business lunch near the office. Although it looks like home delivery and extra home office snacks, coffee, etc. would also cause spend, just in different areas as before. Additionally, in places where the state pays for healthcare, having less stressed workers, having less traffic accidents (I assume, since less commutes) might overall decrease the amount of money spent on health and save some money for the state too. It is not an easy thing to model IMO.
  - lynx23 4y ago
    I recently listened to a casual conversation between two women talking about their husbands WFH behaviour. The general undertone was: "Yes, he can now do this or that time-consuming hobby because he can claim WFH while actually driving from A to B". Just an anecdote, I know, but this is not the first time I overheard people cheering over the personal advantages of WFH.
    - sw104 4y ago
      Those gentlemen would probably also waste time in an office environment. You're just substituting wasting time at work with wasting time at work (from home). In the office I work in, walking past anybody's desk you see procrastination window and tabs quickly disappear. Either that, or people don't even bother hiding it (except from management). If people working from home didn't manage the same workload at home, it would hopefully be noticed in a competently run company. If those gents can fit in a few more hobbies in that time as well, power to them. If the company is run so incompetently that they don't notice you're not meeting goals/project deadlines, or providing low quality work, then that's the managements fault. Remote or in-person work isn't the main argument I think. There's more to it, which makes remote/in-person a good start for improving things. Working 9-5 (if you're lucky to work that) 5 days a week is insane, even for something you're passionate about (which most aren't). Our views on employment, notably:- - The amount of time it takes out of our days and lives (70%+ of your adult life) - The mundanity and pointlessness of (let's face it) most jobs - The additional time lost to commuting to an office to sit amongst a 50/50 cast of people you like/dislike. - The damage many jobs do to your health, both physical (back, eyes) and mentally from lack of stimulation or burnout. When you take a step back to analyse it all, to accept this is like a form of mental illness. If I took my favourite hobby and treated it the same way that a job is treated, after a couple of years it wouldn't even be a hobby anymore.
rubyfan 4y ago
The argument I hear mostly from the ‘remote work is bad’ crowd is that there is highly valuable intangible benefit to collaboration in real life than collaboration remotely. I can get behind the idea that remote work is not as effective especially when forming a new team or assimilating new team members. However the thing that the ‘remote work is bad’ crowd get wrong is the distribution of collaborative work and deep individual work. My experience is that in person collaborative synchronization is needed far less than even once a week. In person touch points with a white board and plenty of getting to know each other as humans time is super valuable… and in my opinion 2-4 times a year in needed, not 3-5 days per week.
- edude03 4y ago
  It heavily depends on what kind of work you do and your relation to others though - if most of your work is deep work done by yourself of course less time interesting with others makes sense but if you're a team lead for example...
  - rubyfan 4y ago
    I’d agree that someone in a lead role must have more collaborative time but I think IRL collaborative time needed is still significantly less than imagined by the ‘remote work is bad’ crowd. In my opinion IRL is more needed for negotiation, handling uncertainty, new team formation, business development, etc.
stuaxo 4y ago
GDP is such a damaging measure to use for anything, we need to stop.
snikeris 4y ago
This is the same fallacy that people make when they think that war is good for the economy. They somehow imagine that people are better off when we spend money bombing eachother.
benlivengood 4y ago
Not every expense or purchase has the same multiplicative effect on GDP. The more value that is added at each stage of production, the more GDP is created by consumer spending (cooking vs. eating out). GDP also captures none of the value created and consumed within the household (cooking, herb gardens, childcare by parents, etc.).

by chii 4y ago

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?!

friendzis 4y ago

Wellllll.... debatable. This argument of expense rerouting is a bit flawed. Suppose working from home saves one some money that they spend elsewhere. Working from the office they spend that money on fuel, indirectly spend on road maintenance, directly spend on vehicle maintenance where the shop in turn spends on parts and tools and so on. The money one spends circulates in the economy much longer and reaches more actors until it eventually falls back into original pocket. Working from home then they buy more items that have been manufactured in China, spend eating out where restaurants pay mostly wages and farmers, making the chain much shorter. There are different economic health considerations for different spending habits. While not exactly a loss it's not entirely equal too.

