What recourse do we as workers have? We can soft boycott and quit/stop applying to onsite positions, but there are hundreds of thousands willing and able to take these positions.
But don’t you know? We are exceptional. Unions are for the plebs. /s
But of course the reality is tech workers are the plebs too, far closer to the median than to capital elite. Treasured illusions die hard.
Unions enjoy 71% public support and organizing is federally protected activity. The minority isn’t stopping anyone, they can be safely ignored.
(My note: I recognize I will never be obscenely wealthy; it does not appeal to me. The wealthy just try to buy back their soul with charity after leaving a wake of destruction on their journey. I would rather work for autonomy and quality of life for my peers, which if done properly, will lead to a better life for myself)
The perks of FAANG are there, IMO, to pay the employees with a feeling of high-class status. Meanwhile, from an economic-class perspective, engineering is essentially blue-collar - it’s mostly about things and not (directly) about people. It’s a weird dichotomy.
From my recent experience, unions can't help you keep remote work they way they work here today. I work(ed) at a unionized German company and when management call everyone back to the office after the Covid vaccination was done, it wasn't protested by the unions and everyone sowed up at the office without protest, and remote work was kept as "in case of emergency" perk you can get every now and then if you get approval from your manager beforehand.
Unions here only serve the purpose to intervene in case of major force like discrimination, health and safety, layoffs, working hours, overtime, and the negociate mandatory yearly pay increases based on inflation and company profits, not help you keep your desired perk of not commuting to the office as the office is seen as the mandatory place of work by contract, not your home, so physical presence at work part is usually non-negotiable.
Actually, unions here are relatively against remote work or at least quiet on the topic, as they assume it'll lead to easier off-shoring in the long run (already happening anyway) and the loss of their jobs , so on-site presence of the workforce is considered as an advantage in convincing the company to keep invested in Germany and not move abroad (generals like seeing their soldiers at work where their money is goes).
Is it only a perk if it basically improves family life, social life, mental health for many, reduces expenses but it also reduces pollution, combats climate change, relieves pressure on infrastructure, etc?
It is, but German companies and management don't see it that way. Decisions are made top-down without consulting with what the workers actually want because the priority is the company's profits.
Plus, the wellbeing of workers in Germany is already considered (at least on paper) to be top notch that mandating remote work for everyone is not considered necessary as "German workers already have it so good".
And with German labor loosing competitiveness, unions are relatively toothless when demanding remote work as there's no government mandate to offer that like it is with working hours, parental leave, etc. and the companies often threaten with relocation/off-shoring when they get demands they don't like so the German government is in no rush to pressure them for new social perks.
So it's up to you to search for a company that's fully WFH, not wait for your union to solve it for you. Unions can work only when they have teeth.
Municipal and government workers are different, as they can always demand whatever they want because they don't have competition and don't need to turn a profit so you're stuck with them whether you like it or not. What else are you gonna do, get your permit from another country's government? The government's monopoly is the real leverage here.
Many industries (in the US at least) are dominated by union labor. Some jobs even require union membership, even if you don't want to join the union. So these companies simply can't avoid union workers if they actually want staff.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but to my knowledge, unions in the US function very differently than unions in Germany/Europe.
In Germany, the unions function more as partners of the business owners and collaborate together on finding the general compromise that won't disturb company profits or the way the business operates, while in the US it seems like unions must treat the business like antagonists even at the sake of company profits because "all business owners are evil so fuck them".
So even if the US has fewer unions than in Europe, they're generally a lot more powerful, which is why many were infiltrated by the mob.
If my memory serves me correctly the earliest unions in Germany were very similar to the unions in the US, as in they were started from clashes with the business owners, and they were in charge of handling stuff like healthcare and pensions pots of the workers, similar to the unions in north america today.
But the Kaiser saw the growing unions and their pensions pots getting bigger along with their nation wide influence over the working class, as threats to the state's own influence and control over the workers, so he dismantled them and introduced them under the new state pension plan, so the modern state social pension in Germany stems form the Kaiser's fear of the workers' unions. :)
Generally speaking one major reason is that union representatives are also on company boards in the Europe. This gives them skin in the game and also the same knowledge that gets shared to the rest of the board. And they generally err on the side of employment; American unions have threatened, and successfully, brought down companies that ceased to be a going concern due to demanding unreasonable concessions. (See: Yellow Trucking)
But German unions are also very subservient given their tacit approvals of things like Agenda 2010.
>But German unions are also very subservient given their tacit approvals of things like Agenda 2010.
My point exactly. Unions aren't here to fight for even better working conditions for you like mandatory WFH for everyone, but just to overwatch to make sure the company adheres to existing labor regulations. That's it.
So yeah, unions are relatively toothless and the QoL and the living standards of the working class in Germany has been on the decline for a while.
Unions can do whatever they set their mind to, and whatever their membership elects to do.
Like humanity itself and other broad categories, saying as a matter of fact that unions can’t do X, when some unions do X, is pretty asinine, almost as much as lumping more than 3B people into “Asians” or other useless categorizations. Particularly if the article doesn’t mention a country of origin being Germany.
You don’t even have to look very far from Germany to find a union negotiating WFH.
Sure, unions can in theory demand whatever they want, but if they don't show enough teeth, as in actually having strikes, they usually don't ask because the corporate overlords will say 'no' anyway.
Unions in Germany are usually a lot more submissively than in France and rarely fight for gaining new perks, they just look after maintain the existing ones, moistly following the "don't bite the hand that feeds you" mentality.
In the orthodox Marxism still practiced by some Trotskyites, the factory worker is seen as a uniquely revolutionary class because of (1) the discipline that comes from factory work and (2) the factory as itself as a nexus of revolution: workers can organize there and ultimately seize control of the means of production.
A knowledge worker who works at home on cloud servers has no spatial nexus to control. All communication between workers is electronically mediated, I guess union organizers can develop a parallel infrastructure, but the workplace itself is a natural place for organizing work to take place.
What amuses me though is that until 1980 or so people thought factory work was the worst kind of work, maybe best expressed in the Ray Davies song "Working At the Factory"
Once the factories left, however, people realized service work or no work was a lot worse and now a new factory in your town is one of the best things a politician can take credit for.
>workers can organize there and ultimately seize control of the means of production.
Workers can try to seize the means of production, but without state support, the police or the military will come shoot and arrest you, like it happened many times in recent history. You need populace and political support for such movements, otherwise you're a terrorist/criminal.
>A knowledge worker who works at home on cloud servers has no spatial nexus to control. All communication between workers is electronically mediated, I guess union organizers can develop a parallel infrastructure, but the workplace itself is a natural place for organizing work to take place.
Knowledge workers have the balance of power in their favor, despite not having ways to physically seize the means of production, but as soon as the individual's knowledge becomes obsolete, commoditized or easily found elsewhere for cheaper, then those workers are shit out of luck if they don't keep up and adapt to a new hot thing.
>Once the factories left, however, people realized service work or no work was a lot worse and now a new factory in your town is one of the best things a politician can take credit for.
Unfortunately, we can't have a well functioning society where everyone is a remote worker. Someone still needs to fix your toilet, teach your kids, drive the train, build new houses, manufacture the stuf you use in your daily life like food and medical supplies.
Sure, you can have all your stuff manufactured offshore and import it, until your manufacturing trading partner has the upper hand and gives you the middle finger because he needs that stuff more urgently or he found a richer buyer, and now you're left wihtout stuff and with a bunch of laptop workers who can't manufacture the stuff you need because that knowledge is not open-source and you since lost all that knowledge over decades of deindustrialization when you gave it to your manufacturing trading partner in exchange for cheap stuff and access to his domestic market.
Knowledge workers can seize things to a certain extent. Upper management (and even lower management in some cases) don't control or even have ready access to critical cloud credentials.
Sure, executives can call the cloud provider and gain access, but not before significant damage to the business can be done. And regardless, that's not much different than factory workers getting the police called on them by the factory owners.
I think the main issue is that knowledge workers are not organized (and generally look down on the idea of union membership), and don't really have the guts to step out of line like that.
>Knowledge workers can seize things to a certain extent.
Of course they can. Let's say workers group together and take the website down which tanks the business completely rendering the business owner broke and the workers unemployed. Then what? Who's gonna hire you as part of that grop of revolutionaries who took down a business?
You want unionization per sector with the blessing of legal authorities, and collective protest per industry, not per company.
Yup. And electing people to office with at least an iota of conscience. One area the current admin is better than the previous one - labor issues. Not perfect (they screwed the railway workers) but better
No, no, I have it on good authority that the optimal strategy is to gang up on the employer and force them to meet the workers' demands.
This will somehow make the employer more competitive, rather than less, and will not in any way incentivize outsourcing and automation at the cost of the domestic jobs in question.
There is always an exchange of good and bad deeds between employees and employers. If you are a dick you should be treated as such. If you are a saint you should be too! You never just go to war with your employer or your employees.
I had one employer who would sometimes get stuck in a loop thanking me for what I've done, how embarrassed he was he couldn't pay me more and that he could never do what I did for such little money. I would mock him by listing the instances of terrible things that would have happened if I wasn't there. If he called me right now, years later, I would do what I could to keep his ship afloat just because the idea of having to fire people haunts him in his sleep.
My previous manager asked me to do an extra shift one time. I told him I understand why he asked it but that this must never happen again. Before that I told him that he couldn't just schedule an extra shift but that he should ask me first. If the place burned down around me I would use it to light my cigar after casually tossing my coat over my arm.
The labor market overall is tight but tech is in an employment recession so employers currently have power. Do what you need to do to put yourself in a position where you can bail and jump to a remote employer at the first opportunity. If the majority does this, companies will have to change or die. Going back to the office because of the current power dynamic is ok but getting complacent and not using your most powerful weapon, jumping to another job, is now the RTO folks win longterm.
Maybe even more powerful than unionmaking would be coop making. Realistically, everyone could take their team of the 10 closest workers they know, form a coop, and contract their work back to the employer akin to a freelancer. This would help take the real leverage from large organizations, their magnitude and its ability to shape markets due to inertia alone, if that magnitude was more of a temporal nature on a per project basis. In a perfect world in this coop model, labor wouldn't be "locked up" on boring projects for large companies, labor would be free to freelance onto interesting or mutually beneficial projects if there was any idle time that could be filled with more billable work. Profits would also be shared among labor since ownership is distributed among labor, versus being this separate parasitic class carried on a palanquin by labor.
We’re afraid of the companies who offshored so many jobs that they killed off entire industries in the US? There’s nothing they won’t do for a buck. If remote work doesn’t happen now, it will in the near future when they realize how much they can save on real estate costs.
The problem is that lots of wealth capital (both personal and corporate) is tied up in commercial real estate. It’s the reason everyone from Martha Stewart to Musk to hedge fund managers are screaming about how “unethical” remote work is. They literally can’t afford to have those buildings sit empty, so they will have to force the peons back into them by any means necessary.
Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, is a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work. Legally, peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867.
Today we just call it wage garnishment. We seem to often gain rights by just moving around the specific parties involve through the transitive property, rather than actually seeing significant change from the status quo.
We may know who some of the bulls are. But where are the bears? Are there any public figures who seem to clearly be hedged against the commercial real estate market and are making pro work from home statements?
Rezoning alone is insufficient. For traditional (but interestingly not technical) reasons, the designs of commercial and residential buildings are very different and converting between them in already built structures is going to be very costly.
Sleeping in a room with no windows is preferable to sleeping in the street. Just change the codes to make the conversions inexpensive and quick-to-deploy.
The problem isn’t the zoning. That can be fixed with literally a stroke of a pen. The problem is that the buildings were never designed for habitation, and so you run into issues with plumbing and windows. Sometimes these things are fixable, but usually at great cost, especially for newer construction.
My understanding is converting huge office buildings into apartments/condos isn't cost effective or even possible a lot of the time. So they could re-zone, but possibly need to demolish/rebuild.
Maybe this will spur innovation in building for buildings that can easily be converted between the two.
No, not necessarily. And also, many office jobs can be done remote. Even if the policy is that you must come in to the office, that doesn't change the fact that it's possible to do it remote.
Time zones and shared language/culture disagree? Or if you think you can get a 90% margin on the competition with the same result, go start a company and see how that works out for you.
So why isn't it? Genuine question. A enormous number of jobs can be done remote. Certainly mine (I've been full remote for over three years - one day during Covid the boss just told everyone to go home and we literally never went back to the physical office, which no longer exists). I can see entire companies, maybe entire industries, where vast amounts of the work can be done remotely.
So why aren't all these companies cutting salary costs by 90%? That's a huge, huge amount of money. The stock price would go berserk. Dividends would soar. The C-suite would see incredible increases on their wealth. So if all these jobs can be done for 90% less, PLUS the savings of having no expensive office lease costs, why aren't they?
There are massive barriers evenif we assume that the work can be done 100% remotely, which in many cases is not true. Barriers include things like linguistic/cultural, legal/regulatory (domicile, contracts), financial (paying in a different currency).
But for sure the pandemic has shown that there is also a lot of inertia.
If your job isn't remote, it can also be offshored for 1/10 the cost - just get an office building.
The arbitrage from offshoring is much narrower than most people think. You mostly get what you pay for and companies can easily waste a lot of money and time trying to go the low-cost more-employees route.
That's not true, the amount of US based scale-up jobs in Europe has risen a lot in the last couple of years also bringing up compensation at the top end to a bit higher than you used to be able to get here.
The market is simultaneously efficient and yet refuses to offshore absolutely every job to make more money and increase profits. Strange world we live in.
If across the board all work that could be remote were 1/10 cost with no downside, literally every job that could be remote would already be offshored at this point already.
The internet has been around for decades; we used to call this practice "offshoring". Yet jobs are still here because not all workers are not fungible, and transaction costs are involved. That said I do believe companies are more geographically concentrated than they need to be.
The office already doesn't matter when it comes to offshoring. Companies are rarely in the same office already, and are spread across the US. Even if a team is co-located, their stakeholders aren't.
Further, timezone-friendly offshoring is about 70-80% of the cost and comes with larger organizational complexity. Good (not mythical 10x, mind you - I mean good by standard definitions) developers are expensive no matter where they live.
70-80% is incorrect, it's more like 40%. I made 22kUSD last year in Kiev. I think my colleague on same team in USA was making 65kUSD. Not SWE, just comparing numbers. I was also paid more than the average for my position/geography. I was a contractor, as was all of the UA team....don't know what coworkers arrangement was...
How much was the contract company getting paid? How much overhead did they have? I saw what the blended rates were grow our negotiations with one of the big players and it wasn’t what the people on the ground were getting paid.
I’m guessing you were getting contracted out at minimum 45 USD an hour.
I contract through my own company. It's a common system in Ukraine to own your own company, because taxes are less if you do business through companies. -- sorry if i explained it poorly. I said that I was a contractor also to say that there are no other benefits that I am getting from employment.
To some extent, yes - but still, there are many challenges:
- Time zones
- Security
- Language barrier
- Work culture
- Employment laws
And the list goes on.
