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The savings in time, money, and energy from remote work are investible. Resources will be reallocated from commercial office space, commuting, etc…to other more

The savings in time, money, and energy from remote work are investible. Resources will be reallocated from commercial office space, commuting, etc…to other more productive endeavors. We won’t see some of that play out for another 5-10 years (e.g. when mass divestment from commercial real estate happens).

Someone1234 3y ago
Indeed. If capitalism is meant to find the most efficient ways of doing things, WFH is a natural result. It is cheaper for the employers AND employees, and solves some current pains (e.g. urban house prices). A lot of the feet-dragging concerns can be summed up as: We ruined suburban areas because everyone had to commute centrally (e.g. closure of community spaces, shops, restaurants) and it will take a while to adjust. I do find it interesting that when individuals take risks and lose, there is near zero sympathy from society but when big commercial real-estate firms do so, suddenly we have to adjust our way of life around them. A lot of the smaller downtown businesses will be absolutely fine, they'll just move suburban where the workers now are.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  Capitalism is only the most efficient way of doing things on transaction boundaries in competitive markets. Anything that doesn't have a priced transaction between firms doesn't count, because there's no way to do an end-run around inefficient power structures and replace them. For example, nobody would think that the current agro-transportation-healthcare system where we make everybody fat with subsidized high-fructose corn syrup, ensure they don't get enough exercise, and then spend massive quantities of money fixing all the obesity-related illnesses is efficient. Nobody thinks the housing stranglehold where home prices get bid up, investors and people who bought them early buy more of them on leverage, and other people go homeless is efficient. Nobody thinks modern enterprise software is efficient. But these systems are held in place because there's essentially no lever to topple them. The economically rational response to a housing shortage is to build more housing, but if you pick up a hammer and do it yourself, you will get shut down so quickly by the local planning commission and building inspector. Corn subsidies and local zoning are held in place by the government; various people have tried to change them, but democratic government by design moves slowly. It would be a big (and expensive) lifestyle change to cook all your meals at home from fresh ingredients and walk everywhere - people that actually do it tend to be significantly healthier than those who don't, but it requires an economic & free time surplus. Building enterprise software with a good UI is an expensive and pointless waste of time, because the decision maker who decides whether to buy your software usually cares about price, how easy it is for IT to manage, and whether they can blame another company when things go wrong. Hence why we get dumpster fires like Concur. It's very likely that remote work will end up in a similar situation. The decision-maker for whether your job is remote isn't the employee; it's the employer, sometimes your manager and sometimes someone higher up in the org like a VP or HR. They optimize for their own incentives, which usually includes how easy it is to manage people. For the economically-rational result to happen, remote workers need to be able to start independent firms that are remote-first, so they can do an end-run around their managers. But for that to happen, remote work needs to be more efficient in the competitive, early stages of a new technology market, so that those remote-first companies win the market when it is still winnable. I'm not convinced that's possible; I think in-person work is still significantly more efficient in a highly-ambiguous environment where people don't have well-defined tasks to do, and that's exactly the environment where most companies get founded.
  - keenmaster 3y ago
