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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
There is always work to do. However there is often a mismatch of skills and unwillingness to learn the right skills. Sometimes there is an unwillingness to work for the price people are willing to pay.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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?
Because this presumes that the people in government will do what is preferable to the masses. My conception of government is that of a tool or weapon that various powers vie for control over. Why should I expect benevolence from such?
I don't agree. It's totally fair to disqualify some desires as less important than others. I think we all agree that a tyrants desire to be a tyrant isn't worth taking into consideration.
Someone selling wares don't usually desire selling wares. They desire income. Everybody wants income. Buying something we don't want/need is waste + redistribution of currency.
Redistribution of currency is a zero sum game unless we have some reason to particularly value the desires of the ones receiving. I don't see why we should particularly value the desires of landlords.
> I just don't think it's a good exercise to justify anything based on what people desire.
> 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.
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 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
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.
Random route service is difficult to efficiently serve with mass transit. Public transit doesn't have to be specifically mass transit, but the collective need of "I need to go from random place A to random place B and later return" is almost never going to line up with a mass transit solution.
Having high frequency mass transit service and decent transfers is better than the current situation, but it's really, really hard to compete with "sub-minute latency, personalized perfectly random route".
True, but I still firmly maintain that with good transfers you can get transit close enough to car levels of service so that it doesn't matter. Of course such service is a lot more expensive to run than current service - but it is still cheaper than the costs of owning a car.
Having your own vehicle is an enormous benefit in quality of life, why would anybody want to take that away? Why should we then eat nice food when we can survive on dull rations? There is so much more to the use of personal vehicles than just "transportation needs", but yes - some places build their infrastructure too much catering to cars.
The best way to beat traffic right now without having to wait for anybody else to change is to get a motorcycle - if the climate where you live permits.
But that vast majority of the time, in the US, anyway, the car is used just to get to work and back, not people exercising "freedom of movement".
It seems to me it would be preferable to have mass transit for regular commuting, combined with perhaps some sort of rental system for those times when you need greater flexibility, or need to haul lots of stuff, etc.
That is false. In areas with heavy traffic you can give more freedom of movement. In the typical city without congestion (including US suburbs!), while the car is better, it still doesn't have to be enough better to matter. That you think the car is always better is a reflection on the bad service you have had on public transit.
Public transport runs on a schedule and you have to adapt to that schedule. I live in a place where public transport is good, cheap and safe. You can never achieve public transport that could even compare to the freedom of movement a personal vehicle gives you, and that's not the purpose of public transport.
> That you think the car is always better
Make your arguments without inventing what other people say and you will make better arguments.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a backwards view. The economy and financial systems actively and VERY STRONGLY encourage us to spend as much time as possible making money.
This can be shown in absolute clarity: we are paid to work and not paid to not work.
You are forced to work, because you have expenses that you must pay: food, shelter, healthcare. If you do not work, you die.
You buy stuff to try to maximise your enjoyment in each unit of time, or to maximise your time: dishwashers to do the dishes, air fryers to cook food quicker. An apartment closer to work. A nanny, a cleaner, an accountant.
Some people use that extra time to... do more work. And because they do, the economy rewards them; inflation and expenses rise, and now everyone else needs to spend more time working too.
The exception to this is that it's possible to hit a threshold where your projected wealth is greater than your projected expenses for the rest of your life, and this allows you to work less. This threshold is unreachable for the vast majority of people in the world, and even the US, at least until the few last years of their lifes.
Couldn't have put it better myself. Of course with the caveat that "work" in this context means the labour we have to do to support our way of life, not the work we do for pleasure. These do and should intersect (as much as possible).
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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).
There's way more distractions at home and not everyone can handle it. It's just wild what people find appropriate to do during meetings that they're supposed to be paying attention to. In office yeah maybe someone would read emails but you wouldn't be fully immersed in doing something else like cooking a full meal.
It's hard to say how much my coworkers actually work. But I strongly suspect that it's much less than in office. Yeah people would pop over to Reddit or whatever. But that's far less engaging then going anywhere you want or doing anything you want. Feel like for most people if you're stuck in the office you might as well do some work.
> Feel like for most people if you're stuck in the office you might as well do some work.
The biggest distractions in the office are the coworkers. Random hallway conversations, loud talkers in neighboring cubes/offices, people walking up to your desk with a question that should've been an email/chat (but really they are too lazy to check the ticket system/wiki/doc store for the answer). The level of distraction varies with each type of job, but for many quiet focus time is important. Working from home provides that quiet focus time.
The whole point of the office is the random hallway conversations, the conversations you should be in on that you know about only because you overhear it from the cube next to you, people walking up to your desk to ask a question.