The devs themselves can be cheap, but by the time you've jumped through many of the hoops to actually get them employed for you - they might not longer be THAT cheap.
In software it's never been easier to start a company than before. If you have increased productivity in every part of the org you can outrace other companies.
There are a few winner take all fields, but there's a plethora of fields which have multiple large players.
At a straight 20% productivity boost in everything, the compounding gains will have you beat competitors in no time.
If you're in software, and you have a magic pill for better everything, you should just do the thing yourself.
I don’t really buy the argument. If commercial RE crashes, that means what, people take a 20% haircut on converting the buildings to condos and/or just selling for the value of the land?
We are still seeing unprecedented housing shortages, which puts a pretty high floor on how much l “downtown” land values will crash.
Idk how realistic it is to convert those buildings, nor how much value it would take off (from the buildings themselves, but also from the rest of the real-estate market).
But it's not unreasonable to assume fear of loss as a motivation, at all. However, what's the link between the people that can actually re-implement work-from-office and those holding all those office buildings?
Office space is very expensive to convert to residential, you have large rectangle with windows on the perimeter only, weird elevator/stair layout, insufficient plumbing for many individual bathrooms, and poor ventilation for kitchens.
Furthermore, I'm skeptical that if commercial real estate crashes (because far fewer people are working in cities) that there will be continued demand to live in those cities. There seems to be an underlying assumption that the only reason people wouldn't want to live in a city is the cost--and that's not true for a lot of folks.
Why are all the capitalists crying, "it's just the market, supply and demand, dude!" . I'm sure less urban areas are getting that capital so it all balances out in the end. I'm not going to cry for someone who is rich enough to own a skyscraper in downtown San Francisco.
Anyone who attributes a preference to one dimension, in this case elites saving commercial real estate, is oversimplifying things. I’m sure it’s a factor. But there are many factors at play, including but not limited to saving commercial real estate, saving service jobs in cities, local government retail and hotel taxes, preference by some to be in office, new grads who want to move to a city to work and not stay in their parents bedroom, improved serendipity for information sharing, better oversight of work being done, companies in long term leases they want to use, employees who enjoy access to benefits like free food, exercise classes, other perks, and a bunch more I can’t think of.
I mean I'm all for a little elite run the world consipiracy theory but really, I'm supposed to think that a diffuse group of corporate leaders are upending companies so they can spend more on real estate going forward, for class solidarity reasons?
The reason people running companies want to end or curtail remote work is because it's very fucking challenging to run a group of people remotely. It just is. Everyone knows it, it's fucking hard.
There are also a lot of reasons TO do it. It's possible remote is the "better" option on the whole as a comprehensive decision.
But it takes a lot of skilled work to communicate effectively as a manager, it's hard, and if you get it wrong things start to spiral.
It's not confusing AT ALL why people might consider it. Pretty sure everyone who leads a group of people has had at least ONE moment of "god dammit it would be a lot easier if we were just all in the same room" in the recent past.
Yes, this reads exactly like it was written by someone who's never had a leadership role, and probably doesn't want to hold such a role, but deigns to know exactly the motivations of people in those roles.
I run a hybrid team while working remotely. The only thing that is considerably more difficult remotely is getting a feeling for how the team members feel. Are they doing okay? Are they bored/annoyed? But that‘s more of a problem for insecure managers. I trust my teams, talk to each regularly and all is fine so far.
It's bizarre to me how religious this conversation has become.
I'm not sure why people are behaving like it's either 100% remote or 100% in the office, and they are locked in a cage.
There are PLENTY of companies who have decided to become fully remote and remain that way indefinitely. If remote opportunities are important to you and your lifestyle, there are plenty of options for you.
Otherwise, I haven't heard of any company requiring 100% RTO all 5 days of a week. Everyone, even Apple, a company notorious for requiring in-office work, has relented and moved towards hybrid.
>I'm not sure why people are behaving like it's either 100% remote or 100% in the office, and they are locked in a cage.
A lot of people have very strong personal preferences (though probably mostly not 100% in person) and they're worried that you'll have a boiling the frog slide towards some outcome they really don't want even if they'd be OK with a more nuanced version.
> it's very fucking challenging to run a group of people remotely.
It's very fucking hard to take a relatively random group of people who are used to working together in person, throw them behind screens with little more support than Slack and Zoom, and try to manage them remotely.
It's much easier to take a group of people used to pro-active written communication, "if it's not monitored then it doesn't exist", async-first, https://nohello.net/en/ , actual remote work culture, and manage them remotely.
See, management is about alignment, and alignment is about 80% culture and politics, very little about what actually needs to be done. If you hire people who culturally fit into remote work, you'll have an easier time managing them. If you hire the opposite, it'll be hell. And you can do about as much to change someone's (work) cultural predisposition as you could change someone's (personal identity) culture.
Well yeah. That's another way of saying it's hard.
Also everyone has to start somewhere and get their first job, so the idea that you just make sure everyone is really used to remote work seems to be missing some subtlety as a long term plan.
I didn't say I agree with ending remote work, I said it's really easy to understand that there might be quite a few people who sincerely think it's the best way forward.
The whole commercial real estate conspiracy schtick really gets old. There may well be cases where a company has made some commitments to some locale in exchange for tax breaks and remote work an upended that. But dumb as some people think corporate execs are, they almost certainly have heard of the sunk cost fallacy and, to my direct knowledge, a lot of companies are looking for ways to decrease their real estate footprint.
I also agree that 100% remote work is not this panacea that's always better than going into the office at least some of the time. If my team were local we'd be getting together semi-regularly--especially with travel/in-person meeting budgets tight. While it's not universal, a lot of younger people just out of school seem to struggle with the lack of in-person connections.
The challenging part is over. Everyone has had literally years of experience doing exactly that. We adapted. If you couldn’t adapt as a manager, you’re obsolete. Find a different job, because you now suck at the one you have. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way world works.
Is corporate real estate price the primary driving force? Perhaps not, but it’s certainly a driving force. There’s no shortage of articles and opinion pieces expressly lamenting the state of corporate real estate and businesses that catered to 9-5 office worker.
I’d say the main thing that’s driving RTO is ego. THE FAANGs built multibillion dollar vanity offices right before the pandemic. It’s a personal insult to these CEOs that the monuments to their greatness are empty. This plays out at a smaller scale down the ladder. Many people want to see their “human resources” as an ego trip.
I heard of one tech exec say about RTO, it’s just easier to collaborate when you can grab someone after a meeting for a quick chat. “What am I supposed to do on a video call? Get on another video call?”
Yeah dude. That’s literally what everyone did if you couldn’t just wait for everyone to hang up on the current one.
I’ve been called back to the office a few days a week now. It took 4 trips back to realize the things I dealt guilty about while working remote were non issues.
Saw 4 managers literally walking by their employees desks watching them work. To add insult to injury, there were 4 managers for 12 employees doing this.
Sounds about right, my manager enjoys tennis, frequent coffee breaks, one or two light meetings, and he activates with out of touch "ideas" in the last hour of the day. It's ridiculous.
I thought this type of stuff only existed in movies. Just curious, can you elaborate at all? I'm wondering if I'm just blind to this stuff assuming everyone else is nose-to-the-grindstone all day too.
He got hired into a successful team with capable developers, all his "ideas" were failures or detrimental, he presented the outcome as success to the upper mgmt and they believed him. No soft skills, no technical skills, just presenting the overachievements of his reports as success and easy life for years. And lots of coffee.
He frequently completely bombards initiatives from within the team with bad faith arguments only to present them as his personal achievements a couple of months later.
When it comes to the areas where the manager is supposed to be useful, like cross team communication, all the work is done by the devs.
I theorize the prevalence depends on factors like how competitive the market is. In a highly competitive market, the organization can’t tolerate gross failure for very long without failing, so it either manages this kind of person out or does not survive.
I don't think that's the case (having spent several years in both the IC and management tracks).
An incompetent or checked-out IC is easy to spot. While comparing the relative impact of people on a team is a Hard Problem, setting that someone's just not doing anything is easy.
On the other hand, the metric of success for a manager is how well their team is performing. So if you take an incompetent (or even a complete no-op) manager and assign them to a capable team, the organization gets no signal that the manager isn't part of the formula for that team's success.
There are measures to counteract that (skip levels, for example). But in many places, skip levels are so rarely held, and/or the manager is geographically close to their manager, creating a wide delta in social comfort between the manager and the IC with the skip-level manager. That dissuades ICs from being honest about the situation.
So there's no signal to use to "manage this kind of person out," and since this is a common problem across the whole tech sector, competitors are weighed down by a similar percentage of worthless managers - so their existence doesn't threaten the company's survival.
A the top end there is a lot of coordination, big money conservatives get together at CPAC and other venues to make plans, each political party is a powerful coordinated force of elites, they are all on each other's boards, etc.
However this article did not present any evidence of any given group of elites doing this, for this reason, so...
Yeah I don't generally disagree, but the coordination usually has a more specific goal with more specific actions. Like, let's spend a bunch of money to buy ads supporting some legislation so that we can get lower taxes.
Let's use our influence over corporate decision making to try to get people to use buildings in order to prop up commercial real estate asset prices feels like a bank-shot at best.
Doesn't everyone know that corporations Boards, and C-suit, and Republican donors, etc, etc, etc.. All vacation together, meet together, perhaps even chug beers with Supreme Court Justices together.
Does the author really need to 'prove' this in order to reference it???
This whole post is people arguing about what level of 'coordination' does it take before we can call it a 'conspiracy'. There isn't any 'conspiracy', it's just friendly chatting and innuendo, but of course there is a common 'problem with a solution we should perhaps generally steer towards (wink)'.
Weren't people right about this though? Institutionalized racism and sexism was everywhere, neoliberalism created the most unequal society since the era we unironically call "the robber-baron era", the carceral system is truly heinous (the ban on weed alone was just a joke), etc etc etc.
Sure, there are all sorts of problems with capitalism. But as Churchill said about democracy, it the worst form of economic organization except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.
Eh I would say Socialism as practiced in Western Europe and the Nordics is doing better. They're out doing the US in most important metrics, and they're trending more Socialist (though we'll see what intensifying climate migration and other climate change consequences bring).
Anyone who thinks that, say, Denmark is not a mixed economy with a strong bit of capitalism as well as a strong social safety net has never dealt with a kid who wants to buy lots of Lego.
> There are important differences between Denmark and the US though.
On the human level, sure. On the level of "fundamental economic system" (which is, I believe, the line of discussion), there really aren't.
They're both WEIRD countries with market based-economies and a social safety net. They both end up at the top of the lists on economic power (adjusted for population).
The differences between them are political fine-tuning of the system to target an extra 5-10% of the population with the safety net, or to target those people in different ways. That's incredibly minor in terms of economic systems.
When comparing two different economic systems, you tend to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and "percentage of the population involved in subsistence farming".
There are large differences though. The US poverty rate is 2.5x higher than Denmark's (15% to 6%). Denmark's life expectancy is 6 years longer. The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative.
> When comparing two different economic systems, you tend to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and "percentage of the population involved in subsistence farming".
There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of subsistence farming.
> The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative.
I disagree. When laid against things like the end of mercantilism, I don't think that qualifies as transformative.
I think the effects would look pretty much like the existing US system, because Denmark looks pretty close to the current US system by the standards we're talking about. If you want to argue they'd be fundamentally different, you can make a case, but I'd like to know why they would produce different results.
> There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of subsistence farming.
Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long.
> Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long.
This is not correct. Under, for example, the Roman Empire, privately held land was routinely leased to free men, either for a share of the produce (métayage) or for a fixed fee. This practice lasted hundreds of years. The end of subsistence farming has everything to do with technology and nothing at all to do with capitalism.
In the eigth century in France, around 50% of the land was under a sharecropping-like system, too. This page, and the page in French wiki it links in the intro, give a good rundown of capitalist-like subsistence farming in antiquity and the middle ages : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metayage
There's a fundamental difference here in that these examples exist before the state had a monopoly on legitimate violence.
Or, to put it another way, the large landowners you're referring to, also had large armies, the largest armies around by definition, otherwise they wouldn't have owned that land. They _were_ the state in their area, in the modern sense.
That's not private ownership of the means of production.
That's completely untrue for Rome, and barely true at all for France in those days.
Roman landowners did not own their land by stealing it from other citizens with large armies. They owned their land by either receiving it from the state as payment, or by buying it. The Roman state had a definite monopoly on violence. In fact, when people commanded armies to take power in Rome, what they were trying to do was to take over the state, and the vast majority of the time those weren't private armies, but State armies that they were misusing.
The Roman state very very much had a monopoly on violence and roman agricultural tenants very very much were renting the landlords privately owned means of production.
Capitalism doesn't magically stop subsistence farming. The advance of science and nothing else makes that possible. The Romans had little interest in advancing fundamental technology because there was no money to be made doing it, and so they never made any advances beyond the domains engineering which were immediately profitable (like weapons and aqueducts and bridges). That's why they made barely any scientific progress in a thousand years.
> The Roman state very very much had a monopoly on violence and roman agricultural tenants very very much were renting the landlords privately owned means of production.
I call BS here. The Romans basically never had this. During the Republic, you had literal private armies.
And once you get past the Diocletian reforms, the large land owners have enough arms to shield locals from Roman military service. Generally in exchange for service to themselves in agriculture (I believe this is the basis for Europe's system of serfdom).
The type of modern state (or even the concept) we're used to doesn't really emerge until the treaty of Westphalia.
> I call BS here. The Romans basically never had this. During the Republic, you had literal private armies
If you can't recognize that the Roman state had a monopoly on violence for the vast majority of its duration I can't help you. Obviously, it got weaker during its terminal decline - that's how state decline works. As soon as the monopoly of violence weakened the Empire started imploding, and indeed when it was healthy the state did enjoy it's monopoly.
The bucellarii, the private armies which were able to rival the Roman state, only became a thing in the late 300s. Rome fell only a hundred years later. For the vast majority of Roman history armies belonged to the State, and any mercenary formations were negligible - the regime you're describing was due to the Empire crumbling and is indeed what led to feudalism.
> The type of modern state (or even the concept) we're used to doesn't really emerge until the treaty of Westphalia.
Westphalia formalized the modern Eufopean state. But there were a great many similar states before, with a monopoly on violence, a defined political system, since ~4000BC. They just didn't bother formalizing what being a state meant.
> No, it doesn't. Of course it isn't magic. It just provides an incentive for people to improve things, usually via new technology.
Technology maybe, and only in the most basic sense, and Rome is the example. In 1100 years of Roman history, not a single basic scientific discovery was made, because it was completely unprofitable. Technology advanced, yes, but soon enough it was limited by the extremely primitive scientific understanding they had, so they barely made any progress for hundreds of years.
> Incentives are surprisingly powerful.
Practical technological is incentivized in every political economy.
> I disagree. When laid against things like the end of mercantilism, I don't think that qualifies as transformative.