chii 4y ago
> The money one spends circulates in the economy much longer and reaches more actors until it eventually falls back into original pocket. that's a total assumption being made. Who knows how the money from an office worker's commute gets dispersed. It's likely too difficult to track exactly. And it's irrelevant to the person how this dispersion happens or why. All they need to care about is that they've eliminated a source of inefficiency, and thus have extra money for either investment or different consumption.
- teamonkey 4y ago
  > All they need to care about is that they've eliminated a source of inefficiency, and thus have extra money for either investment or different consumption. ...or prices rise to balance out the extra money.
saiya-jin 4y ago
I'd say roads that need less maintenance are a win long term, otherwise we go back to original argument about breaking all the windows. The rest... pure speculation from poster's own limited view, the world is more complex than 'I stay home so just order more stuff from China', definitely not true for me. I can chip in mine - ie during travel restrictions forced to buy in more expensive smaller local shops for whole family. One heck of help for local economy. Spending vacations much closer, meaning tons of money flow back to local economy. Having time to plan and do some home repairs with local workforce. And so on, random tiny examples have little significance in hyper complex situation that is called reality.
geysersam 4y ago
The purpose of the economy is to fulfill human desires. The only question we have to ask to understand which situation resulted in higher economic output is: which situation resulted in satisfying more human desires. It's clear that the pointless burning of fossil fuels didn't satisfy any human need. Then the question becomes: is the distribution of currency caused by the buying and burning of the fuels preferable to the alternative distribution if the currency had been spent elsewhere? If it is preferable, does that offset the waste of fuel for no purpose except redistributing currency? Any time I hear these kinds of reasonings the question comes to mind: if some distributions of currency are preferable to others, and we know what such distributions look like, why not let the government do the distribution directly?
- landemva 4y ago
  > the pointless burning of fossil fuels didn't satisfy any human need. That sentence would have a different meaning if the conclusitory (looking for real word here) word "pointless" was not there. Abundant reliable on-demand energy has enormously improved the human condition. I'm also glad the Dutch no longer dig up peat bogs for dirty fuel.
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    He or she didn't mean that burning of these fuels is pointless, it was a response to a poster suggesting to pointlessly burn these fuels in order to stimulate the economy.
  - geysersam 4y ago
    Driving to work, when you can/prefer to work from home, is pointless.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > It's clear that the pointless burning of fossil fuels didn't satisfy any human need. Yeah, but ... how much of it was pointless? Who decides if a use-case is pointless? You? Me? The government?
KronisLV 4y ago
> Working from the office they spend that money on fuel, indirectly spend on road maintenance, directly spend on vehicle maintenance where the shop in turn spends on parts and tools and so on. It's arguable whether all of this is needed everywhere in the world, to such a degree as is presently done. In the cities, the transportation needs of most folks can be covered by public transportation (depending on the country, admittedly) - it is more efficient, more green and also results in fewer traffic jams. Furthermore it scales up and down better: whether at 50% or 80% of capacity it will do its scheduled route, as opposed to all of those people otherwise needing cars and parking spaces for those and so on, which isn't always entirely feasible in densely populated cities. I guess it's just a different take on things, but if there's commute, we might as well make it more efficient, as opposed to spending 1-2 hours per day in traffic, which is essentially wasted time. Or not have the commute altogether. In more rural areas or many places in the US as opposed to EU it's a slightly different story.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I live in Cambridge, MA (a city for sure) and used to work in an office near the Waltham/Lexington line. Not some out in the rural woods places at all. I looked up and wrote up my “what if I tried to commute on public transit to make a 9AM meeting?” It’s ugly to the point where no one would voluntarily choose it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    It probably depends a lot on your circumstances, location and other factors! In my case, in Rīga (the capital of my country, Latvia), it was approximately: - leave apartment at 7:45 - walk to stop in around 5 minutes - wait 5 - 10 minutes for a trolley bus - ride in it for 20 - 30 minutes - walk from stop to work for 10 minutes I think it averaged out to around 40 minutes per trip, and 1 euro per day, given a monthly ticket: https://www.rigassatiksme.lv/en/tickets-and-e-ticket/types-and-prices-of-tickets-1/one-month-ticket/ https://www.rigassatiksme.lv/en/tickets-and-e-ticket/types-a... With a car, the same trip would be around 20-40 minutes. For comparison's sake, walking would mean upwards of 100 minutes for that trip. Regardless of whether in a car, or using public transportation, coming home in the evening often included waiting in traffic jams for close to an hour. In comparison, when coming home before 4-6 PM, the streets were relatively empty and there were no such traffic issues. Fewer cars, fewer issues of that sort. But what holds here true doesn't hold true elsewhere and vice versa. Once you go past a certain scale of the city in question, transfers and other complications become unavoidable. Just how much of an issue it is, depends on many other factors as well (car ownership cost, possibility of accidents, the disadvantage of not being able to easily transport things when not owning a car and so on, lack of freedom without a car, especially when you want to visit less popular rural areas). Neither beats rolling out of bed at 8:45, turning on the computer and brewing some coffee or tea, doing a morning shower and "being at work" 10 minutes later, though.
aflag 4y ago
In your example you're actually valuing the local community more than the global community. Ordering something from China probably contributes to more people's wages than commutting. There are the workers in China, land and sea transport, it's a huge infrastructure.
strken 4y ago
This is close to the broken window fallacy. We tend to forget the flow of money is an indirect proxy for work performed. If 20% of construction workers are freed up from fixing roads because of lower traffic, they don't just sit around crying, they find other work to do. Same with tech workers, same with everyone. That's a net good because the work they'll move to will by definition be worth paying someone to do. Wasting time fixing stuff that didn't need to be broken is intrinsically bad for the economy, but it's disruptive to suddenly have your now-pointless job taken away.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Traffic in general is also much more efficient with a small reduction in traffic. If we have 10% fewer people commuting during work hours, then traffic might move twice as efficiently. Of course, that uses less fuel, which is bad for the economy /s
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  Yeah, people fixate on the money flow so much that they forget that there is another flow, in the opposite direction, the flow of the goods and labour, which is what the economy is actually all about... money is just so much easier to track, and account for, and aggregate (it's all just dollars!) so that the second flow is heavily de-emphasized. Of course, when you look at just the flow of the goods and labour, the organization of a national economy in general seems highly, uh, round-about — the money serves as the main controlling/directing mechanism so without it in the picture things look pretty funky.
- natoliniak 4y ago
  > are freed up from fixing roads because of lower traffic, they don't just sit around crying, they find other work to do. yes, this holds up when there is something else to do, which is not always the case. I remember during the great recession, building contractors in Florida were praying for a hurricane to put them back to work. There was absolutely no other work to be found.
  - bluGill 4y ago

