Is remote work bad for the economy?

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&#x27;s just a reality.<p>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 valid jobs which later became unneeded or &quot;invalid&quot;.<p>Remote work can increase efficiency by eliminating artificial inefficiencies. Not having to drive to work reduces fuel consumption and lengthens the time between car repairs or replacement. This obviously is a financial loss for the economy because it shifts the balance back from money to time. The same goes for office space: less office space need reduces demand which reduces rents (and amount of space leased). However, that cost can be offset some as home working can increase demand for larger homes. Even so, a slightly larger home is still probably less cost than a commercial space which goes unused for 12+ hours per day.<p>It smells like much of this anti-remote-work conversation (not TFA, but the topic in general) is because the people accustomed to being in charge have a fear of losing control. The manager who rules by force or threat has much to fear of subordinates who are out of sight. However, the manager (leader) who works together with a group of people toward a common goal has little to fear. Some companies operate very successfully even when management cannot observe the workers. The alarms and complaints we hear are almost certainly from the bad group. Eventually that group will be like the dinosaurs.

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&#x27;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-skilled young working age adults bringing billions into the economy just in taxes. But what about the towns these people are from? They essentially get nothing out of the bargain, unless one day one of those workers decides to plop down a retirement home there, which by then their economic contributions have already peaked. The way I see it remote work reverses this trend and offers a far more equitable way of doing things. It takes the strain off the big metros and allows wealth to be spread more equally across the country.

The economy is for the people, the people aren&#x27;t for the economy, ideally. If you run a business that relies on particular behaviour, like people commuting the office, then I&#x27;m sorry things are hard but we do not owe you our business.<p>Something that seems similar that comes up often around here is when there are proposals to improve the road system to move traffic out of towns. Currently the main highways run through a bunch of small towns, so they get lots of non-local traffic. Frustrating for drivers due to the extra time, and its a safety issue. But whenever changes are happening businesses in those towns are up in arms omg we&#x27;ll lose our passing trade, don&#x27;t build the road. They&#x27;ve capitalised on some inconvenience, we don&#x27;t owe them to keep it around.

There was another article in the Sydney Morning Herald [0] behooving everybody to get back to the CBD because...mental health...cafes will close...<p>What if you work in a tech park that has few or no amenities, or your work office is in a cruddy bit of town you really dislike? When the house is tidy and the washing done in the 10 minutes an hour I can wander away from the work laptop, I feel a <i>lot</i> happier than worrying about trying to get it done on the weekends or the evenings.<p>I&#x27;d rather quit and find some other job. I&#x27;m tired of articles telling me that something I hated to do was somehow a sacrifice I have to make for made up reasons that really don&#x27;t add up to a hill of beans.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smh.com.au&#x2F;national&#x2F;nsw&#x2F;sydney-it-s-time-to-get-back-to-the-office-20230127-p5cfvq.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smh.com.au&#x2F;national&#x2F;nsw&#x2F;sydney-it-s-time-to-get-...</a>

Remote work is great for: - People who want more quality time with family - Environment. Less pollution. - Businesses who can save money by not needing an office.<p>If “the economy” doesn’t like it, it needs to adapt.<p>The economy should support people, not the other way around.

I would suggest that the current economic crises are a massive ocean swell on which WFH is a tiny ripple.<p>Are some city cafes likely to go under because people aren&#x27;t coming into the office? Probably.<p>Are people being forced to eliminate every single discretionary expense so they can pay their bills and eat in the same month? Yes, absolutely. Are some households only surviving because WFH is letting them avoid transport expenses, and reduce food costs? Also yes.<p>Our mortgage + insurances + rates + mobile&#x2F;internet + utilities + basic food = almost what we&#x27;re bringing in this month. And the last payment on the bathroom reno we started five interest rate rises ago will probably be due this month too.<p>So, define &quot;economy&quot;. This bit of the economy would probably run out of money to put fuel in the car if I couldn&#x27;t work from home.