That may be your benchmark but it's not mine. I think permanently pulling 30m people out of poverty in the US would be a multi-trillion dollar multi-decade endeavor on the scale of combating climate change (you need housing reforms, education reforms, health care reforms, criminal justice reforms, etc). That may not qualify for you, but it definitely does for me.
> Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long.
Besides being something of a no-true-scotsman, examples are India, Brazil, and Mexico.
> On the human level, sure. On the level of "fundamental economic system" (which is, I believe, the line of discussion), there really aren't.
One of the problems with this whole "debate" is that defenders of the status quo apply a huge motte and bailey to the definition of "capitalism". Both strawmanning any criticism of it as a rejection of all aspects claimed by capitalism, and also giving capitalism credit for systems that share some aspects of capitalism even though they haven't gone all-in and let capital run roughshod over everything else.
This dynamic is so common it has become a trope - kneejerk cries of "socialism". The original link that kicked off this comment tree was basically doing the same thing in more words.
The distinction between the motte and the bailey is easiest to see when aspects that we associate with capitalism end up in direct opposition to capitalism itself. For example, free markets can be directly opposed to capitalism, like in the context of imaginary property. A capital-centric view says that inventing a new form of capital out of whole cloth is the right thing to do. A market-centric view says that competition should drive the cost of information to within an epsilon of the copying/distribution cost.
> One of the problems with this whole "debate" is that defenders of the status quo apply a huge motte and bailey to the definition of "capitalism". Both strawmanning any criticism of it as a rejection of all aspects claimed by capitalism, and also giving capitalism credit for systems that share some aspects of capitalism even though they haven't gone all-in and let capital run roughshod over everything else.
This is a fair call-out, given that there's so much drive-by arguing on the internet.
I'm pretty sure I'm using a standard definition, but let me state the definition I'm using just to be as explicit as possible: A system is capitalist if it has private ownership of the means of production.
So, to give an example, a country would be a capitalist country regardless of their tax scheme/welfare spending so long as the means of production were privately held. Another country that nationalized industries (the oil industry is a common one) would be, at the very least, a mixed-economy, regardless of how free their markets are.
Given the above comments on Europe, I would argue that European countries do meet the definition of capitalist for the most part. While some European countries do completely nationalize a handful of industries, it's rare, and the majority of industries are privately owned, even if they are highly regulated.
I don't know that is a great definition any more. A straightforward implication is that China is capitalist. Which isn't necessarily wrong, but rather demonstrates that it's focused on yesterday's arguments.
Meanwhile I'd say most critics of "late stage capitalism" aren't bemoaning the private ownership aspect itself. Rather they're criticizing the wealth concentration, industry consolidation, and government corruption that large accumulations of capital symbiotically buy and benefit from.
> A straightforward implication is that China is capitalist. Which isn't necessarily wrong
But it is wrong. The Chinese government has demonstrated repeatedly that they are the de facto owners of, effectively, all of the wealth in the country.
Meaningful ownership isn't a legal status, it's the power to do... well... whatever you want with the thing in question.
Which I suppose puts ownership (and thus also capitalism) on a spectrum and makes it all messy, but all real life things are messy.
> Meanwhile I'd say most critics of "late stage capitalism" aren't bemoaning the private ownership aspect itself. Rather they're criticizing the wealth concentration, industry consolidation, and government corruption
And they can criticize all of that they want. I'd, frankly, like a less corrupt government along with a more decentralized world. But equating that to capitalism itself is roughly as lazy as the old boomers who think that socialism is when the government does anything.
But capitalism is the only system of economics I'm aware of that doesn't seem to have periodic famines, which I have a vested interest in preventing (I enjoy eating). And until I see serious evidence to the contrary (and several smaller scale experiments), I'm going to keep pushing it.
Comparing absolute numbers isn't fair to China, but look at the percentage of the population that starved in each country during those relative time periods.
I just don't think any of that is related to the economic system. It's pretty clearly the result of China having a lot more subsistence farmers when they industrialized.
But it is, at least their political system. But those are pretty intertwined in China, especially in that period.
They imported Lysenkoism from the soviets (who also had massive famines while implementing it).
Which is one of the reasons it's a bad idea to give control of the means of production to the politicians. There are a lot of things that sound good to a politician, but are a bad idea in practice.
> The Chinese government has demonstrated repeatedly that they are the de facto owners of, effectively, all of the wealth in the country... Which I suppose puts ownership (and thus also capitalism) on a spectrum and makes it all messy, but all real life things are messy.
There is plenty of this messiness in the US as well. Which puts the judgement solidly in "I know it when I see it" territory, leaving that definition pretty useless. This is also bordering on giving capitalism credit for the rule of law.
( considering China as capitalist would seem to make for more productive analysis. We can then start criticizing things we don't like about their system within the context of capitalism, rather than othering it and pretending we can't have similar problems )
> But equating [corruption] to capitalism itself is roughly as lazy as the old boomers who think that socialism is when the government does anything.
I'm not drawing this connection lazily in general, but rather due to specific forms of corruption that seem like "private" ownership run amok and are thus reasonable to pin on capitalism itself. I already mentioned imaginary property, which is a form of ownership/capital invented out of whole cloth, under the idea that its better to have more forms of ownership rather than unowned commons. But rather than stopping at creating the general concept, we get things like the DMCA that privilege large accumulators of capital over distributed individual ownership.
There are also our overfinancialized money markets, which have paperclip maximized their way to creating financial assets from of any future rent stream they can. This is backed up by governmental help from the federal reserve supplying an endless stream of money for creating said financial instruments, such that the first-order asset ownership of most of society hardly matters in the larger economic picture.
And I haven't even touched upon "private" entities themselves promulgating paradigms that reject the concept of private ownership (eg "trusted" computing, SaaS/platform sharecropping). Those seem solidly in the realm of capitalism trumping/abhorring free markets and freedom in general.
In a different context I can see myself arguing that these things aren't "true" capitalism (the centralized vs distributed distinction I made elsewhere), and if only the government held truer to the concept of private ownership we'd be in a better spot. But I'm also sympathetic to the argument that mass accumulations of capital will inevitably change the rules of the game to benefit themselves, despite those changes going against other people's private ownership interests. In a way it seems that corrupt legislation and precedents are themselves forms of capital that have been invested in because they facilitate rent streams, at the direct expense of our distributed societal freedom.
The general thrust of my critique is why should we put the philosophical focus on capital itself defaulting to the label of "capitalism"? Why not private property, free markets, the rule of law, personal freedom, etc? It feels like a propaganda push from large centralized capital holders to privilege themselves over those other ideals.
> This is also bordering on giving capitalism credit for the rule of law.
I'd rather go the other way, and give rule of law credit for capitalism. Probably one of its better effects. Capitalism requires an external neutral enforcer (for varying degrees of neutrality, but generally more neutral is better) to enforce property rights. Otherwise you end up with capital owners that need their own security forces, which morph into de facto states (see medieval feudal lords for an example). This state control of the means of production may work well on a 5-10 year period occasionally, but it's disastrous in the long term.
> considering China as capitalist would seem to make for more productive analysis
I think you can look at them in that lens post Deng or so (and they've had significantly fewer famines since then). Although with the recent consolidation of power, I'm not sure if the lens of totalitarianism might yield a better light. The union of political, military, and economic power completely within a single institution has certain properties that don't hold true for any single one of those.
> ...rather due to specific forms of corruption that seem like "private" ownership run amok and are thus reasonable to pin on capitalism itself.
Might I ask you to elaborate on this? Because the failures I see in China tend to pattern match more towards the patronage networks you see crop up in public systems. But I'll admit to not having a perfect understanding of China, and am willing to hear a case be made.
> I already mentioned imaginary property, which is a form of ownership/capital invented out of whole cloth, under the idea that its better to have more forms of ownership rather than unowned commons.
I'll give you this one. Intellectual property is dumb, as there's no scarcity requiring an efficient distribution of goods. You can argue private ownership of (non-intellectual) property is an evil, but I would argue that it is a necessary one (on the level of taxation). And one we get quite a bit of benefit from.
> There are also our overfinancialized money markets, which have paperclip maximized their way to creating financial assets from of any future rent stream they can. This is backed up by governmental help from the federal reserve supplying an endless stream of money for creating said financial instruments, such that the first-order asset ownership of most of society hardly matters in the larger economic picture.
So, I mean... let them fail. They've been trying to fail since the 80s or so with the bond crisis back then, and we keep propping them up. I'm gonna be honest, blaming capitalism for the actions of politicians feels like an unfair slight. Propping up ventures well past their point of usefulness because of political necessity is one of the hallmarks of a politically owned system, not a privately owned one. One that has happened over and over (see the soviet army's capture of the USSR's budget, or Lysenkoism).
You could say that the capitalists pressure the politicians, which is fair on some level, but seems like a symptom of a political system corruption. I would argue that as long as you have that, none of your economic systems are going to do what you want, though I will still argue that being as capitalistic as possible will, generally, still perform the best.
> But I'm also sympathetic to the argument that mass accumulations of capital will inevitably change the rules of the game to benefit themselves
This is probably the best argument here. Nobody, least of all me, argues that capitalists are supremely ethical. In fact amorality is generally one of the big points of it. There does need to be some sort of external arbiter.
I guess, the general avenue of my counter-argument is that it works well. Sure, it has downsides, but we have billions of lives riding on this. Show me a system that has a decently scaled example of working better.
> why should we put the philosophical focus on capi...
If people actually bothered to read the link I posted, it is all about the lazy blaming of a wide variety of problems with specific solutions on a very hand-wavy "capitalism".
I know a fair bit about about the housing shortage for instance, and it's not "capitalism". It's a specific set of rules and institutions that cause the problem.
Sure, but that's the strawmanning I'm talking about. Citing tweets from people trying to be edgy with Marxism and pointing out their intellectual laziness isn't actually addressing the legitimate complaints about late stage capitalism.
To me, the root causes of the housing crisis are zoning and the endless supply of newly created money from the Federal Reserve. Both of these policies are direct results of those who own housing (aka capital owners) politically insisting that the value of their "investments" continually go up. That's capital acting on the meta-system to optimize for capital itself. It's sensible to lay the blame for this on capitalism itself, and doing so doesn't mean I'm looking to somehow blow away the entire system in favor of some completely different -ism.
I'd personally make my own distinction of centralized capitalism versus distributed capitalism. But that's more of a constructive argument of how to specifically reform the system, while still sharing the general criticism.
A core element of socialism is that all industries and natural resources are state-owned. European countries are capitalist, not socialist, and got where they are by being so.
> - European social democracies are trending more socialist all the time
Eh? Which ones? As a European this is very much news to be; not much seizing of the means of production going on. If anything, some divesting of the means of production; heavily regulated privatisation of state energy, transport etc monopolies has been going on all over Western Europe for a while.
I realise that in the US, the colloquial definition of ‘socialist’ these days is more or less “not actively going around kicking poor people”, but the idea that Europe is becoming more socialist by any reasonable definition is a bit out there.
There's a recent rightward shift for sure, but long term benefits are increasing, unions are gaining power, and you're seeing people use democracy to force industry to adopt green policies. This is the power dynamic described by socialism: people control companies, not the other way around.
This is a ranking of economic freedom which strongly aligns with capitalism. The U.S. ranks 25th behind European countries like Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Iceland, etc.
Anytime this point comes up, someone on the right/Republican will say any taxation is Socialism, that Europe is Socialist. So, to compare Europe/Nordic socialist policies, to US policies is not a large leap. You can't just say, "well technically that isn't really socialism so we can't use that as an example in this argument", when literally for a decade the 'right' has specifically called them socialist.
Half of the country thinks "anything the government does is socialism" and campaigns to stop it, or get rid of it, or handicaps it, or how it is just evil and control.
Basically to the right: 'government' = 'socialism'.
And they haven't realized yet they are arguing for anarchy.
I thought republicans wanted to strengthen borders?
I do not follow US politics, but I never heard anyone advocating that taxation should be abolished. Seems a bizarre claim. Here in Germany parties publish the platforms they are running on, is there something similar in the US?
Libertarians typically don't get a candidate into the election, so they end up voting Republican.
In the Venn Diagram, Libertarians are a sub-set of Republicans.
Republican views are also administration dependent.
If there is a Democratic President then Republicans think government is evil, socialist and place a high value on reducing the debt, reducing the size of government.
But if a Republican is president, then debt no longer matters, increasing spending on defense, walls, and having a 'strong government of law and order' is the priority. So debt is ok, and the bigger the gov the better. It's a bit schizophrenic.
You asked? So it was relevant as an answer to the question.
But, agree, not relevant to the original story.
Just a little.
The original story was about 'elites'. In the US, any conversation on that subject gets wrapped up in different opinions on who the 'elite's are, and if they are Socialist. One side thinks the 'elite's are Socialist, the other side think the 'elite's are corporate CEO's.
This thread digressed to the discussion of Socialism (not the academic definition), and I was just following along with that tangent.
Minor quibble. The industries generally need to only be "socially-owned" rather than state-owned. Though I will admit that state-ownership is the most common in practice.
More of an academic point though, as Europe, as a whole, is still basically completely capitalist under this definition as well.
Edit: An example of a socially-owned company that is not state-owned would be an employee owned company.
I think that it is. Socialism is where the workers own the means of production. I think a democracy that's nationalized significant industries fits that description, e.g. France:
> 1982 François Mitterrand's proposals in the 110 Propositions for France and alliance with Jean-Pierre Chevènement's Socialist Party faction CERES, committed France to an explicitly socialist ‘rupture with capitalism’. Full nationalisation (100%): the Compagnie Générale d'Electricité, the Compagnie Générale de Constructions Téléphoniques, Pechiney-Ugine-Kuhlmann, Rhône-Poulenc, Saint-Gobain-Pont-à-Mousson, Thompson-Brandt. Partial nationalisation (51%+): Dassault, Honeywell-Bull, Matra, Roussel-Uclaf, Sacilor, Usinor. Thirty-nine banks, two financial houses, and the remaining 49% of the SNCF were also nationalised, taking the size of the French state to unprecedented levels within a year of Mitterrand's election as president in 1981.
>Socialism is where the workers own the means of production.
Clearly that is not the case in any European country.
>Dassault
Literally family owned.
I don't think you realize just how capitalist European countries really are. State owned corporations are usually quite rare and generally known for being run extremely badly. On the other hand many of the largest corporations are still controlled by the families of their founders.
> Eh I would say Socialism as practiced in Western Europe and the Nordics is doing better
It is not an easy comparison.
They have the luxury of the US taxpayers taking care of their defense while they propped up Russia, which US is also paying the most by a large margin to fix now [1, 2, 3]. Hilariously US socialists are against US defense spending except when it comes to US spending on Europe.
They also have the luxury of oil money which American "socialists" are totally against [4].
Edit: All of what I say is objective. Luxurious Western Europe and Nordic "socialism" can't survive without gullible US taxpayers footing the bill over decades.