    Labor markets aren’t totally efficient, but they’re also way more efficient, transparent, and capitalist than the healthcare system in the U.S. Enough, at least, for some of the “end run” around inefficient power structures you speak of, over a sufficiently long time frame. The most egregious counter examples are monopsony employers in small to medium sized towns with limited labor mobility - this is an edge case and not really germane to the subject.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  I don't have any sympathy for big commercial real estate interests. I do worry whether they hold the economy hostage. Do they have the ability to ruin that? Do they have the choice of ruining it or not, or have they gotten shit so tangled up that it would be ruined even if they didn't want it to be? And does anyone really believe that, given the choice between themselves being ruined but the economy surviving just fine, and them being ruined while the economy is ruined as well... that they'd choose the former?
  - keenmaster 3y ago
    There’s just no going back, and commercial real estate has a whooping coming for it. No one likes to hold a loser in their portfolio. Wealthy, well-connected people who are invested in commercial real estate have a perverse incentive to hype up their investment before they can dump it as soon as they can. Only then will they speak with clarity about how the industry is doomed. No amount of bailouts or subsidies will save it. There will still be a need for office space, but it will be more limited AND the offices that do remain will need to be upgraded to suit their new role as an awesome, high tech, inspiring place for occasional company meetups.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      > There’s just no going back, and commercial real estate has a whooping coming for it. And I don't care. They can rot. Really. But if they drag everyone else down with them... god help us all. Can they? Could they, for instance, destablize the stock market, or cause a cascade of bank runs? Is it a matter of choice on their part, or will they also be helpless to stop this supposing they even want to stop it? I too laugh at my enemies as I see them sink down into the quicksand, but first I check if they've grabbed onto my ankle. For anyone reading this, I'm not being rhetorical. I do not understand the economics of this well enough to know if they're going to blow up the world on the rest of us. Are they?
      - keenmaster 3y ago
        Even attempting to drag the economy down with them (not possible) would be a waste of their time, because that is ultimately futile and they know it. What they need to focus on is how to repurpose their real estate portfolios. For example, it’s not trivial to convert a skyscraper office tower to a mixed residential and retail condo building. Now multiply that by thousands of different buildings in different locales with different zoning laws and different calculus for convert vs. keep vs. demolish. A profit maximizing commercial real estate company would put most of its effort into that, after flailing and trying to maintain the previous status quo. If it doesn’t, it will go bankrupt earlier, and new ownership will push forward changes that are necessary in the new WFH reality.
- maxrecursion 3y ago
  Society doesn't care when big business fails, but those businesses have the money and power to make the government care, so they get help. The rest of us don't have the ability to make the government care about us, so we get screwed, and the government just shrugs.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    This is slightly incorrect. Big businesses have a lot of employees. Even if just a small percentage of those employees contact their representatives and get on the news, it's still a much larger and more focused message then individuals doing it about individual problems. A big business failing becomes a very loud squeaky wheel.
    - maxrecursion 3y ago
      A vast majority of people want the federal government to legalize weed. I think the average of polls is over 70% of the population. Even on polls of just conservatives it's over 50%. It's the most obvious no brainer thing to do, that a majority agrees on across the board, in a time where they agree on nothing else. Yet, it isn't happening because powerful alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical lobbies are against it. People can unite and call representatives all they want. Unless you can primary a representative in a local election they won't give a crap, and will gladly please their donors.