The author talks about three data points:<p>1. Is there less restaurant business?<p>2. Does it hurt city real estate?<p>3. People spend more time with family.<p>I&#x27;m much more interested in other points about how remote work has an impact on the economy.<p>* How do cities and states attract well paid remote workers? Who are the winners and losers of this transition.<p>* How does remote work impact wages? A programmer in Nashville was probably paid less than one in San Fransisco. How is remote work impacting that discrepancy?<p>* How is remote work impacting residential real estate? Are home owner rates climbing as people flee the expensive cities? How is it impacting which homes are more desirable?<p>* How is remote work impacting energy usage?<p>* How is remote work impacting in office jobs for the same type of work? Are in office jobs paying a premium for labor over remote? Do employers see the increased investment as paying off? Do investors?

Heard the &quot;but what will restaurants in the city centre do?&quot; argument while discussing with a local politician. I argued that this way maybe restaurants, grocery shops and other activities can flourish back in small towns that are now relegated as dormitory.<p>Three months later, the same administration sent out a package against the depopulation of small towns (we live in the Alps so that&#x27;s a real issue)<p>This is the short-sightedness of our administrators. Instead of giving the people the freedom to work where they want, they spend public resources to marginally attempt to reduce a problem they refuse to acknowledge in the fist place, for the gain of temporary consensus.<p>Lay optic fiber everywhere and let people work from where they prefer. We would still have dense cities and alive satellite towns.

It seems that the same people who are trying to politicize what economy would benefit from restricting remote work are the same population benefitting from keeping the federal minimum wage at $7.25 for the last 15 years.<p>It’s sure to only benefit a select few. We should let the free market decide what we collectively value in cities. With remote work in particular, it feels like there is more value placed on the standards of humanity than being close to a “hub” to make larger sums of money. For me, I love great weather and not spending a tenth of my day in traffic.

It&#x27;s bad for hcol cities that rely on the tax revenue to fund their public services and bad for the politicians that draw power from such. Also bad for corporations that won large tax abatements for fancy, new HQs in exchange for bringing in hundreds or thousands of high paying jobs to an area.<p>But good for the workers and good for the US economy as a whole as it redistributes higher paying jobs to increasingly rural areas as internet connectivity allows.

It’s been great for my economy. I used to schlep an hour each way on MUNI, 5 days a week, to an open-plan office where the sound of ping-pong games in the background drives me nuts with distraction. Now I’m taking a year to do a work-remote tour of the food capitals of Latin America. I’m currently in La Paz, Bolivia, where a 10-course tasting menu at one of the region’s 50 best restaurants[1] runs $70 USD, <i>with</i> wine pairings.<p>Anyone who thinks they can put the toothpaste back in this tube is kidding themselves.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theworlds50best.com&#x2F;discovery&#x2F;Establishments&#x2F;Bolivia&#x2F;La-Paz&#x2F;Gustu.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theworlds50best.com&#x2F;discovery&#x2F;Establishments&#x2F;Bol...</a>

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.

Remote work is bad for the &#x27;people are there to serve business&#x27; economy.<p>It is good for the &#x27;business is there to serve the people&#x27; economy.<p>The latter distributes people across the country rather than concentrating them in megacities and forces business to go where the people want to live. It favours social capital over financial capital.<p>We need to decide politically which of these economies we want.

i’ve been working remotely for a decade and i’ve never been happier. i also suspect that the population being happier is no doubt bad for corporate profits.

I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s bad for the economy. It&#x27;s certainly made my world smaller in a way probably not experienced by my parents for example.<p>On a weekly basis, ranked by frequency I see - my wife, my dog, my mailman, and the attendant at the gas station. Past that I can&#x27;t quote a regular person I interact with on weekly basis.

The thing about remote work is like Entropy (or some religions): you can&#x27;t go back , it&#x27;s a self-reinforcing thing. So it really isnt very useful to ponder whether it&#x27;s &#x27;bad for the economy&#x27;, but what economy will result when people adapt to an increasingly popular reality.

Great writeup. It seems like a strange variant of the broken windows fallacy to imply that workers need to be shuttling to and from work and spending money on brick and mortar restaurants and stores. Of course remote workers will have extra spending money that&#x27;s still going into the economy, whether that&#x27;s delivery services mentioned in the article, local restaurants in their personal time, etc.

I&#x27;m not reading another article about remote work because they all make my mind bleed but when anyone is reading remember this:<p>Remote work as existed for a long long time.<p>The pandemic made more people and companies go remote but it&#x27;s been there like forever.<p>In context of ycombinator almost all start-up companies that have ever existed will have extensively used remote workers are the start phase of their companies.