Arguably the US caused the Russia problem with the aggressive expansion of NATO, and the failure to defend Crimea, so this seems fair. Also the US produces a bonkers amount of oil; dunno what your point is here.
EDIT: how could I forget Trump's undermining of NATO, cozying up to Russia, and withholding aid to Ukraine?
I mean, fuck Churchill and that quote, constantly abused to protect a horrible system by people who are too deep in it to even conceive an alternative.
Not key, but they synergize very well with capitalism. Having a class of people you can freely exploit drives down wages, makes many otherwise unviable jobs viable, is politically useful in a myriad of manners as wedge issues, cudgels, and distractions. Meanwhile, the invisible hand of the market can be used to legitimize any difference in standard of living, healthcare, and can even be used to practically deny legal rights. They really do work very well together.
How can that be, when the most "anti-racism" obsessed country in the world is the USA which is also the most capitalist, and China/North Korea strongly restrict immigration and China even runs concentration camps for the Uighur? It seems like the opposite. The most capitalist places are the ones who spend all day stressing about the right way to capitalize the word black.
Are you forgetting the 200 years for which the USA was also the most capitalist country and legally enforced racism?
Just because there is a lot of noise being made about anti-racism in the US doesn't mean it's the most progressive country in the world. It just means that a lot of noise is being made there.
I read the article more as an implied warning: a lot of paper wealth is tied up in commercial real estate, and that wealth could evaporate. The people who own that paper wealth aren't just going to sit back and let that happen. Yes, for many companies there is no direct way to force them to bring workers back to the office. But it might be worth taking some time to think about what else might be tried.
I would note that the Grand Commercial Real Estate Conspiracy was not notably successful in getting people to go to brick and mortar retail; if there was an effective conspiracy, you’d expect it to have put a horse’s head in Amazon’s bed.
Sound point, but the fact that we're forced to do this parsing in the comments means readers of the linked piece will happily continue to use "the elite" as a placeholder for whatever they already believe.
Legally, doesn't a conspiracy require proof of communication? I think that communication can be indirect or even negative in nature, but it has to be there. But if everyone that owns commercial real estate has lower margins, that would eventually lower property taxes for such properties, which hurts city revenue. City planners can connect the dots and push for rto, no communication necessary.
I could be wrong here but I don't read this as a claim of conspiracy.
To my mind, this is more a systems-level description of currents in capital. Yes, there's a clickbaity headline about 'elites', but if you think more in terms of wealth doing things of its own accord (similar to how e.g. Dawkins got us talking about selfish genes -- selfish dollars?) then this observation might cash out after all.
That said, I do agree that the editorial style of the article is needlessly conspiratorial --- it likely appeals strongly to leftists (like me) who see and sense that capital flows and floes seem to have a mind of their own, but who (unlike me) think this requires smoky backroom deals.
I’m just confused about causal chain that would lead to this happening…perhaps it’s a lack of imagination. Like, do we think that landlords are bribing corporations to lease their properties?
Corporations are already in 5+ year leases and don't want them to be unmitigated liabilities, the owners of the corporation also have significant investments in real estate, there's your incentive.
> But there is direct evidence that politicians are influencing corporations to alter return to office policies:
But no evidence that this is related to property values alone or even in large part. SF is desperate to ensure the downtown does not enter a full-on doom loop which would impact all businesses as well as anyone who lives there or visits regularly. [0] Other knock-on effects include BART facing severe financial problems due to low ridership. They want people back any way they can get them so San Francisco does not end up like Detroit.
You were probably down-voted because your comment reads like you think that is okay to treat unwilling people like cash cows to prop SF's downtown and mass transit. That is doubly ironic coming from S-fucking-"we don't want you tech bros gentrifying our city"-F officials.
Neither mayor has any power to affect this. Further, the SF link is from March of last year. The WFH push didn’t start until earlier this year, coinciding with the softening job market.
> as though there's some kind of coordinated conspiracy.
I don't see how this is different from consensus among actors, or rather it looks the same.
The label or attribute conspiracy is a tool used to discredit findings or positive correlations.
I see now that you think elite is overloaded and programmed to have conspiracy relation. This is not true though according to m-w: "a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence".
If you pay attention to main stream media, you will see almost all forms of dissent attributed to conspiracy.
A lot of financial news outlets have been pointing out the risk of corporate real estate risks.
Making the connection to back-to-office doesn't have to be a coordinated conspiracy.
It just has to be a few middle managers being like "Hey Bob in Dev, this is Steve from Operations, I'm in a real bind with the empty office on 5th, can you see about filling it. Sure Man."
How are "the elite" forcing companies that do not own real estate and who rent their office space to mandate RTO? How are they forcing these companies to renew their leases when they expire?
Google has tons of office real estate that's assigned a certain value on balance sheets. If that tanks, the C-suite compensation plans and (slight conjecture here) the value of Brin's & Page's stock-secured liquidity will take a hit.
Page and Brin are shareholders. A counterexample would be if a worker owned business like Igalia was doing RTO (I think they've always been remote & remain so, so they're not actually a good example for or against, just to illustrate).
Even companies that do own commercial real estate but aren't in that business must see it as a sunk cost and that employees are volunteering to provide their own office space for free.
Real estate like that is actually (well, in the olden days) an appreciating long-term asset as well as a well-lobbied avenue for balance sheet games. Commercial real estate is subject to yearly depreciation, unlike your home. It can be somewhat arbitarily valued or devalued (see the games that Trump plays with real estate and taxes, sorry to introduce some politics), but generally real estate is tangible and appreciates long term.
Although if a company has a RECENTLY constructed office then it very much is a sunk cost, because the depreciation is on a 10 or 20 year schedule (don't remember exactly) and hasn't appreciated, and of course they haven't gotten the actual "house workers who make money for you" return. SO I agree with that. And of course all the companies don't want to see their already-depreciated by market appreciated values collapse under them. They want more sucker startups to but their appreciated properties once their business model ages.
Now, I guess we'll see how much the author's contention of a bubble/apocalypse plays out, but we'll know if office tower -> housing becomes a recurring thing. It wasn't with dilapidated malls, although it probably should have been.
As hinted at, the masters of office space are very well integrated with local politicians and the pork train. It's one of the pillars of local politics and local corruption. They'll try to find ways to get tax breaks or find a bigger sucker (like the local government!) to take on the burden or bail them out.
Yeah I don’t think elon musk is sipping whisky with his landlord and the small business chamber of commerce of downtown palo alto or wherever the “X” office is conspiring to bring the workers back into the office.
The currency of elites is deference. One of the reasons why Musk can get away with so much is that other powerful people don't want to check him because they're afraid that other people will check them. By showing deference you preserve deference for yourself.
When other important people line up with Musk it is not because they are sipping whisky together, instead they are lining up like iron filings in the field of a magnet.
Maybe funding sources are saying "if our real estate hedges implode your funding dries up, get your workers back in town and spreading our money around"
This question should have made the author delete this essay, and is why it has no business being promoted on a supposedly legitimate aggregator like hacker news.
The author is either a straight up liar working to subvert what little is left of American capitalism. Or they're a conspiracy theory whacko who doesn't know the slightest thing about "the elite," or any of the people/factions that comprise it.
Yeah maybe, but maybe its helpful to think what the holders of commercial real estate debt do to avoid the catastrophe? Surely, they are not just sitting and waiting. The offices are empty. The companies are doing just fine. There need to be external pressures applied to bring people back to the offices, I'd think.
Sure. They might be commissioning a harvard business professor to write about productivity gains of being in-office. They might lobby for some regulation to force a liability onto companies with remote workers. But what they aren't doing is getting 1000 of the richest people in the world into a room and coordinating a conspiracy to help some corner of the room not go bankrupt.
Since the article is in line with what you said, coordination could be through commissioning a Harvard writer, or lobbying, or regulation, either way it isn't explicitly stated. I get the impression that you are arguing against a point of view that you are assuming.
This is clearly you, reading (a lot) into what she said, and then reacting to your own pre-formed perceptions of an argument you think she made.
Kind of like when people get into internal mental arguments with fictional others, and start talking to themselves. Then getting so wound up they blurt something out of context, or march on the capital.
The only way in which she anything she said could be consistent with mine is if she used the term "the elites" to mean very specifically "CRE investors." This is a definition she never once even implied, let alone stated.
The entire article implied it.
It is literally the subject of the article.
From the article:
>"It’s about real estate"
>"Corporate landlords currently hold $1.2 trillion in loans on office towers all over the country"
It is being a bit pedantic to argue around what a 'CRE Investor' IS. Who 'owns' versus who has a 'lease' since the 'lease' is still a debt obligation. And you don't have to be specifically a 'CRE Investor', you just need to own or lease a lot of CRE to be impacted.
If you think statements like "It’s about real estate" are somehow a redefinition of a different term ("the elites") used elsewhere in the document to make it mean something no one else in the world thinks it means, then we have no business even talking to each other. Your opinion of how reading works is so different from mine that it results in us living in two different worlds. I'm sure I'm right when I say this college professor knows how to communicate clearly, and if she had intended for "the elites" to mean "a small subset of elites who have large interest in CRE prices," that she would have found a clearer term, instead of a Marxist-charged one like "the elites," most often used for the purpose of throwing shit in the fan of corporate America, rather than arguing genuine points.
>> "the elites" to mean "a small subset of elites who have large interest in CRE prices"
That is exactly what is meant. I'm sorry if it really needs to be spelled out like leading a horse to water. It was the point of the entire article, even if there was not a specific sentence clearly equating a=b. There were links to other backing documents. Maybe she could have drawn the line a little more clearly, but it was a short piece, maybe she didn't think she needed to make it a big thesis.
For "elites". Is it "Marxist-Charged"? It is a little funny to be re-defining the term again, given that for 6 years Republicans have been using it as a derogatory term for "educated liberals", not for "Corporate America". Now all of a sudden, if someone uses the term "Elite" to refer to "Corporate America", now that makes them Marxist by besmirching "Corporate America"?
I do agree. It is hard to communicate in this day and age when words change meaning from month to month, and the Left/Right are working with different definitions.
Any definition of 'Elites', in any conversation gets wrapped up in different opinions on who the 'Elite's are. One side thinks the 'Elite's are Socialist, educated liberals, the other side think the 'Elite's are corporate CEO's.
Depending on your side, you get triggered in the opposite direction.
I know you believe this and there's nothing I can do to change your mind. You do you, but nothing you say with your ridiculous leaps of logic and assumptions will change my choice to read it in the most direct and logical way.
But don't think that your ultra-literal reading is more 'correct' for being literal.
When someone says it is a 'blue moon' this month, do you get upset when it isn't blue?
I think we both know you have an axe to grind, and are just as extremely biased in one direction as you think I am biased in the other direction.
Best wishes on becoming more self aware. The world needs it.
>>> "a Marxist-charged one like "the elites," most often used for the purpose of throwing shit in the fan of corporate America, rather than arguing genuine points."
(Actually, I'm beginning to suspect this is a Troll, hard to tell these days. Let me know if this was just a long joke.)
Let me tell you how all this works: you see, Team America is funded by the corporations, so they fight for the corporations... while they sit in their corporation buildings... and they're all corporation-y... and they make lots of money!
Someone always playing
Corporation games
Who cares they're always changing
Corporation names
We just want to dance here
Someone stole the stage
They call us irresponsible
Write us off the page
Shareholders, local/state governments that are basically in the grip of developers and real estate investors/landlords, Wall Street, cocktail parties, (bad) middle managers rioting, the feeling that if your underlings have all the freedoms you have they're less like underlings and more like peers, the usual class warfare stuff.
Unlike the caricature naive people believe it to be, such real world conspiracies seldom are about some shady guys meeting in a secret underground lair. That's so third world coup style.
More like a huge net, cast by powerful people scratching each other's back, lobbying, advertising, and PR budgets, the media getting on with the program, and of course politicians, middle managers, academics, journalists, and other such types quickly figuring out the right things to say and the right signals to sent that would advance their careers - and trying to whip the majority into going there to.
Thats just it, outside of the media outlets they control and federal policy, they cannot. Its largely a propaganda campaign and a thinly veiled one at that.
Biden was told by elites this was about to become a trillion dollar shit sandwich for the economy during a rocky period of high inflation and stagnation. He symbolically called all the federal workers back into offices (already owned by the government) as a show of "the right thing to do" but otherwise any company outside the fortune 50 will absolutely use this as an opportunity to tell their landlord to pound sand.
Some companies are weird about using a co-working address and want a really small office footprint. Enough for a meeting room, a few offices, and a mailbox so when some banker or other business shows up you can put on a dog and pony show in a formal office with your name on the wall.
That's about it.
Many creative companies don’t own real estate and are looking foward to sunsetting their existing leases to go with something much smaller and easier to manage. In addition to the rental square footage NNN leases and increasing energy and insurance will dove that the RTW push is short-lived as it financially makes little sense.
In principle it could be straight up targeted propaganda "making" the bosses do that.
I have no idea if the reality is more that, or more the banal "nobody is organising anything like this and suggestions to the contrary are just conspiracy theories, the bosses genuinely believe what they're saying".
I currently have a boss who appears to sincerely want people back in the office; he doesn't want to be the CEO of a 100% remote company.
I feel like often article-writers miss the fact of people like your boss: some people just legitimately like being in an office and there's no conspiracy to speak of.
As someone who likes being in an office, I personally feel that everyone becoming permanent WFH basement gremlins is a bad thing overall. Human contact is a good thing, and my observations of people who are 100% WFH is that they almost never interact with anyone outside of their household.
In a hilarious and ironic turn of events, at my last job in which I was 100% remote from a different continent, I made an effort to meet my boss in-person for the first time while traveling internationally as a break from the grind. We went out for pizza, and it was completely out of the scope of expectations and purely an effort to play that card and get to know one of my colleagues better. The ironic part is that not had the startup been purchased by a commercial real estate behemoth, but I'd face increasing demands and pressure upon arrival back home, then a layoff. He even paid for the meal even though
it wasn't technically a work expense.
Communication got incredibly toxic from his end; every sentence infused with inexplicable resentment. It was a very confusing result, and now I'm even less likely to bother meeting anyone in the future. I'm happy I avoided burnout by simply ignoring the toxicity, as petulant behaviour probably resulting from stresses in his own life, but still.
80% of my friends are ex-coworkers. Some i even made from WFH. So, I think making friends at work is important, but I'm not sure how much being in-person is necessary.
Granted, I've seen how our developers rarely make friends with each other, so it may be more of a sales/HR/product thing than engineering.
I have to deal with double faced people at work on a daily basis, and usually I have to play the game against my will. I hate a couple of coworkers, and they had ruined my day more than once.
I don't think that kind of human contact is better than spending more time with my wife and kids.
My personal feeling about people eager to go back to the office is that they have empty jobs, but walking around from meeting to meeting, from the water fountain to the coffee machine, and bikeshedding other people's work makes them feel worthy. Of course, they need other people around to have meetings and "work".
Office life and commutes have so completely destroyed our ability to have outside social lives that the solution to not being able to socialize is to go back to the office. Brilliant.
