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Is remote work bad for the economy?

fractional.work

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Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#111

Post by randomdata »

pillefitz wrote: post #100
randomdata wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mainly because meals out cost 3-10x as much as eating at home If you are at a place that sells an experience that happens to come with food that may be true, but one in the business of selling food is going to beat your home kitchen every time. The big difference is that the home kitchen costs are largely front-loaded. This does mean you generally need less free cashflow when you are hungry, which is an appealing a…

Home kitchens can be had for cheap, so I don't really get why paying 15 USD vs. 3 USD 2-3 times a day should be a better deal.

$15 USD for a meal at a business in the business of selling food? Your local cost of living must be insane! I think you'd be hard-pressed to spend much more than $5 USD for a meal at a food business around here.

In these parts, I can go to a restaurant in the business of selling an experience, with nice ambiance, a server who will wait on you hand and foot like you are some kind of king, etc. and can have nearly anything on the menu for $15 USD. At that price you're paying to get to act like a king for an hour or two, not for food.

If your local cost of living is that high, what's the housing market like? High CoL and high rent often to go hand in hand. If you sold your appliances and offered your kitchen space as a bedroom rental, what kind of income are we talking here?

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#112

Post by jrumbut »

michaelteter wrote: post #74

This applies everywhere: just because a job or business has existed does not mean it has a right to exist forever. This is not being harsh on people; it's just a reality. The blacksmiths in the horse and buggy days saw demand for their services fall when time and technologies changed. The coal miners began losing their jobs when we realized that coal as fuel was more harmful than it was beneficial. History is full of…

This is probably true to an extent, but I do think this analysis fails to capture the very real upheaval that happened in the life of a hypothetical blacksmith or wainwright that ended up at a car factory.

A job isn't just a financial transaction. It's part of a person's identity and a social outlet. There is a career progression that they had planned on, they made choices about where to live and all kinds of other things based on this career they thought they were going to have.

So even if they are making the same money, they might be very unhappy and this unhappiness may end up being expressed in antisocial ways that end up costing society money. In the transition from wagons to cars, the increased productivity of cars papered over all these losses. Eventually everyone had to admit it was for the best.

I'm not sure remote work will do the same thing. We'll see, but in any planning it's important that we look at externalities and factors that are difficult to quantify because otherwise we risk running roughshod over what really matters to people.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#113

Post by hknmtt »

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

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#114

Post by midoridensha »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #33
Sebguer wrote: post #9

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

Maybe those restaurants can simply move to residential areas. People still eat lunch. Regardless we don’t manufacture buggy whips to keep the buggy whip businesses afloat either.

>Maybe those restaurants can simply move to residential areas.

In the US and other places with Euclidean zoning, that's illegal. Restaurants have to be kept far apart from residences. It's better in such places for all the restaurants to go out of business, and people can just stay at home and cook microwave meals.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#115

Post by saiya-jin »

perceptronas wrote: post #106
smackeyacky wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on who you are shaming. The whole "ZOMG stop eating avocado toast and buy a house already" thing directed at young people is disgusting.

I think there is some truth to that. My parents went to eat out like once a year for quite a while. They saved as much as they could and succeeded at that.

Generation of our parents lived much more frugal lives from current perspective. Less traveling, adventures, exciting matters and more grind of work & kids care. I utterly respect them for that, but its not a life I would call ideal and strive to have.

Financials now for buying real estate became ridiculous for many places globally. It can be counted from ie how many salaries of similar jobs you need to buy a house in same place before and now. Not exact, but this shows how things skyrocketed due to cheap debt and speculation.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#116

Post by midoridensha »

tempestn wrote: post #38
sshine wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> middle managers fearing for their future and building owners afraid of losing out on rent money You forget the business owners who fear they'll lose direction of the work. It's not so much whether you put in the hours at home, but whether your work is directed towards a common goal. Remote work requires a higher degree of communication, and some business owners don't possess the skill or interest to maintain out-of…

I'm glad you included that last line. I agree with you that managing a remote team or running a remote business has challenges that an in-person one doesn't. (I've been running AutoTempest with an all-remote team for almost 14 years now.) Managers who rely on the 'butts in seats' heuristic will struggle a lot with managing remote employees. However, the opportunities are also massive. For one thing, the owners/manage…

>You can also hire from anywhere, which is huge in terms of finding talented people.

This is a negative for many businesses: their employees can get poached by competitors far away that offer better pay or benefits or working conditions.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#117

Post by geysersam »

friendzis wrote: post #97
chii wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

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 act…

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?

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#118

Post by ok_dad »

jrumbut wrote: post #112
michaelteter wrote: post #74

This applies everywhere: just because a job or business has existed does not mean it has a right to exist forever. This is not being harsh on people; it's just a reality. The blacksmiths in the horse and buggy days saw demand for their services fall when time and technologies changed. The coal miners began losing their jobs when we realized that coal as fuel was more harmful than it was beneficial. History is full of…

This is probably true to an extent, but I do think this analysis fails to capture the very real upheaval that happened in the life of a hypothetical blacksmith or wainwright that ended up at a car factory. A job isn't just a financial transaction. It's part of a person's identity and a social outlet. There is a career progression that they had planned on, they made choices about where to live and all kinds of other t…

What really matters to me is spending time with my family. Fuck executives and management that would force me to go to an office to do the exact same things I do at home now. Upheaval be damned.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#120

Post by KronisLV »

friendzis wrote: post #97
chii wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

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 act…

> 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.

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