To summarize the article: Some people benefit, and some don&#x27;t.<p>To editorialize: This is how all economic exchange works, and any talk of &quot;the economy&quot; being &quot;good&quot; or &quot;bad&quot; is mystification. The powers that be are cranking up rates hoping but not really expecting to avoid a recession. In their view, a recession (i.e. more pain for working people) is acceptable collateral damage when weighed against the risk of continued labor inflation (i.e. more pain for asset owners).<p>Not everything is some technocratic spreadsheet puzzle to be balanced. There are winners and losers.

The author&#x27;s answer to the title question seems to be: No.<p>Which I agree with.<p>If the answer was &quot;Yes&quot; however, I would question if that&#x27;s even a bad thing to begin with. If our economy is reliant on people driving to an office and spending their money at a restaurant, then our economy is pretty terrible to begin with.

There&#x27;s an economic flipside to the &#x27;death of the city&#x27; aspects too though, which is that the ability for companies to hire from outside of big cities, and the ability of people to take jobs with companies based anywhere, opens up a ton of economic opportunity. There&#x27;s clearly an opportunity for a much more efficient system if where you live and where you work don&#x27;t need to be geographically coupled.

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))<p>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<p>In contrast, the knowledge economy is essentially information: collated, processed, transmitted etc by people&#x27;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<p>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&#x2F;KE in a <i>sustainable</i> 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 &quot;a good economy&quot;.<p>In any case, it could be that a sustainable economy (where KE is mostly WFH could be &quot;smaller&quot; in monetary units, especially if it has a major collaborative and open source component) but it is by no means clear it would &quot;worse&quot;.<p>[0] KE obviously requires some RE, which is for example why the pandemic induced bloated hardware inventories

Some value is latent in listed property trusts. If that value ceases to exist, at scale, if we have a massive revaluation of commercial property of all kinds, depending how that happens then yes, it would be enormously destructive of wealth at large. It&#x27;s part of billions of workers future pension income, as well as an asset class backing other forms of investment which in turn makes economic value.<p>That aside, there are so many upsides. Not the least of which are the reduction in time and energy waste, and pollution. Or less reductive sexist models of childcare and home duties. Work life balance, employment and unemployment and underemployment and mental&#x2F;physical health could all improve at scale. Sure, some people suffer. Were talking aggregate here. Many sad special cases exist.<p>Work needs redefining but radical redefinition without planning is not sensible unless revolution is a goal.<p>Rate of profit, investment in people is complicated.

the economy should adapt to the needs of the time and society<p>why is always the plebs that must adapt to every inconvenience and illogical irrationality...just because that&#x27;s is how it always was :&#x2F;

No, but it is bad for some rent seeking players with loud voices.

I blame open offices. I used to love coming into work and having my own space to work. Then open offices came around and I nope&#x27;d the heck out of there. I no longer had my own desk. The pleasant quiet cubical became a loud PITA. There was no longer even the little privacy I had when I first started working.<p>I miss being able to hang out with work friends at the office, but not enough to go back to the open floor plan horror show. Not to mention living downtown near 3 freeways and having to dodge traffic just to get some groceries...

No, the opposite. Look how much tech stocks boomed after Covid. WFM unlocked considerable productivity that was wasted at the office. People were wasting money and time on commuting, which resulted in fatigue and less productivity.

Concisely put: It&#x27;s redistribution of wealth.<p>Rather than public transport and commuting, folks will spend elsewhere.<p>Rather than office real estate, companies will spend &#x2F; invest elsewhere.<p>Some will benefit, others will have to adapt to survive.

Maybe dollars spent at local restaurants isn&#x27;t the metric we should be optimizing for?

Broken window fallacy + slippery slope fallacy<p>I wonder why we never see slippery slope arguments about unaffordable housing.<p>Even if remote work is bad for the economy - its good to have the option and to not enforce it on people who don&#x27;t need to do it.<p>It relieves pressure on roads. It gives people time back they lost in commutes. If people insulate their homes properly - it will lower carbon emissions. It relieves rent pressures in the city.