Being forced to interact with people one doesn't like, and having to perform work theater to maintain ones livelihood, is not a good thing for many people.
Besides which, WFH means more time with the family (also human contact) and skipping the commute means more time around people whose presence one actually enjoys.
All that said, I tend to agree with your point that people pushing RTO more due to their personal ideology (which clearly I do not share) rather than some grand conspiracy around real-estate.
I am 100% remote, I socialize after work by playing golf, going to the gym, or going to tech meets. I also get to explore some research topics outside of my day-to-day work by attending some special topic zooms during lunch times. I think the flexibility staves off burnout and helps my problem solving by enabling creativity. If I wasn't remote, I would lose all that to commuting.
The basement gremlin comment is unnecessarily judgemental, especially considering that some people have movie theaters, gyms or marble floored, spa-like basements (yes, even the remote, non-elite ones may have that).
But I respect that other people's way of work is not for me. I just don't mind if someone else goes to the office, and I would just expect the same courtesy.
> In principle it could be straight up targeted propaganda "making" the bosses do that.
More than "in principle", I would be very shocked if many someones were not at least trying very hard to make it happen.
If PR firms can push "suits are cool again" or "maybe chocolate is kinda healthy for you", then they can easily push stuff like "in-office work is better", or "executives like you don't like remote-work".
Companies who own city real estate are getting screwed. This includes all the big tech companies. That real estate is no longer an appreciating asset, and cannot be converted to residential, when the prospect is the collapse of downtowns due to people migrating out to smaller places.
It isn't just companies. For example, one of the most central parts of downtown Seattle is owned by the University of Washington[0], a government institution. Some of their leases are structured as revenue share on the real estate. This is both an asset they borrow against and a source of income.
The big fortune 100 tech companies are also commercial real estate owners and landlords. Look at all the buildings that Amazon owns and subleases in Seattle.
Those executives absolutely have an incentive to be pushing RTO because of their commercial real estate risk.
They also have an outsized bullhorn and the industry tends to watch what they do and report over what they do, and they have PR budgets which can get articles written the way they want. Bezos outright owns the WaPo.
Further down the ladder that PR will land on businesses where it just reinforces the attitudes of management towards RTO and gives them arguments to make in meetings. The people in those meetings don't necessarily have any skin in the commercial real estate game, but if they've spent the past 3 years reading articles about remote work and RTO published in the business press influenced by those who do have a whole lot of skin in the game, how do you attribute causality?
They way I'd look at it is that you can't take it in isolation and you need to step outside of naive root cause analysis that looks at the manager in the company who has no skin in the game and says that they can't possibly be influenced by the commercial real estate issues. For any individual "atom" of a manager in this analysis their own biases will more strongly influence what they're doing, but everyone in that room has been reading the same articles, and industrial propaganda and PR actually is effective at shaping attitudes. They are blowing on the dice, or turning up the temperature, or whatever analogy you like that draws a parallel to statistical mechanics and the bulk behavior of matter in the presence of individual randomness.
It's literally the subject of the article. Empty Corporate Real-estate, offices, is driving a Return to Work effort by those corporations. So many people here are saying it is a 'conspiracy theory' hence not true. Many financial news outlets have reported on this, the properties are public knowledge.
Even Amazon does check its bottom line from time to time. It is possible they do care about hits to it. They aren't so profitable that they don't care about expenses.
Their market cap has swung by 20x that this year. It’s fun to theorize about creepy ulterior motives but doing some basic arithmetic blows the whole thing up.
According to [0], Amazon owns $40B in real estate. Which isn't a lot compared to a $1.4T market cap. OTOH, if the cost of pushing people to RTO is less than $40B it's still worth it.
What do you mean? Unless they plan to sell, all the real estate value does for them is increase their tax burden. It's the companies that lease out commercial real estate that need to maintain prices.
Once companies are established they also tend to insist all their investments are legitimate barriers to entry. I doubt Sears would have lasted as long as it did if people didn't fear its ultimately worthless real estate investments.
Thank you, this is a far more cogent model of the incentives and behaviors in place than all the conspiratorial essays on a boogeyman plurality conspiring against the working class.
> “All of our corporate leaders need to get in the room and say, let’s come up with a minimum,” Adams said in an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, referring to how many days a week employees should be in the office. “If it’s four days a week, it’s four days a week.”
You must not have been long on this world if you don't realize by now that of course most CEOs make decisions based on the same cargo cult nonsense you follow to pick the ultimate in SPA build systems.
Anecdotes about "trust fund kids," asserting a "misguided war on inflation," and a vague conspiracy of unidentified landlords make the post seem more like a rant than serious economic analysis.
The "misguided war on inflation" stood out to me too, because I felt the author is uninformed on economics, or some strain of radical belonging to an economic school of thought I'm not familiar with.
I must say, the past few months have been weird with employment numbers stubbornly staying high regardless of the Fed's efforts as fewer jobs are usually a second-order effect when rates are hiked. I am glad fewer people than expected are currently unemployed.
More content than you might expect, in a variety of “reputable” news outlets as well a veritable plague of blogs, is paid placement. Either through the outlet directly, or through a contributing writer that has (not all that) covert connections to PR firms.
PR pieces are often very subtle and difficult to detect because they tend to be on orthogonal subjects to the intended ”drive by” messaging.
After engaging PR and marketing firms for a few years now and seeing the kind of things that show up on their price lists, I have near zero marginal faith in media as a source of unbiased information. You end up seeing the fingerprints of priming, perverse incentive and commercialised bias in nearly everything.
Why do you think all those article writers write? Few of them are directly compensated.
> How are "the elite" forcing companies that do not own real estate and who rent their office space to mandate RTO?
Well, for one thing, the people who own real estate and the people who run Fortune 500 companies are the same people. What do you think the CxOs and board members do with their money after they cash out their outsized stock grants? Hide it under the mattress? No, they invest it, and often they invest it in whatever's "cool" that year - in this case commercial real estate. Even if the exact same person doesn't have feet in both camps, there are likely to be favors going back and forth between them. So, renting isn't the smartest move for chairperson X's company? That's OK, says building-owner Y. We'll make it up with deals from the other companies I own, or you can get a special bonus when you jump ship to join our other friend Z's company because they owe me a favor.
It's not a conspiracy theory when the possibilities are legion. No coordination is required; it's more of an emergent network-effect kind of thing. I've seen people I know[1] make these kinds of deals. In general they fall below the "breach of fiduciary duty" line, but even when they're clearly crooked they're unlikely to be prosecuted. Even the DAs and such who aren't hoping to walk through the same revolving door lack the resources to prosecute such complex and uncertain cases. They have more career-enhancing things to do. We could argue about how much it happens, or how much it's driving the push for RTO, but the ultra-dismissive tone of some commenters here smells just as fishy as anything coming from the other side of the discussion.
[1] No, not friends. I like my friends moral. But I'm not 100% in control of who moves into my neighborhood, who joins the clubs or engages in the activities I do, etc. Sometimes they mention these things directly, because I can pass as a business-savvy person and they don't even realize these things are wrong. Sometimes I overhear them, because braggarts tend to be loud. If you've never moved beyond the semi-rich techie circle and met people in the really-rich business circle, you might not appreciate just how bad these people tend to be.
Have you traced the networks of company boards where execs often sit on other boards. Or have you traced what entities actually invest in VC funds. Have you looked at relation of investment to massive private equity funds also invested strongly into real estate.
If venture funded companies actually wanted to run efficiently to maximize their investment, the the last thing many should do is setup offices in posh downtown areas, yet before all of this they often signed leases in high rent spaces. Why did you think that happened so often before this wave of remote work?
IIRC, prior to the pandemic, Apple implemented a freeze on leasing new office space in the bay area. Big companies are definitely incentivized to cut down on RE expenses.
Your average line manager is no more elite than you the worker are. Depending on the depth of structure, to get to elites you need to go one or two levels up.
Where did I express any distaste for actually descriptive terms like "bourgeoisie"? Only on the Internet is purposefully misconstruing someone's statement seen as a valid method of communication.
> Where did I express any distaste for actually descriptive terms like “bourgeoisie”?
Who do you think the elite in a capitalist society are? “Elite” is accurate and descriptive, and more common in casual conversation, than, e.g., “haut bourgeoisie”.
(And “bourgeoisie” alone is different, as it includes the petit bourgeoisie, who are both less of an elite, though still one compared to the proletariat, and much less significant in terms of the thing being discussed, control of commercial real-estate.)
Bad take. There are plenty of dumb reasons people are wanted back at the office but the most predominant one is probably that it just "feels like" it will make your company better.
I'd think people would be happy that at least some remote work will never go away at this point. To argue that you should never ever even have to consider going back into an office for any amount of time is just silly. But to also argue you can never ever work from home is also silly.
Most managers were people doing stuff who got promoted into 'managing' stuff with no obvious output or direct value. It's not really surprising that a chain of these people would knee-jerk react weirdly in a situation they felt exposed as not being that useful / have their limited people a management skills tested in a situation they themselves likely didn't experience.
To reframe your argument more charitably, it seems like most people agree that managing a remote team well is probably a lot harder than in person, and we already know that many managers have not even received the training to do well with an in person team. So we should not be surprised if they are not taking this well.
our lab just got dinged by an employee who was trying to hold got another full time job on the down low....something that would have been caught if the work was in person.
Sure, that happens. But if you think that's actually a significant problem (significant enough to abandon all the benefits of allowing workers to work from home), you're gonna need more than an n=1 anecdote to support that take.
And regardless, that sort of thing happens even when employees work in an office. People can certainly get a part time side gig and do that work from their main job's office. Maybe a little more likely to get caught, but it's far from impossible.
Your problem isn’t that this employee got another job, it’s if their performance and work suffers for it. if they somehow are able to do both then your company is lucky they have an incredible employee and should be liking for means to retain them
You are technically correct, but I would posit “secretly holding two full time, demanding, salaried jobs” is an extremely strong predictor for failing to perform sufficiently at either. Given that, it’s a simple matter of weighing those odds against the costs involved in proving it.
One common argument is if you can’t tell their performance is impacted, they must actually be performing adequately. Except, in a different context, we will happily explain how our own performance can’t be measured by number of lines changed or bugs fixed.
As for myself, I'd prefer to not bail out commercial real estate in order to prop up the economies of major metropolitan areas that will be inundated with sea water in the next decade.
close but slight correction.. sea-level rise in 15 years has gone from "cuckoo topic" to carefully monitored via centralized systems with leadership meetings. The best information that I can gather to date suggests that a) active port cities will deploy enough resources to roll with the changes, even if they are very expensive; b) large metropolitan areas generally will do the same, despite large costs; c) there is an unexpected threat to underground sewer and dry infrastructure, due to rising water tables; d) many places that do not have a lot of economics, really will go under water slowly.
Given the track record, a wager that there will be giant bailouts requested is almost a certain win, and that some portion of those bailouts will accompany graft-corruption under the covers. Lots of built infrastructure that was expensive to build in its' day, but not crucial now, will be lost to water.
This argument may not realistically apply to larger companies in the same way, especially those that don't own their office spaces and have longer-term leases of 5-10 years or more. The dynamics are different for larger companies located in major city centers like NYC, where commercial leases tend to be longer term.
Smaller companies with shorter-term leases likely have more flexibility and control over their spaces, so the argument could hold more weight for them. Larger enterprises are more anchored to their existing offices and long-term leases, limiting their ability to quickly shed or change office footprints.
This seems needlessly class-war-monegring. People slack off at home, people slack off in the office. Everyone’s situation is not your situation. Everyone’s work does not look like your work. Some people like/want/need office space to work, some people don’t. Some people find themselves in different camps on different days.
In any case, companies driving RTO are acting in their own perceived best interests, not their landlords. Either they’re so beholden to CRE that their landlords best interests are their best interests (eg some law firms, maybe architects, ?), reasoning against sunk costs of their existing long-term leases, playing some petty power-game, or seeing some actual benefit to hybrid/in-office schedules. Some of those seem more likely than others, but all seem more likely than all managers being part of an elite cabal and doing it as a favor to their elite-cabal friends with CRE interests.
The elites are actively engaging in class war with you. I don’t understand why so many people are so quick to be little foot soldiers for the people that despise their existence.
I don't understand why so many people don't understand the "the elites" consist of multiple people, who don't all have the same incentives. Many elites own commercial real estate and would love rents up. Many elites rent commercial real estate and would love to keep rents down, or close the office entirely to save money on rent.
When class war is invoked too frequently, it’s reasonable to grow suspicious about any one particular invocation without disbelieving the existence of a class war.
Prejudice exists, but if every time a protected class was not hired they shouted “prejudice!” you would not be wrong to question them.
Many of the elements of the claimed class war often struggle to pass basic sniff tests, as well. I like to think critical thinkers are naturally suspicious of grand conspiracy claims, requiring strong evidence and compelling argument.
None of this is to deny your basic premise- perhaps this truly is a manifestation of the class war- but instead to address your question.
the real war against remote work is coming from middle management who can no longer hide under the 'I keep them in line' mantra. Corps have become bloated by too little competition (e.g. from mergers) or collusion, toxic departmental politics, etc. We could lose half of middle management and pay the lowest tier more AND be more producive and profitable in many corps.
My experience feels a lot like middle management has had to work harder to connect and coordinate people with remote because a lot of the sort of organic in-person connections that happened among people at a company isn't happening to the same degree any longer.
The issue with management (and a lot of jobs really) is that there is no ongoing training. You learn what you learn in school, you subscribe to the belief systems that seem good to you, and that is your dogma for your career. Being able to sit down and rethink your entire management approach requires careful studying of both what you are doing, and what the possibilities even are that you can do. How many managers you know do that, basically chose to become a life long learner in this space? If you know anyone like that, just tie your ship to theirs for the rest of your career if you can. Frankly most people don't care enough to be so self critical.
Remote working takes doing things a little bit differently. Its not more challenging, its just different than what people come to know which seems challenging because they are a greenhorn again in this respect. People have been working in distributed teams or decades now. Some people at this point have probably had entire careers from college to retirement on distributed teams. Its not a new thing, its not an uncharted unknown, its not rocket science. The managers claiming it is have simply given up on learning to manage.
I'm still waiting to find out that there are tax implications for having X% of staff in an office building. In particular, if less than, say, 40% of staff is coming into a building, can you still count it as an office building?
But the author thinks making 200k, taking selfies, paid internships and a bunch of other normal stuff for some reason is things only rich people do?
Reads very us vs them classist bullshit. The people that own enough office real estate to care make 8+ figures a year not six. WFH was a thing in certain jobs long before the pandemic and even today a lot of jobs can't be done from home.