satoru42 4y ago

It is said that in many cities in China the governments actually did something similar. They broke parts of the roads repeatedly so that they could rebuild them later.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
That's how local corruption works in Eastern European cities. New mayor gets elected, so good streets get torn up and re-paved, so that his friend who runs a local construction company gets a lucrative government contract above market rates. Rinse and repeat every time we get a new mayor. It's a tried and tested way of legally shoveling public taxpayer money into well connected private pockets. I've seen similar corruption scandals in Western Europe as well, since the owners of construction companies and city leaders tend to not be strangers to one another, so I don't expect China to be any different here.
- dcow 4y ago
  SF too.
- 988747 4y ago
  Yes, and it's also funny that they will re-pave the street, and then few months later it turns out that some water pipes need to be replaced, so the freshly re-paved street is torn up again. Then, few months later, new fiber cables needs to be put in the ground, so guess what?. Re-paving becomes one of the best businesses in such town :)
  - bluGill 4y ago
    A few cities have someone who's job it is to coordinate between all the groups that have/want something under the streets so when the streets are torn up (which needs to happen every 20-60 years depending on how long the chosen pavement type lasts) everyone with something under the road goes out and does whatever they need. The city I'm in now puts everything in the area between the streets and the sidewalks. I don't have a sidewalk yet because there are some thing that will be going in next summer.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

>Otherwise, why not increase the GDP and economy, by periodically just breaking every window? The replacement is gonna cause huge growth! I believe by classical Keynesian theory that would indeed create economic growth?