Seems like a significant amount of commenters are arguing against the title without realising the content agrees with them :)

The way in which remote work could be bad for the economy would be reduced creativity (or “work output” in business speak) which would make us produce less, invent less, generally make less awesome happen.<p>That’s the root of what the economy is … how much useful stuff gets done.<p>Whether remote work has that effect remains to be seen. Certainly in the short term there’s a lot of evidence it has. That would make it very unlike other examples of change we have, such as switching from horse and buggy to cars.<p>All the other considerations are merely moving money from one area to another. This is irrelevant to a “good economy.”<p>In the end, the total wealth available to all participants in the economy is a function of the resources available and the meaningful work done.<p>That’s it.

Do cars reduce the need for horses? Yes. Does remote work reduce the need for restaurants? Yes. Does this mean there will be fewer jobs for carriage drivers &#x2F; waiters? Yes. Is this good for the economy &#x2F; the planet &#x2F; humanity? YMMV.

We need to get rid of &quot;what&#x27;s good for the economy&quot; (aka corporate revenue&#x2F;profits and high employment) as the sole yardstick for making policy decisions. It is very, very clearly not working.<p>The economy should exist for (benefit) as many as possible. This doesn&#x27;t mean tearing down the entirety of the existing system, but some changes are clearly needed.<p>Even if remote work does end up being less than optimal for the economy, the benefits to many&#x2F;most remote employees in work&#x2F;life balance, health, and family life is easily worth it.

The only way it&#x27;d be worse for the economy would be if remote working somehow caused people to hoard money in cash in their house. So long as people are still spending, or saving&#x2F;investing their money in institutions that reinvest, then all that happens is a shift in where people&#x27;s economic work is done. Restaurants in cities might suffer from losing the lunch time crowd, but people will spend that money somewhere else in the economy instead.<p>Remote work is <i>obviously</i> not bad for the economy because the economy is basically a closed system.

Solutions to nonexistent problems don&#x27;t generate any GDP. Not fighting off aliens is bad for the economy.<p>IMO way too much attention goes to beating around the bush when we need to take a step back and ask some more abstract questions about exactly what our goal as a society should be. There are some hard questions out there that are not getting enough attention.

Is banning child labor bad for manufacturing?

Who cares about economy? It is to serve us, not the other way around. Economy is just the motion of money and debts.

How about we start caring less about what is good for the economy and start caring more about what is good for the workers. I&#x27;m tired of society&#x27;s sole focus being on maximum efficiency and profit extraction.

It&#x27;s been a disaster for the burgling community, I can tell you that.

Who gives a shit. Saving your money is bad for the economy.<p>The real question is, is it good for the population? Or individuals? The answer is clearly yes.

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...

I think its great unless this means almost all (a part is good) the jobs are outsourced to abroad.

when a headline is phrased like this the answer is always: No

&gt; Is remote work bad for the economy?<p>Nope.

Nope.

I don&#x27;t care what it does to the economy. The only people against remote work are middle managers fearing for their future and building owners afraid of losing out on rent money. I have been working remotely for 5 years and I will retire and live in a cardboard box before I commute and work in an office again.

&#x27;We are suffering from the intolerable competition of a foreign rival, placed, it would seem, in a condition so far superior to ours for the production of light that he absolutely inundates our national market with it at a price fabulously reduced. The moment he shows himself, our trade leaves us — all consumers apply to him; and a branch of native industry, having countless ramifications, is all at once rendered completely stagnant. This rival, who is none other than the sun, wages war mercilessly against us, and we suspect that he has been raised up by perfidious Albion (good policy nowadays), inasmuch as he displays toward that haughty island a circumspection with which he dispenses in our case.<p>What we pray for is that it may please you to pass a law ordering the shutting up of all windows, skylights, dormer-windows, outside and inside shutters, curtains, blinds, bull&#x27;s-eyes; in a word, of all openings, holes, chinks, clefts, and fissures, by or through which the light of the sun has been in use to enter houses, to the prejudice of the meritorious manufactures with which we flatter ourselves that we have accommodated our country — a country that, in gratitude, ought not to abandon us now to a strife so unequal.&#x27;

Such a straw man article. He ignores the main argument against WFH which is that people are walking their dogs or doing yoga instead of actually working. I take long naps. I know I&#x27;m less productive but I can&#x27;t help it.