Someone1234 3y ago

Indeed. If capitalism is meant to find the most efficient ways of doing things, WFH is a natural result. It is cheaper for the employers AND employees, and solves some current pains (e.g. urban house prices). A lot of the feet-dragging concerns can be summed up as: We ruined suburban areas because everyone had to commute centrally (e.g. closure of community spaces, shops, restaurants) and it will take a while to adjust. I do find it interesting that when individuals take risks and lose, there is near zero sympathy from society but when big commercial real-estate firms do so, suddenly we have to adjust our way of life around them. A lot of the smaller downtown businesses will be absolutely fine, they'll just move suburban where the workers now are.

nostrademons 3y ago
Capitalism is only the most efficient way of doing things on transaction boundaries in competitive markets. Anything that doesn't have a priced transaction between firms doesn't count, because there's no way to do an end-run around inefficient power structures and replace them. For example, nobody would think that the current agro-transportation-healthcare system where we make everybody fat with subsidized high-fructose corn syrup, ensure they don't get enough exercise, and then spend massive quantities of money fixing all the obesity-related illnesses is efficient. Nobody thinks the housing stranglehold where home prices get bid up, investors and people who bought them early buy more of them on leverage, and other people go homeless is efficient. Nobody thinks modern enterprise software is efficient. But these systems are held in place because there's essentially no lever to topple them. The economically rational response to a housing shortage is to build more housing, but if you pick up a hammer and do it yourself, you will get shut down so quickly by the local planning commission and building inspector. Corn subsidies and local zoning are held in place by the government; various people have tried to change them, but democratic government by design moves slowly. It would be a big (and expensive) lifestyle change to cook all your meals at home from fresh ingredients and walk everywhere - people that actually do it tend to be significantly healthier than those who don't, but it requires an economic & free time surplus. Building enterprise software with a good UI is an expensive and pointless waste of time, because the decision maker who decides whether to buy your software usually cares about price, how easy it is for IT to manage, and whether they can blame another company when things go wrong. Hence why we get dumpster fires like Concur. It's very likely that remote work will end up in a similar situation. The decision-maker for whether your job is remote isn't the employee; it's the employer, sometimes your manager and sometimes someone higher up in the org like a VP or HR. They optimize for their own incentives, which usually includes how easy it is to manage people. For the economically-rational result to happen, remote workers need to be able to start independent firms that are remote-first, so they can do an end-run around their managers. But for that to happen, remote work needs to be more efficient in the competitive, early stages of a new technology market, so that those remote-first companies win the market when it is still winnable. I'm not convinced that's possible; I think in-person work is still significantly more efficient in a highly-ambiguous environment where people don't have well-defined tasks to do, and that's exactly the environment where most companies get founded.
- keenmaster 3y ago
  Labor markets aren’t totally efficient, but they’re also way more efficient, transparent, and capitalist than the healthcare system in the U.S. Enough, at least, for some of the “end run” around inefficient power structures you speak of, over a sufficiently long time frame. The most egregious counter examples are monopsony employers in small to medium sized towns with limited labor mobility - this is an edge case and not really germane to the subject.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
I don't have any sympathy for big commercial real estate interests. I do worry whether they hold the economy hostage. Do they have the ability to ruin that? Do they have the choice of ruining it or not, or have they gotten shit so tangled up that it would be ruined even if they didn't want it to be? And does anyone really believe that, given the choice between themselves being ruined but the economy surviving just fine, and them being ruined while the economy is ruined as well... that they'd choose the former?
- keenmaster 3y ago
  There’s just no going back, and commercial real estate has a whooping coming for it. No one likes to hold a loser in their portfolio. Wealthy, well-connected people who are invested in commercial real estate have a perverse incentive to hype up their investment before they can dump it as soon as they can. Only then will they speak with clarity about how the industry is doomed. No amount of bailouts or subsidies will save it. There will still be a need for office space, but it will be more limited AND the offices that do remain will need to be upgraded to suit their new role as an awesome, high tech, inspiring place for occasional company meetups.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    > There’s just no going back, and commercial real estate has a whooping coming for it. And I don't care. They can rot. Really. But if they drag everyone else down with them... god help us all. Can they? Could they, for instance, destablize the stock market, or cause a cascade of bank runs? Is it a matter of choice on their part, or will they also be helpless to stop this supposing they even want to stop it? I too laugh at my enemies as I see them sink down into the quicksand, but first I check if they've grabbed onto my ankle. For anyone reading this, I'm not being rhetorical. I do not understand the economics of this well enough to know if they're going to blow up the world on the rest of us. Are they?
    - keenmaster 3y ago
      Even attempting to drag the economy down with them (not possible) would be a waste of their time, because that is ultimately futile and they know it. What they need to focus on is how to repurpose their real estate portfolios. For example, it’s not trivial to convert a skyscraper office tower to a mixed residential and retail condo building. Now multiply that by thousands of different buildings in different locales with different zoning laws and different calculus for convert vs. keep vs. demolish. A profit maximizing commercial real estate company would put most of its effort into that, after flailing and trying to maintain the previous status quo. If it doesn’t, it will go bankrupt earlier, and new ownership will push forward changes that are necessary in the new WFH reality.
maxrecursion 3y ago
Society doesn't care when big business fails, but those businesses have the money and power to make the government care, so they get help. The rest of us don't have the ability to make the government care about us, so we get screwed, and the government just shrugs.
- pixl97 3y ago
  This is slightly incorrect. Big businesses have a lot of employees. Even if just a small percentage of those employees contact their representatives and get on the news, it's still a much larger and more focused message then individuals doing it about individual problems. A big business failing becomes a very loud squeaky wheel.
  - maxrecursion 3y ago
    A vast majority of people want the federal government to legalize weed. I think the average of polls is over 70% of the population. Even on polls of just conservatives it's over 50%. It's the most obvious no brainer thing to do, that a majority agrees on across the board, in a time where they agree on nothing else. Yet, it isn't happening because powerful alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical lobbies are against it. People can unite and call representatives all they want. Unless you can primary a representative in a local election they won't give a crap, and will gladly please their donors.