dgb23 4y ago
Is there a model that incorporates utility outside of “people are willing to pay for it”?
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  I can't remember her name but there was an economist who IIRC was Australian and made a critique of classical Keynesian economics based on an accounting model that you need a debit column to be able to balance out loss of raw materials, environmental degradation etc. For example if an oil tanker sinks you should be able to calculate the loss of value the environmental damage represents as well as the additional value that replacing that ship represents. Can't remember much beyond that though.

f6v 4y ago

> Otherwise, why not increase the GDP and economy, by periodically just breaking every window? Starting wars to fuel arms industry worked just fine so far.

danuker 4y ago
Bonus points if you loot oil or some other resource.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
Sounds like Zorg’s speech: https://youtu.be/KXwqUMkXFiI?t=50 https://youtu.be/KXwqUMkXFiI?t=50
lotsofpulp 4y ago
The distinction is breaking someone else’s windows. Plus you need to win, not just start the war, and extract some resources from the someone else.
- pokepim 4y ago
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- ilostmyshoes 4y ago
  That's why wars that don't involve the US are a cash cow. Just sell them weapons! Ez money
chii 4y ago
The war in afghanistan (and to a degree, iraq 2nd invasion) was largely a waste, but these are not the same as the broken window fallacy.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  Waste? Depends who you ask. All of the counties around Washington DC are the richest in the US. Like, literally, search for "richest counties in the US" and notice how many DC 'burbs are in the top 10 (and top 20). But as mentioned that's the taxpayer getting fleeced, not the broken window fallacy.

red_trumpet 4y ago

Sure. Just like planned obsolescence causes more growth for those who produce appliances.

antihipocrat 4y ago

Exactly, the local suburban businesses are loving the extra foot traffic, at the expense of less foot traffic in downtown areas. I'm sure home delivery services are benefiting too. The suggestion that the general economy is suffering because of people WFH doesn't make much sense, spending is just reallocated. .. Now if people were saving any money previously spent on commuting and eating out, then that would reduce GDP expenditure. The high levels of inflation suggest this isn't the case.

bequanna 4y ago
Right, and in my experience urban retail is often high cost, low quality. Some of the dirtiest stores/restaurants you see are in urban centers. They could get away with this because they had a captive group which was previously forced to be in that location with relatively few options.
- thatsamonad 4y ago
  > Right, and in my experience urban retail is often high cost, low quality. Some of the dirtiest stores/restaurants you see are in urban centers. This may depend on your area but this hasn’t been my experience. I used to commute into downtown Portland for work and we had a great selection of options for lunch and happy hours, a plethora of food cart options which were great and affordable, and a number of decent bars where you could meet a friend for drinks afterwards. Now I work from home in the suburbs and, while I wouldn’t trade being remote for anything, the food options here mostly consist of bland fast food and chain restaurants. One of the things I miss the most is grabbing a decent lunch with a coworker and breaking up the monotony a bit.
- dumpsterlid 4y ago
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wink 4y ago
Not exactly sure how representative I should feel, but before, working in the city center, a lot of shops/restaurants got my foot traffic, and since I've been WFH it's mostly my local grocery store that gets all the money.

badpun 4y ago

> it's not, because the money that was otherwise spent (wasted) can now be deployed else where. Not neccessarily, people have less costs now, so some people can now just choose to work less - which would shrink the economy.

mejutoco 4y ago
Having less costs is not clear to me. Might be assuming commute with a car (very US-centric). Paying for all the coffee, snacks, lunch, proper office setup might not always be expensed by the employer and incur extra costs. But let's say, on average, it is true that now employees have less costs because of working remotely. Lower costs could have other consequences, other than people working less: general inflation; inflating rents/property prices; lower salaries for the same job; longer working hours (officially or not) I think what you mention is one possible effect, but there are many and it is not clear which one dominates.
chii 4y ago
> so some people can now just choose to work less that's good - they're able to recover some of their time. Just because this "own time" doesn't count towards official GDP, doesn't mean it isn't an improvement.
carlosjobim 4y ago
Working less is the purpose of the economy.
- teamonkey 4y ago
  This is a scorching-hot take. Would you care to elaborate?
  - badpun 4y ago
    That's easy. We work to get stuff. The better the economy, the more stuff we get for less work input. The ideal that we're slowly getting asymptotically closer to is a world where we get everything for no work at all.

