Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is remote work bad for the economy?

fractional.work

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 363 posts

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#201

Post by lelanthran »

geysersam wrote: post #117
friendzis wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#202

Post by college_physics »

It is actually not easy to decide this question. We can at least try to formulate a framework to think about it rationally. Remote work is not a new economic category but just a reconfiguration of what we call the knowledge economy (The total economy (TE) being the sum of the real economy (RE) and the knowledge economy (KE))

RE is 1) material stuff being extracted, processesed and moved around by people and 2) physical services provided by people. The size of RE is constrained on the supply side i) by material scarcity, environmental considerations etc, and on the demand side by ii) saturation of material consumption needs by the average human

In contrast, the knowledge economy is essentially information: collated, processed, transmitted etc by people's brains and digital artifacts [0]. Given the zero marginal cost of reproduction, the size of KE is constrained by i) intellectual property enforceability and ii) saturation of information consuption needs by the average human

Back to the original question, remote work is making KE more efficient and is entirely natural. In fact the work-from-office pattern is mostly a historical relic of how RE was organized. Remote work can be judged as positive or negative contribution towards TE in the context of a point-in-time analysis (i.e. here and now) or the overall balance of RE/KE in a sustainable economy. Moving millions of brains around in massive 2 ton exoskeletons that consume enormous resources in order for them to type into inane powerpoints and spreadsheets is not exactly "a good economy".

In any case, it could be that a sustainable economy (where KE is mostly WFH could be "smaller" in monetary units, especially if it has a major collaborative and open source component) but it is by no means clear it would "worse".

[0] KE obviously requires some RE, which is for example why the pandemic induced bloated hardware inventories

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#204

Post by Tade0 »

klodolph wrote: post #156
briga wrote: post #25

Bad for which economy? Countless programmers over the years have packed up their bags and moved away from their small towns to live in big expensive tech hubs. This has certainly been beneficial for the economy of large metros--they didn't pay to educate these workers and in many cases these workers (including myself) were raised and educated in completely different countries. So these metros have a huge pool of high…

The big metros are more efficient (dollar-wise) and have a lower environmental impact than small towns. Small towns, in the US, are already subsidized by big towns, at least economically.

> The big metros are more efficient (dollar-wise)

Depends for who. When a studio apartment in a big metro costs as much as a house in a small town, you need to shell out much more for a comparable level of comfort.

I know a couple who paid literally half per unit area just because they chose live a few kilometres from the city, not in it. They both work partially remotely, so ultimately the savings will be greater than the cost of transport, especially now that interest rates have gone up so much in this region of the world.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#205

Post by Joker_vD »

strken wrote: post #159
friendzis wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. Was…

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.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#206

Post by bregma »

doublerabbit wrote: post #172
atraac wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remote work is great for: - People who want more quality time with family I'd argue it's great for people. In general. I don't have family, I can spend more time with my dog, I can make morning or afternoon walk longer, I can get better at cooking cause I have more time, I have more time for hobbies, to deal with personal stuff, I can go to public institution or a doctor if I have to, without taking a day off since…

I'll argue it's not and that the better alternative would be to have your own chosen days off. I've just started a new job for an enterprise company. It is proving insanely hard getting in contact with folk. Myself having to introduce myself every-time. Trying to find someone to give me basic mentoring, even trying to understand the hierarchy. Not only does communications break down over email, messenger, people get…

> I've just started a new job for an enterprise company. It is proving insanely hard getting in contact with folk. Myself having to introduce myself every-time. Trying to find someone to give me basic mentoring, even trying to understand the hierarchy.

It's interesting. I started a new job in a cube farm a few years ago after a decade of WFH and that describes my exact experience with that transition. I suspect it's all about corporate and workplace culture, not physical working arrangements.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#207

Post by carlosjobim »

jrumbut wrote: post #187
mathgeek wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A job isn't just a financial transaction. It's part of a person's identity and a social outlet. It doesn’t have to be. For hundreds of years in a large part of the world, a job for most people was whatever the local lord told you to do. Before and during that, it was whatever you were born into. History does noy dictate the present or the future.

They don't have to be, but they are. And we ignore that our peril. I'm not arguing against working from home, I think working from home is great. I'm arguing that to make progress we need to consider things like "now that so many people are working from home, what do we do to help the people who have been affected negatively by this change?" People like baristas, gas station attendants, auto mechanics, people whose l…

>People like baristas

Thank God a massive amount of workers left the hospitality industry during the pandemic, never to return to that line of work. And they are much better off for it, because they would never have any good return for their work and effort in that industry. They got the shake up they needed to move sectors, and realized that any other sector will reward them better.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#208

Post by ant6n »

msrenee wrote: post #77
gladiatr72 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. Well, methinks your idea and mine as to what constitutes a small town are somewhat different. The small town (pop.~1500 at the time) canceled pre-calc my senior year; the district contacted, individually, the 3 of us that had enrolled. Something about being the only person who had enrolled, so they couldn't justify a regularly scheduled class. I guess they might have thought that nerds didn't talk to each other.…

>would kill such a a program in the crib. Did I miss something in the comment you're replying to or do I need to read the article? 1500 is a small town for sure. I'd consider 12k to be a small town as well. 1500 is way bigger than the town my dad is from. There's about 100 people there now. Your small town is huge compared to that. He sometimes talks about being on the highschool football team at the school shared by…

1500 sounds like a village.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#209

Post by matwood »

newswasboring wrote: post #92
raldi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

School quality is one of the most important criteria people use when deciding where to buy a house.

Maybe within a city, but people are not moving to another town/city to get access to a good school. The primary factor for people moving somewhere is still jobs. If that wasn't the case why will these people move out of the place which made them this capable?

In the US schools are hyperlocal. So a job might bring someone to the general area, but the school system makes them buy in given locality in the area.

Re: Is remote work bad for the economy?

#210

Post by INGSOCIALITE »

The issue is that middle managers are being proven as ineffective and useless. The guy who wanders around the office synergizing everyone now has a spotlight on them, because its been proven over the last few years that people can be efficient and productive without Lundberg stopping by and asking for a progress report. The only part of the industry that has now been proven unnecessary are the ones clawing and fighting to get everyone back into the office.
Post reply on HN