> There are already examples of how gains are captured by the few and not the many. The New York Times - "Feel Bad About Everything, Always" Remote work is amazing, net on net it vastly improves lives, reduces commute time / traffic / car pollution, reverses the decades long trend of economic activity centralizing in a few boom cities, and I believe will reduce inequality longterm as workers will be able to get good,…
Try telling that to the office cleaner.
The Winners of Remote Work
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Re: The Winners of Remote Work
#22Re: The Winners of Remote Work
#23Human society has had a lot of versions of "how things work" in regards to obtaining and distributing resources. As some of the work force transitions from physical, in-person employment (trading labor for pay) to increasingly virtual employment, some things are de-coupled, like high "cost of living" areas being less strongly related to "high paying employment centers."
But for employees, it's just an amplification of the previous trend towards inequality in employment that was already happening.
Another way to think about this is specialization. A few people can specialize in certain remote tasks - obviously the examples of education (for fitness, academia, etc.) - because creation is not tied to consumption, especially for digital goods and services.
The distribution of employment has always shifted over time as productivity has increased for certain types of work, and then new methods of employment has popped up as technology and entertainment and culture evolved. In a free country a couple hundred years ago, many people might work their own farm and largely sustain themselves off that work. But today a tiny slice of the population manages massive scale farms. What does everyone else do? Industries have evolved from nothing - large scale housing, transportation, etc.
To try to wrap this up, this article isn't going far enough. The goal might be to predict the future. If everything we know we need and want can be produced by a shrinking work force, what will the rest of the population do to earn their keep? Will some kind of redistribution scheme of resources arise, like socialism or universal basic income?
Re: The Winners of Remote Work
#24Re: The Winners of Remote Work
#25> There are already examples of how gains are captured by the few and not the many. The New York Times - "Feel Bad About Everything, Always" Remote work is amazing, net on net it vastly improves lives, reduces commute time / traffic / car pollution, reverses the decades long trend of economic activity centralizing in a few boom cities, and I believe will reduce inequality longterm as workers will be able to get good,…
But but but.. what about the gas stations, shiny offices and all those things we have built with an explicit purpose to take advantage of you physically moving in?
Re: The Winners of Remote Work
#26This is partly why I keep thinking I should have become an electrician or a carpenter: the only real competition is local, there is always demand in cities. I knew a very wealthy electrician who started his own business and it seems to be a common path. Unlike programming where the common path is work for someone else and burn out.
Re: The Winners of Remote Work
#27This is partly why I keep thinking I should have become an electrician or a carpenter: the only real competition is local, there is always demand in cities. I knew a very wealthy electrician who started his own business and it seems to be a common path. Unlike programming where the common path is work for someone else and burn out.
I believe this has something to do with the statistical distribution of compensation - normal-like for electricians, dentists, and more power-like for coders and people from highly creative or sports fields.
Whereas a Pro Bowl quarterback or A-list movie star is worth maybe $100s of millions to a team or studio relative to players/actors who are "only" very competent. Coders are somewhere in between.
Re: The Winners of Remote Work
#28This article really isn't about remote work writ large, it's about websites/organizations that provide platforms for individuals to sell services to consumers. The fact that you can make popular workout videos from your home is orthogonal to the behavior of consumers on the Peloton platform. It's an interesting and important observation that good communicators win disproportionately as telecommunications get better -…
It's got to be clickbait. If there are winners, then how many workers are losing by working remotely? It seems obvious that the vast majority of people win big by not being forced to commute into a full day at an office where they would rather not be.
Re: The Winners of Remote Work
#29If there's a large increase in the amount of remote work, I wonder how much software architectures will change in order to accommodate the lessened interaction?
Re: The Winners of Remote Work
#30The Winners of Remote Work don't live in the United States. The pandemic has accelerated globalization.