20 years ago my boss ordered me to work from home one day when I had an urgent task to get done. Most of the time though I was better off in the office - while I couldn't get as much high concentration work done, I was doing more useful work because I was in sync with the office.
The above assumes that a significant number of people are in the office everyday. A pure work from home environment works because people figure out how to use other means to communicate important things. However communication is much harder, and thus takes more effort. As a shy person I would be much better off in the office all the time as I don't put enough effort into communication.
But that quiet focus time is all for naught if people use it to pursue their time consuming hobby instead of working. Which is the point that kicked off this thread.
Wasting time at home, or finding excuses for doing so, is still easier to do, and it is harder to evaluate how much time you really spent working. And then there is the children effect. It seems magically OK if a WFH worker is not available for a few hours because "something with the child", an excuse they simply can not pull while in the office.
Also, I find it pretty aggressive that you call 9-5 5days a week "insane" and go to extra length to emphasis that you think people who do that have a mental illness. Its fine to have different viewpoint on a matter, but to call someone insane and unable to assertain their own situation just because you like a different way of spending your time, is pretty condescending.
For the record, I work 9-5 5days a week for 22 years now, and I still like it.
I hope you found a modus that makes you happy, so happy that you dont have to look down at other people and lecture them about what is best and what is insane.
People in the office constantly use the child effect. Leaving early, arriving late, popping out in the middle of the day because both parents work and the kid needs to go to the doctor/be picked up from school etc. I witness it all the time, and will probably also use the same opportunity when needed.
I'm not calling people insane who work those hours. I'm saying it's insane that this behaviour is considered normal.
You like your job, and that's good. And hopefully you will feel the same way in another 10/20/30/40 years.
Many, many people don't, yet because of the way our world works they have to keep plugging away at something they don't like, losing a phenomenal amount of their life, with a couple of gaps (holidays, weekends) thrown in as a treat. Not many of those gaps are really sufficient for pursuing anything of significant value. And the biggest gap, being at the end of life, when the bodys and minds best years are behind it.
People who work in under-stimulating jobs, and people who work with something they're interested in/passionate about or something they trained all of their life for, all feel this way at some point. Such a working schedule (which as I said is lucky, as many people work more than that) takes away so many other opportunities in life. It also has a severe effect on health. The lack of exercise and poor nutrition (you know when you finish work sometimes and you can't be bothered cooking, so you order takeout) we see in the Western world today has led to soaring obesity and overweight levels which has huge implications for society at large.
If you gave most people the choice to cut their working hours down, or to cease working entirely, I think they would take it (unless they needed money). I think most people would want to work to some degree (3/4 days a week), but if we started from scratch, nobody would choose to work 5 of 7 days a week, half of the daily waking hours (plus travel and the other bits, as well as the hours lost to rest and recuperate for the next day).
I can't see many people dropping work entirely, as it's a good way to have a sense of purpose. But it's hard to find a purpose in many jobs, increasingly so as everything gets automated. Remember, for every person that is lucky enough to work with something interesting, many more people are sat bored out of their mind waiting for the end of the day. There really isn't enough stimulating work to go round everybody.
You might be a good hard working person, but many people procrastinate simply because they don't enjoy their job. They'll procrastinate working from home, and they'll procrastinate at the office. The average office isn't a high surveillance environment. Many of your colleagues are probably browsing Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook, news websites etc. right now.
And to add to that, the physical and mental health implications and other points I mentioned, as well as points others have made about environmental damage from car commuting / congestion.
None of this should be normal. If we started from a point in time of people working less, as opposed to almost all the time (in the Industrial Revolution), it would be considered crazy if somebody suddenly came up with the idea to get everybody in an office 5 days a week. But it's considered normal and acceptable because it's a step down from the insane working practices of the times that came before (Industrial Revolution, 6 days a week, kids working in factories).
Even if less work gets done (citation needed, I think there are reasons why remote can increase productivity), you also don't have at least one major negative externality: pollution from commuting. There are also likely economic benefits: remote workers can move to areas that would otherwise suffer an economic drain from mass migration to large cities. Imagine how many other cities would benefit if most of us didn't have to live in the same six cities (in America).
Save money, too. Yeah there is a productivity hit, but in exchange you don't have to pay for offices, tables, chairs, monitors, HVAC, window washing, etc.
Plus I can offer a High COL rate, Mid COL rate, and Low COL rate, and recruit talent from all over. Yeah my boy doing node.js in Des Moines or Nashville might not be as good as the shit-hot MIT grade in NYC, but I can pay him 60% less, and he's 80% as good as that MIT kid.
Problem is you gotta re-tool and be equipped for that kind of management, and the Boomer / old Gen-X crowd running the show isn't.
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!