HPsquared 4y ago

It's not really about the money itself but the amount of work done. If people get less work done, that's less value added. Less 'stuff' is produced but the same wage is paid - regardless of what happens with inflation. Whether that's good or bad is another question, as is the question of whether it even is happening or not.

mejutoco 4y ago
It seems false to assume that people work less when working remotely. That is far from obvious. I personally think it is false, and have not seen any justification of it. I understand arguments about people not eating business lunch near the office. Although it looks like home delivery and extra home office snacks, coffee, etc. would also cause spend, just in different areas as before. Additionally, in places where the state pays for healthcare, having less stressed workers, having less traffic accidents (I assume, since less commutes) might overall decrease the amount of money spent on health and save some money for the state too. It is not an easy thing to model IMO.
- lynx23 4y ago
  I recently listened to a casual conversation between two women talking about their husbands WFH behaviour. The general undertone was: "Yes, he can now do this or that time-consuming hobby because he can claim WFH while actually driving from A to B". Just an anecdote, I know, but this is not the first time I overheard people cheering over the personal advantages of WFH.
  - sw104 4y ago
    Those gentlemen would probably also waste time in an office environment. You're just substituting wasting time at work with wasting time at work (from home). In the office I work in, walking past anybody's desk you see procrastination window and tabs quickly disappear. Either that, or people don't even bother hiding it (except from management). If people working from home didn't manage the same workload at home, it would hopefully be noticed in a competently run company. If those gents can fit in a few more hobbies in that time as well, power to them. If the company is run so incompetently that they don't notice you're not meeting goals/project deadlines, or providing low quality work, then that's the managements fault. Remote or in-person work isn't the main argument I think. There's more to it, which makes remote/in-person a good start for improving things. Working 9-5 (if you're lucky to work that) 5 days a week is insane, even for something you're passionate about (which most aren't). Our views on employment, notably:- - The amount of time it takes out of our days and lives (70%+ of your adult life) - The mundanity and pointlessness of (let's face it) most jobs - The additional time lost to commuting to an office to sit amongst a 50/50 cast of people you like/dislike. - The damage many jobs do to your health, both physical (back, eyes) and mentally from lack of stimulation or burnout. When you take a step back to analyse it all, to accept this is like a form of mental illness. If I took my favourite hobby and treated it the same way that a job is treated, after a couple of years it wouldn't even be a hobby anymore.

rubyfan 4y ago

The argument I hear mostly from the ‘remote work is bad’ crowd is that there is highly valuable intangible benefit to collaboration in real life than collaboration remotely. I can get behind the idea that remote work is not as effective especially when forming a new team or assimilating new team members. However the thing that the ‘remote work is bad’ crowd get wrong is the distribution of collaborative work and deep individual work. My experience is that in person collaborative synchronization is needed far less than even once a week. In person touch points with a white board and plenty of getting to know each other as humans time is super valuable… and in my opinion 2-4 times a year in needed, not 3-5 days per week.

edude03 4y ago
It heavily depends on what kind of work you do and your relation to others though - if most of your work is deep work done by yourself of course less time interesting with others makes sense but if you're a team lead for example...
- rubyfan 4y ago
  I’d agree that someone in a lead role must have more collaborative time but I think IRL collaborative time needed is still significantly less than imagined by the ‘remote work is bad’ crowd. In my opinion IRL is more needed for negotiation, handling uncertainty, new team formation, business development, etc.

stuaxo 4y ago

GDP is such a damaging measure to use for anything, we need to stop.

snikeris 4y ago

This is the same fallacy that people make when they think that war is good for the economy. They somehow imagine that people are better off when we spend money bombing eachother.

benlivengood 4y ago

Not every expense or purchase has the same multiplicative effect on GDP. The more value that is added at each stage of production, the more GDP is created by consumer spending (cooking vs. eating out). GDP also captures none of the value created and consumed within the household (cooking, herb gardens, childcare by parents, etc.).