I feel like the author doesn't get why the bullshit at office jobs exist. It's almost as if they were very used to hourly low paying jobs (same here) and recently started doing salaried office jobs. When you are paid salary (like the $200k bosses mentioned), you don't get paid by the hour, you don't even get paid for working the hours you have to be in the office, you get paid for results. You show up in the office to be available and visible for "bullshit" your manager or coworkers need in addition to results on assigned tasks. Furthermore, no one, doing any job at all in the world gets paid for the value of their work or their hard work, everyone (including salaried people) get paid for the perceived cost and difficulty of replacing them and to keep them happy enough to not look for other jobs. That's why unions are effective, because they change the variable and now replacing everyone us what the company is facing instead of individuals.
The reality for me is, I get to deal with less in-person bullshit but also I get to be more productive when doing WFH, but the again you have slack/teams/zoom bullshit and interruptions. Whereas before you could at least look busy, now you have to do enough things that show result where bosses won't think you are a slacker.
The main reason you have to look busy in the office is not because managers don't know you are not actually being busy, it is because others who see you slacking will think you never do anything and they stop being productive. But when you are a manager or even working in very small teams, nobody cares about slacking off so long as you are showing results.
the worst part isnt even in the article. Now that companies in places like LA and NYC know productivity doesnt take a hit from remote work, and remote packages are a selling point for hiring managers, they can sunset their leases and walk away from slumlords pushing overpriced office space.
Fortune 10 and 50 companies will probably mandate everyone go back to work because theyre heavily invested in the type of real estate that could crucify them in a crash, but for the 99% of remaining employers the choice is an absolute no brainer. The small architecture firm, the payment processing company, local accountants and underwriters will all ignore the shot across the bow from elites and save a ton of cash in the process.
Its not about if but when at this point. Biden sent all the federal workers back to the office but it isnt going to be enough. Elites are going to take a bite of what could wind up being a nearly trillion dollar shit sandwich they cooked up in their own kitchen.
A university friend of mine is head of a European non-IT company with a an upper five digit number of employees. A few weeks ago we had breakfast and among other things talked about remote working. He points why he wants his people back in office were pretty clear:
- he sees productivity slowly but steadily deteriorating
- especially weaker and new employees are falling behind
- restructuring has become very hard
- employees who cannot work remotely (they have quite a few factories and workshops) feel treated unfair
- he does not give a shit about commercial real estate
Of course this is only anecdotal, but I only know one person who could be called a member of "The Elite" and his views do not support the author's claims.
Correlation is not causation. I do suspect productivity is decreasing but more related to things like “quiet quitting” and myopia from inflation destroying most people’s lives and less so because people are working from home. Hard to stay motivated at work when your living expenses go up 30% but companies keep withholding raises and bonuses because “uncertain economic times”.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 5968 ms ] threadBut of course the reality is tech workers are the plebs too, far closer to the median than to capital elite. Treasured illusions die hard.
Unions enjoy 71% public support and organizing is federally protected activity. The minority isn’t stopping anyone, they can be safely ignored.
(My note: I recognize I will never be obscenely wealthy; it does not appeal to me. The wealthy just try to buy back their soul with charity after leaving a wake of destruction on their journey. I would rather work for autonomy and quality of life for my peers, which if done properly, will lead to a better life for myself)
From my recent experience, unions can't help you keep remote work they way they work here today. I work(ed) at a unionized German company and when management call everyone back to the office after the Covid vaccination was done, it wasn't protested by the unions and everyone sowed up at the office without protest, and remote work was kept as "in case of emergency" perk you can get every now and then if you get approval from your manager beforehand.
Unions here only serve the purpose to intervene in case of major force like discrimination, health and safety, layoffs, working hours, overtime, and the negociate mandatory yearly pay increases based on inflation and company profits, not help you keep your desired perk of not commuting to the office as the office is seen as the mandatory place of work by contract, not your home, so physical presence at work part is usually non-negotiable.
Actually, unions here are relatively against remote work or at least quiet on the topic, as they assume it'll lead to easier off-shoring in the long run (already happening anyway) and the loss of their jobs , so on-site presence of the workforce is considered as an advantage in convincing the company to keep invested in Germany and not move abroad (generals like seeing their soldiers at work where their money is goes).
Plus, the wellbeing of workers in Germany is already considered (at least on paper) to be top notch that mandating remote work for everyone is not considered necessary as "German workers already have it so good".
And with German labor loosing competitiveness, unions are relatively toothless when demanding remote work as there's no government mandate to offer that like it is with working hours, parental leave, etc. and the companies often threaten with relocation/off-shoring when they get demands they don't like so the German government is in no rush to pressure them for new social perks.
So it's up to you to search for a company that's fully WFH, not wait for your union to solve it for you. Unions can work only when they have teeth.
In Germany, the unions function more as partners of the business owners and collaborate together on finding the general compromise that won't disturb company profits or the way the business operates, while in the US it seems like unions must treat the business like antagonists even at the sake of company profits because "all business owners are evil so fuck them".
So even if the US has fewer unions than in Europe, they're generally a lot more powerful, which is why many were infiltrated by the mob.
If my memory serves me correctly the earliest unions in Germany were very similar to the unions in the US, as in they were started from clashes with the business owners, and they were in charge of handling stuff like healthcare and pensions pots of the workers, similar to the unions in north america today.
But the Kaiser saw the growing unions and their pensions pots getting bigger along with their nation wide influence over the working class, as threats to the state's own influence and control over the workers, so he dismantled them and introduced them under the new state pension plan, so the modern state social pension in Germany stems form the Kaiser's fear of the workers' unions. :)
But German unions are also very subservient given their tacit approvals of things like Agenda 2010.
My point exactly. Unions aren't here to fight for even better working conditions for you like mandatory WFH for everyone, but just to overwatch to make sure the company adheres to existing labor regulations. That's it.
So yeah, unions are relatively toothless and the QoL and the living standards of the working class in Germany has been on the decline for a while.
Like humanity itself and other broad categories, saying as a matter of fact that unions can’t do X, when some unions do X, is pretty asinine, almost as much as lumping more than 3B people into “Asians” or other useless categorizations. Particularly if the article doesn’t mention a country of origin being Germany.
You don’t even have to look very far from Germany to find a union negotiating WFH.
https://rfi.fr/en/france/20201205-why-france-is-struggling-t...
https://today.rtl.lu/news/luxembourg/a/1993852.html
Unions in Germany are usually a lot more submissively than in France and rarely fight for gaining new perks, they just look after maintain the existing ones, moistly following the "don't bite the hand that feeds you" mentality.
A knowledge worker who works at home on cloud servers has no spatial nexus to control. All communication between workers is electronically mediated, I guess union organizers can develop a parallel infrastructure, but the workplace itself is a natural place for organizing work to take place.
What amuses me though is that until 1980 or so people thought factory work was the worst kind of work, maybe best expressed in the Ray Davies song "Working At the Factory"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0khnH1qi6M
Once the factories left, however, people realized service work or no work was a lot worse and now a new factory in your town is one of the best things a politician can take credit for.
Workers can try to seize the means of production, but without state support, the police or the military will come shoot and arrest you, like it happened many times in recent history. You need populace and political support for such movements, otherwise you're a terrorist/criminal.
>A knowledge worker who works at home on cloud servers has no spatial nexus to control. All communication between workers is electronically mediated, I guess union organizers can develop a parallel infrastructure, but the workplace itself is a natural place for organizing work to take place.
Knowledge workers have the balance of power in their favor, despite not having ways to physically seize the means of production, but as soon as the individual's knowledge becomes obsolete, commoditized or easily found elsewhere for cheaper, then those workers are shit out of luck if they don't keep up and adapt to a new hot thing.
>Once the factories left, however, people realized service work or no work was a lot worse and now a new factory in your town is one of the best things a politician can take credit for.
Unfortunately, we can't have a well functioning society where everyone is a remote worker. Someone still needs to fix your toilet, teach your kids, drive the train, build new houses, manufacture the stuf you use in your daily life like food and medical supplies.
Sure, you can have all your stuff manufactured offshore and import it, until your manufacturing trading partner has the upper hand and gives you the middle finger because he needs that stuff more urgently or he found a richer buyer, and now you're left wihtout stuff and with a bunch of laptop workers who can't manufacture the stuff you need because that knowledge is not open-source and you since lost all that knowledge over decades of deindustrialization when you gave it to your manufacturing trading partner in exchange for cheap stuff and access to his domestic market.
Sure, executives can call the cloud provider and gain access, but not before significant damage to the business can be done. And regardless, that's not much different than factory workers getting the police called on them by the factory owners.
I think the main issue is that knowledge workers are not organized (and generally look down on the idea of union membership), and don't really have the guts to step out of line like that.
Of course they can. Let's say workers group together and take the website down which tanks the business completely rendering the business owner broke and the workers unemployed. Then what? Who's gonna hire you as part of that grop of revolutionaries who took down a business?
You want unionization per sector with the blessing of legal authorities, and collective protest per industry, not per company.
This will somehow make the employer more competitive, rather than less, and will not in any way incentivize outsourcing and automation at the cost of the domestic jobs in question.
I read it on HN, so it must be true.
I had one employer who would sometimes get stuck in a loop thanking me for what I've done, how embarrassed he was he couldn't pay me more and that he could never do what I did for such little money. I would mock him by listing the instances of terrible things that would have happened if I wasn't there. If he called me right now, years later, I would do what I could to keep his ship afloat just because the idea of having to fire people haunts him in his sleep.
My previous manager asked me to do an extra shift one time. I told him I understand why he asked it but that this must never happen again. Before that I told him that he couldn't just schedule an extra shift but that he should ask me first. If the place burned down around me I would use it to light my cigar after casually tossing my coat over my arm.
Maybe this will spur innovation in building for buildings that can easily be converted between the two.
So why aren't all these companies cutting salary costs by 90%? That's a huge, huge amount of money. The stock price would go berserk. Dividends would soar. The C-suite would see incredible increases on their wealth. So if all these jobs can be done for 90% less, PLUS the savings of having no expensive office lease costs, why aren't they?
But for sure the pandemic has shown that there is also a lot of inertia.
The arbitrage from offshoring is much narrower than most people think. You mostly get what you pay for and companies can easily waste a lot of money and time trying to go the low-cost more-employees route.
Further, timezone-friendly offshoring is about 70-80% of the cost and comes with larger organizational complexity. Good (not mythical 10x, mind you - I mean good by standard definitions) developers are expensive no matter where they live.
I’m guessing you were getting contracted out at minimum 45 USD an hour.
- Time zones - Security - Language barrier - Work culture - Employment laws
And the list goes on.
The devs themselves can be cheap, but by the time you've jumped through many of the hoops to actually get them employed for you - they might not longer be THAT cheap.
There are a few winner take all fields, but there's a plethora of fields which have multiple large players.
At a straight 20% productivity boost in everything, the compounding gains will have you beat competitors in no time.
If you're in software, and you have a magic pill for better everything, you should just do the thing yourself.
The elite can't stop you.
We are still seeing unprecedented housing shortages, which puts a pretty high floor on how much l “downtown” land values will crash.
Leverage and derivatives completely turn this assumption on its head.
I’m not justifying the for-back-to-work, but to point out the vested interests fighting against remote workers.
But it's not unreasonable to assume fear of loss as a motivation, at all. However, what's the link between the people that can actually re-implement work-from-office and those holding all those office buildings?
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/downtown-sf-office-bu... https://www.globest.com/2023/06/07/wells-fargo-sells-san-fra...
You can tear the buildings down and build new ones, but that will take a decade to get permitted, if you're in a construction permissive city.
I'm talking about getting all needed permits.
I mean I'm all for a little elite run the world consipiracy theory but really, I'm supposed to think that a diffuse group of corporate leaders are upending companies so they can spend more on real estate going forward, for class solidarity reasons?
The reason people running companies want to end or curtail remote work is because it's very fucking challenging to run a group of people remotely. It just is. Everyone knows it, it's fucking hard.
There are also a lot of reasons TO do it. It's possible remote is the "better" option on the whole as a comprehensive decision.
But it takes a lot of skilled work to communicate effectively as a manager, it's hard, and if you get it wrong things start to spiral.
It's not confusing AT ALL why people might consider it. Pretty sure everyone who leads a group of people has had at least ONE moment of "god dammit it would be a lot easier if we were just all in the same room" in the recent past.
I'm not sure why people are behaving like it's either 100% remote or 100% in the office, and they are locked in a cage.
There are PLENTY of companies who have decided to become fully remote and remain that way indefinitely. If remote opportunities are important to you and your lifestyle, there are plenty of options for you.
Otherwise, I haven't heard of any company requiring 100% RTO all 5 days of a week. Everyone, even Apple, a company notorious for requiring in-office work, has relented and moved towards hybrid.
A lot of people have very strong personal preferences (though probably mostly not 100% in person) and they're worried that you'll have a boiling the frog slide towards some outcome they really don't want even if they'd be OK with a more nuanced version.
It's very fucking hard to take a relatively random group of people who are used to working together in person, throw them behind screens with little more support than Slack and Zoom, and try to manage them remotely.
It's much easier to take a group of people used to pro-active written communication, "if it's not monitored then it doesn't exist", async-first, https://nohello.net/en/ , actual remote work culture, and manage them remotely.
See, management is about alignment, and alignment is about 80% culture and politics, very little about what actually needs to be done. If you hire people who culturally fit into remote work, you'll have an easier time managing them. If you hire the opposite, it'll be hell. And you can do about as much to change someone's (work) cultural predisposition as you could change someone's (personal identity) culture.
Also everyone has to start somewhere and get their first job, so the idea that you just make sure everyone is really used to remote work seems to be missing some subtlety as a long term plan.
I didn't say I agree with ending remote work, I said it's really easy to understand that there might be quite a few people who sincerely think it's the best way forward.
I also agree that 100% remote work is not this panacea that's always better than going into the office at least some of the time. If my team were local we'd be getting together semi-regularly--especially with travel/in-person meeting budgets tight. While it's not universal, a lot of younger people just out of school seem to struggle with the lack of in-person connections.
Is corporate real estate price the primary driving force? Perhaps not, but it’s certainly a driving force. There’s no shortage of articles and opinion pieces expressly lamenting the state of corporate real estate and businesses that catered to 9-5 office worker.
I’d say the main thing that’s driving RTO is ego. THE FAANGs built multibillion dollar vanity offices right before the pandemic. It’s a personal insult to these CEOs that the monuments to their greatness are empty. This plays out at a smaller scale down the ladder. Many people want to see their “human resources” as an ego trip.
I heard of one tech exec say about RTO, it’s just easier to collaborate when you can grab someone after a meeting for a quick chat. “What am I supposed to do on a video call? Get on another video call?”
Yeah dude. That’s literally what everyone did if you couldn’t just wait for everyone to hang up on the current one.
Saw 4 managers literally walking by their employees desks watching them work. To add insult to injury, there were 4 managers for 12 employees doing this.
Individual contributors, too, but those have a much harder time hiding.
An extrovert schmoozer can afford to not work that much as a manager for a long time.
Just join meetings, write some short docs, etc.
He frequently completely bombards initiatives from within the team with bad faith arguments only to present them as his personal achievements a couple of months later.
When it comes to the areas where the manager is supposed to be useful, like cross team communication, all the work is done by the devs.
An incompetent or checked-out IC is easy to spot. While comparing the relative impact of people on a team is a Hard Problem, setting that someone's just not doing anything is easy.
On the other hand, the metric of success for a manager is how well their team is performing. So if you take an incompetent (or even a complete no-op) manager and assign them to a capable team, the organization gets no signal that the manager isn't part of the formula for that team's success.
There are measures to counteract that (skip levels, for example). But in many places, skip levels are so rarely held, and/or the manager is geographically close to their manager, creating a wide delta in social comfort between the manager and the IC with the skip-level manager. That dissuades ICs from being honest about the situation.
So there's no signal to use to "manage this kind of person out," and since this is a common problem across the whole tech sector, competitors are weighed down by a similar percentage of worthless managers - so their existence doesn't threaten the company's survival.
Manager with be seen as the slur that it should in 50 years.
However this article did not present any evidence of any given group of elites doing this, for this reason, so...
Let's use our influence over corporate decision making to try to get people to use buildings in order to prop up commercial real estate asset prices feels like a bank-shot at best.
Doesn't everyone know that corporations Boards, and C-suit, and Republican donors, etc, etc, etc.. All vacation together, meet together, perhaps even chug beers with Supreme Court Justices together.
Does the author really need to 'prove' this in order to reference it???
This whole post is people arguing about what level of 'coordination' does it take before we can call it a 'conspiracy'. There isn't any 'conspiracy', it's just friendly chatting and innuendo, but of course there is a common 'problem with a solution we should perhaps generally steer towards (wink)'.
On the human level, sure. On the level of "fundamental economic system" (which is, I believe, the line of discussion), there really aren't.
They're both WEIRD countries with market based-economies and a social safety net. They both end up at the top of the lists on economic power (adjusted for population).
The differences between them are political fine-tuning of the system to target an extra 5-10% of the population with the safety net, or to target those people in different ways. That's incredibly minor in terms of economic systems.
When comparing two different economic systems, you tend to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and "percentage of the population involved in subsistence farming".
> When comparing two different economic systems, you tend to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and "percentage of the population involved in subsistence farming".
There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of subsistence farming.
I disagree. When laid against things like the end of mercantilism, I don't think that qualifies as transformative.
I think the effects would look pretty much like the existing US system, because Denmark looks pretty close to the current US system by the standards we're talking about. If you want to argue they'd be fundamentally different, you can make a case, but I'd like to know why they would produce different results.
> There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of subsistence farming.
Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long.
This is not correct. Under, for example, the Roman Empire, privately held land was routinely leased to free men, either for a share of the produce (métayage) or for a fixed fee. This practice lasted hundreds of years. The end of subsistence farming has everything to do with technology and nothing at all to do with capitalism.
In the eigth century in France, around 50% of the land was under a sharecropping-like system, too. This page, and the page in French wiki it links in the intro, give a good rundown of capitalist-like subsistence farming in antiquity and the middle ages : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metayage
Or, to put it another way, the large landowners you're referring to, also had large armies, the largest armies around by definition, otherwise they wouldn't have owned that land. They _were_ the state in their area, in the modern sense.
That's not private ownership of the means of production.
Roman landowners did not own their land by stealing it from other citizens with large armies. They owned their land by either receiving it from the state as payment, or by buying it. The Roman state had a definite monopoly on violence. In fact, when people commanded armies to take power in Rome, what they were trying to do was to take over the state, and the vast majority of the time those weren't private armies, but State armies that they were misusing.
The Roman state very very much had a monopoly on violence and roman agricultural tenants very very much were renting the landlords privately owned means of production.
Capitalism doesn't magically stop subsistence farming. The advance of science and nothing else makes that possible. The Romans had little interest in advancing fundamental technology because there was no money to be made doing it, and so they never made any advances beyond the domains engineering which were immediately profitable (like weapons and aqueducts and bridges). That's why they made barely any scientific progress in a thousand years.
I call BS here. The Romans basically never had this. During the Republic, you had literal private armies.
And once you get past the Diocletian reforms, the large land owners have enough arms to shield locals from Roman military service. Generally in exchange for service to themselves in agriculture (I believe this is the basis for Europe's system of serfdom).
The type of modern state (or even the concept) we're used to doesn't really emerge until the treaty of Westphalia.
> Capitalism doesn't magically stop subsistence farming.
No, it doesn't. Of course it isn't magic. It just provides an incentive for people to improve things, usually via new technology.
Incentives are surprisingly powerful.
If you can't recognize that the Roman state had a monopoly on violence for the vast majority of its duration I can't help you. Obviously, it got weaker during its terminal decline - that's how state decline works. As soon as the monopoly of violence weakened the Empire started imploding, and indeed when it was healthy the state did enjoy it's monopoly.
The bucellarii, the private armies which were able to rival the Roman state, only became a thing in the late 300s. Rome fell only a hundred years later. For the vast majority of Roman history armies belonged to the State, and any mercenary formations were negligible - the regime you're describing was due to the Empire crumbling and is indeed what led to feudalism.
> The type of modern state (or even the concept) we're used to doesn't really emerge until the treaty of Westphalia.
Westphalia formalized the modern Eufopean state. But there were a great many similar states before, with a monopoly on violence, a defined political system, since ~4000BC. They just didn't bother formalizing what being a state meant.
> No, it doesn't. Of course it isn't magic. It just provides an incentive for people to improve things, usually via new technology.
Technology maybe, and only in the most basic sense, and Rome is the example. In 1100 years of Roman history, not a single basic scientific discovery was made, because it was completely unprofitable. Technology advanced, yes, but soon enough it was limited by the extremely primitive scientific understanding they had, so they barely made any progress for hundreds of years.
> Incentives are surprisingly powerful.
Practical technological is incentivized in every political economy.
Incentives are surprisingly powerful.
That may be your benchmark but it's not mine. I think permanently pulling 30m people out of poverty in the US would be a multi-trillion dollar multi-decade endeavor on the scale of combating climate change (you need housing reforms, education reforms, health care reforms, criminal justice reforms, etc). That may not qualify for you, but it definitely does for me.
> Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long.
Besides being something of a no-true-scotsman, examples are India, Brazil, and Mexico.
One of the problems with this whole "debate" is that defenders of the status quo apply a huge motte and bailey to the definition of "capitalism". Both strawmanning any criticism of it as a rejection of all aspects claimed by capitalism, and also giving capitalism credit for systems that share some aspects of capitalism even though they haven't gone all-in and let capital run roughshod over everything else.
This dynamic is so common it has become a trope - kneejerk cries of "socialism". The original link that kicked off this comment tree was basically doing the same thing in more words.
The distinction between the motte and the bailey is easiest to see when aspects that we associate with capitalism end up in direct opposition to capitalism itself. For example, free markets can be directly opposed to capitalism, like in the context of imaginary property. A capital-centric view says that inventing a new form of capital out of whole cloth is the right thing to do. A market-centric view says that competition should drive the cost of information to within an epsilon of the copying/distribution cost.
This is a fair call-out, given that there's so much drive-by arguing on the internet.
I'm pretty sure I'm using a standard definition, but let me state the definition I'm using just to be as explicit as possible: A system is capitalist if it has private ownership of the means of production.
So, to give an example, a country would be a capitalist country regardless of their tax scheme/welfare spending so long as the means of production were privately held. Another country that nationalized industries (the oil industry is a common one) would be, at the very least, a mixed-economy, regardless of how free their markets are.
Given the above comments on Europe, I would argue that European countries do meet the definition of capitalist for the most part. While some European countries do completely nationalize a handful of industries, it's rare, and the majority of industries are privately owned, even if they are highly regulated.
Meanwhile I'd say most critics of "late stage capitalism" aren't bemoaning the private ownership aspect itself. Rather they're criticizing the wealth concentration, industry consolidation, and government corruption that large accumulations of capital symbiotically buy and benefit from.
But it is wrong. The Chinese government has demonstrated repeatedly that they are the de facto owners of, effectively, all of the wealth in the country.
Meaningful ownership isn't a legal status, it's the power to do... well... whatever you want with the thing in question.
Which I suppose puts ownership (and thus also capitalism) on a spectrum and makes it all messy, but all real life things are messy.
> Meanwhile I'd say most critics of "late stage capitalism" aren't bemoaning the private ownership aspect itself. Rather they're criticizing the wealth concentration, industry consolidation, and government corruption
And they can criticize all of that they want. I'd, frankly, like a less corrupt government along with a more decentralized world. But equating that to capitalism itself is roughly as lazy as the old boomers who think that socialism is when the government does anything.
But capitalism is the only system of economics I'm aware of that doesn't seem to have periodic famines, which I have a vested interest in preventing (I enjoy eating). And until I see serious evidence to the contrary (and several smaller scale experiments), I'm going to keep pushing it.
Comparing absolute numbers isn't fair to China, but look at the percentage of the population that starved in each country during those relative time periods.
They imported Lysenkoism from the soviets (who also had massive famines while implementing it).
Which is one of the reasons it's a bad idea to give control of the means of production to the politicians. There are a lot of things that sound good to a politician, but are a bad idea in practice.
There is plenty of this messiness in the US as well. Which puts the judgement solidly in "I know it when I see it" territory, leaving that definition pretty useless. This is also bordering on giving capitalism credit for the rule of law.
( considering China as capitalist would seem to make for more productive analysis. We can then start criticizing things we don't like about their system within the context of capitalism, rather than othering it and pretending we can't have similar problems )
> But equating [corruption] to capitalism itself is roughly as lazy as the old boomers who think that socialism is when the government does anything.
I'm not drawing this connection lazily in general, but rather due to specific forms of corruption that seem like "private" ownership run amok and are thus reasonable to pin on capitalism itself. I already mentioned imaginary property, which is a form of ownership/capital invented out of whole cloth, under the idea that its better to have more forms of ownership rather than unowned commons. But rather than stopping at creating the general concept, we get things like the DMCA that privilege large accumulators of capital over distributed individual ownership.
There are also our overfinancialized money markets, which have paperclip maximized their way to creating financial assets from of any future rent stream they can. This is backed up by governmental help from the federal reserve supplying an endless stream of money for creating said financial instruments, such that the first-order asset ownership of most of society hardly matters in the larger economic picture.
And I haven't even touched upon "private" entities themselves promulgating paradigms that reject the concept of private ownership (eg "trusted" computing, SaaS/platform sharecropping). Those seem solidly in the realm of capitalism trumping/abhorring free markets and freedom in general.
In a different context I can see myself arguing that these things aren't "true" capitalism (the centralized vs distributed distinction I made elsewhere), and if only the government held truer to the concept of private ownership we'd be in a better spot. But I'm also sympathetic to the argument that mass accumulations of capital will inevitably change the rules of the game to benefit themselves, despite those changes going against other people's private ownership interests. In a way it seems that corrupt legislation and precedents are themselves forms of capital that have been invested in because they facilitate rent streams, at the direct expense of our distributed societal freedom.
The general thrust of my critique is why should we put the philosophical focus on capital itself defaulting to the label of "capitalism"? Why not private property, free markets, the rule of law, personal freedom, etc? It feels like a propaganda push from large centralized capital holders to privilege themselves over those other ideals.
I'd rather go the other way, and give rule of law credit for capitalism. Probably one of its better effects. Capitalism requires an external neutral enforcer (for varying degrees of neutrality, but generally more neutral is better) to enforce property rights. Otherwise you end up with capital owners that need their own security forces, which morph into de facto states (see medieval feudal lords for an example). This state control of the means of production may work well on a 5-10 year period occasionally, but it's disastrous in the long term.
> considering China as capitalist would seem to make for more productive analysis
I think you can look at them in that lens post Deng or so (and they've had significantly fewer famines since then). Although with the recent consolidation of power, I'm not sure if the lens of totalitarianism might yield a better light. The union of political, military, and economic power completely within a single institution has certain properties that don't hold true for any single one of those.
> ...rather due to specific forms of corruption that seem like "private" ownership run amok and are thus reasonable to pin on capitalism itself.
Might I ask you to elaborate on this? Because the failures I see in China tend to pattern match more towards the patronage networks you see crop up in public systems. But I'll admit to not having a perfect understanding of China, and am willing to hear a case be made.
> I already mentioned imaginary property, which is a form of ownership/capital invented out of whole cloth, under the idea that its better to have more forms of ownership rather than unowned commons.
I'll give you this one. Intellectual property is dumb, as there's no scarcity requiring an efficient distribution of goods. You can argue private ownership of (non-intellectual) property is an evil, but I would argue that it is a necessary one (on the level of taxation). And one we get quite a bit of benefit from.
> There are also our overfinancialized money markets, which have paperclip maximized their way to creating financial assets from of any future rent stream they can. This is backed up by governmental help from the federal reserve supplying an endless stream of money for creating said financial instruments, such that the first-order asset ownership of most of society hardly matters in the larger economic picture.
So, I mean... let them fail. They've been trying to fail since the 80s or so with the bond crisis back then, and we keep propping them up. I'm gonna be honest, blaming capitalism for the actions of politicians feels like an unfair slight. Propping up ventures well past their point of usefulness because of political necessity is one of the hallmarks of a politically owned system, not a privately owned one. One that has happened over and over (see the soviet army's capture of the USSR's budget, or Lysenkoism).
You could say that the capitalists pressure the politicians, which is fair on some level, but seems like a symptom of a political system corruption. I would argue that as long as you have that, none of your economic systems are going to do what you want, though I will still argue that being as capitalistic as possible will, generally, still perform the best.
> But I'm also sympathetic to the argument that mass accumulations of capital will inevitably change the rules of the game to benefit themselves
This is probably the best argument here. Nobody, least of all me, argues that capitalists are supremely ethical. In fact amorality is generally one of the big points of it. There does need to be some sort of external arbiter.
I guess, the general avenue of my counter-argument is that it works well. Sure, it has downsides, but we have billions of lives riding on this. Show me a system that has a decently scaled example of working better.
> why should we put the philosophical focus on capi...
I know a fair bit about about the housing shortage for instance, and it's not "capitalism". It's a specific set of rules and institutions that cause the problem.
To me, the root causes of the housing crisis are zoning and the endless supply of newly created money from the Federal Reserve. Both of these policies are direct results of those who own housing (aka capital owners) politically insisting that the value of their "investments" continually go up. That's capital acting on the meta-system to optimize for capital itself. It's sensible to lay the blame for this on capitalism itself, and doing so doesn't mean I'm looking to somehow blow away the entire system in favor of some completely different -ism.
I'd personally make my own distinction of centralized capitalism versus distributed capitalism. But that's more of a constructive argument of how to specifically reform the system, while still sharing the general criticism.
- there are big differences between US capitalism and European social democracy
- European social democracies are trending more socialist all the time
> European countries are capitalist, not socialist, and got where they are by being so.
Ehhhh communist movements, multiple devastating wars, and unions had a hand in it too.
Eh? Which ones? As a European this is very much news to be; not much seizing of the means of production going on. If anything, some divesting of the means of production; heavily regulated privatisation of state energy, transport etc monopolies has been going on all over Western Europe for a while.
I realise that in the US, the colloquial definition of ‘socialist’ these days is more or less “not actively going around kicking poor people”, but the idea that Europe is becoming more socialist by any reasonable definition is a bit out there.
No, you are seeing governments force green policies against the will of the majority.
This is a ranking of economic freedom which strongly aligns with capitalism. The U.S. ranks 25th behind European countries like Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Iceland, etc.
Anytime this point comes up, someone on the right/Republican will say any taxation is Socialism, that Europe is Socialist. So, to compare Europe/Nordic socialist policies, to US policies is not a large leap. You can't just say, "well technically that isn't really socialism so we can't use that as an example in this argument", when literally for a decade the 'right' has specifically called them socialist.
Nonsensical strawman. Socialism has a real meaning and "taxation" isn't it.
I know this, but there is 50/50 chance that whoever is posting on the internet does not know it.
And Republicans argue that both are socialism.
Half of the country thinks "anything the government does is socialism" and campaigns to stop it, or get rid of it, or handicaps it, or how it is just evil and control.
Basically to the right: 'government' = 'socialism'. And they haven't realized yet they are arguing for anarchy.
I thought republicans wanted to strengthen borders?
I do not follow US politics, but I never heard anyone advocating that taxation should be abolished. Seems a bizarre claim. Here in Germany parties publish the platforms they are running on, is there something similar in the US?
https://www.lp.org/issues/taxes/
https://www.lp.org/news-press-releases-libertarian-party-don...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_as_theft
Libertarians typically don't get a candidate into the election, so they end up voting Republican.
In the Venn Diagram, Libertarians are a sub-set of Republicans.
Republican views are also administration dependent.
If there is a Democratic President then Republicans think government is evil, socialist and place a high value on reducing the debt, reducing the size of government.
But if a Republican is president, then debt no longer matters, increasing spending on defense, walls, and having a 'strong government of law and order' is the priority. So debt is ok, and the bigger the gov the better. It's a bit schizophrenic.
But, agree, not relevant to the original story. Just a little.
The original story was about 'elites'. In the US, any conversation on that subject gets wrapped up in different opinions on who the 'elite's are, and if they are Socialist. One side thinks the 'elite's are Socialist, the other side think the 'elite's are corporate CEO's.
This thread digressed to the discussion of Socialism (not the academic definition), and I was just following along with that tangent.
About the republicans calling taxation socialism. Zero evidence of that.
They are Republicans.
https://www.lp.org/issues/taxes/
https://www.lp.org/news-press-releases-libertarian-party-don...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_as_theft
Then it should be trvial to link to a republucan publication/website/statemrent claiming the same thing.
To be honest I think you are just making stuff up.
I started searching and had dozen hits, and was like "wait, why do I have to search for this person, this is a troll at this point".
It has been in debates, articles, arguments. Like non-stop for 6 years. It was in the Republican debates. You go look it up.
Seems like being extra pedantic now , "well, they didn't mean it, those other links don't count, show me the official Republican documentation".
More of an academic point though, as Europe, as a whole, is still basically completely capitalist under this definition as well.
Edit: An example of a socially-owned company that is not state-owned would be an employee owned company.
> 1982 François Mitterrand's proposals in the 110 Propositions for France and alliance with Jean-Pierre Chevènement's Socialist Party faction CERES, committed France to an explicitly socialist ‘rupture with capitalism’. Full nationalisation (100%): the Compagnie Générale d'Electricité, the Compagnie Générale de Constructions Téléphoniques, Pechiney-Ugine-Kuhlmann, Rhône-Poulenc, Saint-Gobain-Pont-à-Mousson, Thompson-Brandt. Partial nationalisation (51%+): Dassault, Honeywell-Bull, Matra, Roussel-Uclaf, Sacilor, Usinor. Thirty-nine banks, two financial houses, and the remaining 49% of the SNCF were also nationalised, taking the size of the French state to unprecedented levels within a year of Mitterrand's election as president in 1981.
Clearly that is not the case in any European country.
>Dassault
Literally family owned.
I don't think you realize just how capitalist European countries really are. State owned corporations are usually quite rare and generally known for being run extremely badly. On the other hand many of the largest corporations are still controlled by the families of their founders.
>they're trending more Socialis
Indeed. More and more ridicolous taxes and less and less useful social investments.
It is not an easy comparison.
They have the luxury of the US taxpayers taking care of their defense while they propped up Russia, which US is also paying the most by a large margin to fix now [1, 2, 3]. Hilariously US socialists are against US defense spending except when it comes to US spending on Europe.
They also have the luxury of oil money which American "socialists" are totally against [4].
All in all, a pretty neat scam if you ask me.
[1] https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/88764 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKEycjREgPE [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_aid_to_Ukrain...
[4] https://www.barrons.com/news/norway-earns-record-oil-gas-rev....
Edit: All of what I say is objective. Luxurious Western Europe and Nordic "socialism" can't survive without gullible US taxpayers footing the bill over decades.
EDIT: how could I forget Trump's undermining of NATO, cozying up to Russia, and withholding aid to Ukraine?
2. All I am saying is socialism that exists due to the benevolence of capitalism and exploiting nature is not real socialism and is not sustainable.
3. > how could I forget Trump's undermining of NATO, cozying up to Russia, and withholding aid to Ukraine
Wasn't Trump the one who warned the snickering Europeans against Russia? Even if that is the case, it doesn't go against my point #2.
Just because there is a lot of noise being made about anti-racism in the US doesn't mean it's the most progressive country in the world. It just means that a lot of noise is being made there.
To my mind, this is more a systems-level description of currents in capital. Yes, there's a clickbaity headline about 'elites', but if you think more in terms of wealth doing things of its own accord (similar to how e.g. Dawkins got us talking about selfish genes -- selfish dollars?) then this observation might cash out after all.
That said, I do agree that the editorial style of the article is needlessly conspiratorial --- it likely appeals strongly to leftists (like me) who see and sense that capital flows and floes seem to have a mind of their own, but who (unlike me) think this requires smoky backroom deals.
Corporations have an incentive to not lose money on real estate that they’ve already purchased, whether or not they have employees warming that space.
Landlords have an incentive to make money through rent, but they can’t really exert pressure on corporations to rent the space landlords own.
Where is the chain of incentives?
But there is direct evidence that politicians are influencing corporations to alter return to office policies:
- Mayor of SF asking businesses to pledge to implement RTO policies: https://sfist.com/2022/03/03/mayor-breed-would-like-you-back...
- Mayor of NYC basically doing the same: https://archive.is/si6xd
But no evidence that this is related to property values alone or even in large part. SF is desperate to ensure the downtown does not enter a full-on doom loop which would impact all businesses as well as anyone who lives there or visits regularly. [0] Other knock-on effects include BART facing severe financial problems due to low ridership. They want people back any way they can get them so San Francisco does not end up like Detroit.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-francisco-crime-downtown-do...
Here's another related one: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/02/17/new-york-c...
I don't see how this is different from consensus among actors, or rather it looks the same.
The label or attribute conspiracy is a tool used to discredit findings or positive correlations.
I see now that you think elite is overloaded and programmed to have conspiracy relation. This is not true though according to m-w: "a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence".
If you pay attention to main stream media, you will see almost all forms of dissent attributed to conspiracy.
A lot of financial news outlets have been pointing out the risk of corporate real estate risks.
Making the connection to back-to-office doesn't have to be a coordinated conspiracy.
It just has to be a few middle managers being like "Hey Bob in Dev, this is Steve from Operations, I'm in a real bind with the empty office on 5th, can you see about filling it. Sure Man."
Real estate like that is actually (well, in the olden days) an appreciating long-term asset as well as a well-lobbied avenue for balance sheet games. Commercial real estate is subject to yearly depreciation, unlike your home. It can be somewhat arbitarily valued or devalued (see the games that Trump plays with real estate and taxes, sorry to introduce some politics), but generally real estate is tangible and appreciates long term.
Although if a company has a RECENTLY constructed office then it very much is a sunk cost, because the depreciation is on a 10 or 20 year schedule (don't remember exactly) and hasn't appreciated, and of course they haven't gotten the actual "house workers who make money for you" return. SO I agree with that. And of course all the companies don't want to see their already-depreciated by market appreciated values collapse under them. They want more sucker startups to but their appreciated properties once their business model ages.
Now, I guess we'll see how much the author's contention of a bubble/apocalypse plays out, but we'll know if office tower -> housing becomes a recurring thing. It wasn't with dilapidated malls, although it probably should have been.
As hinted at, the masters of office space are very well integrated with local politicians and the pork train. It's one of the pillars of local politics and local corruption. They'll try to find ways to get tax breaks or find a bigger sucker (like the local government!) to take on the burden or bail them out.
He’s just a myopic asshole.
When other important people line up with Musk it is not because they are sipping whisky together, instead they are lining up like iron filings in the field of a magnet.
The author is either a straight up liar working to subvert what little is left of American capitalism. Or they're a conspiracy theory whacko who doesn't know the slightest thing about "the elite," or any of the people/factions that comprise it.
Since the article is in line with what you said, coordination could be through commissioning a Harvard writer, or lobbying, or regulation, either way it isn't explicitly stated. I get the impression that you are arguing against a point of view that you are assuming.
This is clearly you, reading (a lot) into what she said, and then reacting to your own pre-formed perceptions of an argument you think she made.
Kind of like when people get into internal mental arguments with fictional others, and start talking to themselves. Then getting so wound up they blurt something out of context, or march on the capital.
From the article:
>"It’s about real estate"
>"Corporate landlords currently hold $1.2 trillion in loans on office towers all over the country"
It is being a bit pedantic to argue around what a 'CRE Investor' IS. Who 'owns' versus who has a 'lease' since the 'lease' is still a debt obligation. And you don't have to be specifically a 'CRE Investor', you just need to own or lease a lot of CRE to be impacted.
Here is better response from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37113486
-> Corporations own a lot of corp-real-estate
-> that corp-real-estate is now empty and under-utilized
-> this could lead to a corp-real-estate market crash
-> SO companies have a 'Motivation' to require people to return to the office to fill those offices.
She cited other sources.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/500-billion-office-real-estat...
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1174938708/commercial-real-es...
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/empty-office-buildi...
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/06/1174468821/companies-are-defa...
That is exactly what is meant. I'm sorry if it really needs to be spelled out like leading a horse to water. It was the point of the entire article, even if there was not a specific sentence clearly equating a=b. There were links to other backing documents. Maybe she could have drawn the line a little more clearly, but it was a short piece, maybe she didn't think she needed to make it a big thesis.
For "elites". Is it "Marxist-Charged"? It is a little funny to be re-defining the term again, given that for 6 years Republicans have been using it as a derogatory term for "educated liberals", not for "Corporate America". Now all of a sudden, if someone uses the term "Elite" to refer to "Corporate America", now that makes them Marxist by besmirching "Corporate America"?
I do agree. It is hard to communicate in this day and age when words change meaning from month to month, and the Left/Right are working with different definitions.
Any definition of 'Elites', in any conversation gets wrapped up in different opinions on who the 'Elite's are. One side thinks the 'Elite's are Socialist, educated liberals, the other side think the 'Elite's are corporate CEO's.
Depending on your side, you get triggered in the opposite direction.
I know you believe this and there's nothing I can do to change your mind. You do you, but nothing you say with your ridiculous leaps of logic and assumptions will change my choice to read it in the most direct and logical way.
But don't think that your ultra-literal reading is more 'correct' for being literal.
When someone says it is a 'blue moon' this month, do you get upset when it isn't blue?
I think we both know you have an axe to grind, and are just as extremely biased in one direction as you think I am biased in the other direction.
Best wishes on becoming more self aware. The world needs it.
>>> "a Marxist-charged one like "the elites," most often used for the purpose of throwing shit in the fan of corporate America, rather than arguing genuine points."
(Actually, I'm beginning to suspect this is a Troll, hard to tell these days. Let me know if this was just a long joke.)
Unlike the caricature naive people believe it to be, such real world conspiracies seldom are about some shady guys meeting in a secret underground lair. That's so third world coup style.
More like a huge net, cast by powerful people scratching each other's back, lobbying, advertising, and PR budgets, the media getting on with the program, and of course politicians, middle managers, academics, journalists, and other such types quickly figuring out the right things to say and the right signals to sent that would advance their careers - and trying to whip the majority into going there to.
Biden was told by elites this was about to become a trillion dollar shit sandwich for the economy during a rocky period of high inflation and stagnation. He symbolically called all the federal workers back into offices (already owned by the government) as a show of "the right thing to do" but otherwise any company outside the fortune 50 will absolutely use this as an opportunity to tell their landlord to pound sand.
There is nothing that can be done.
In the future as the leases expire we may see shrinking and a slow return to more remote work as companies reduce the square footage of the leases.
Smart managers know that eliminating rent from balance sheets improves the bottom line.
I have no idea if the reality is more that, or more the banal "nobody is organising anything like this and suggestions to the contrary are just conspiracy theories, the bosses genuinely believe what they're saying".
I currently have a boss who appears to sincerely want people back in the office; he doesn't want to be the CEO of a 100% remote company.
As someone who likes being in an office, I personally feel that everyone becoming permanent WFH basement gremlins is a bad thing overall. Human contact is a good thing, and my observations of people who are 100% WFH is that they almost never interact with anyone outside of their household.
Good thing that there are these things called friends, which usually aren’t forced on people like work colleagues are.
Maybe workplaces would be more meritocratic if people didn't base promotions on who they like to go out for a beer with.
Communication got incredibly toxic from his end; every sentence infused with inexplicable resentment. It was a very confusing result, and now I'm even less likely to bother meeting anyone in the future. I'm happy I avoided burnout by simply ignoring the toxicity, as petulant behaviour probably resulting from stresses in his own life, but still.
I'm not saying forced daily association is the way to make them friends, but you can see the logic behind trying to encourage it.
Granted, I've seen how our developers rarely make friends with each other, so it may be more of a sales/HR/product thing than engineering.
It’s a firms way to gain productivity. Especially after preventing you from socializing near your home.
Wow, uh, maybe we should be against team building in principle.
Professionalism and trust result in more productivity - not necessarily friendship
I don't think that kind of human contact is better than spending more time with my wife and kids.
My personal feeling about people eager to go back to the office is that they have empty jobs, but walking around from meeting to meeting, from the water fountain to the coffee machine, and bikeshedding other people's work makes them feel worthy. Of course, they need other people around to have meetings and "work".
Office life and commutes have so completely destroyed our ability to have outside social lives that the solution to not being able to socialize is to go back to the office. Brilliant.
Besides which, WFH means more time with the family (also human contact) and skipping the commute means more time around people whose presence one actually enjoys.
All that said, I tend to agree with your point that people pushing RTO more due to their personal ideology (which clearly I do not share) rather than some grand conspiracy around real-estate.
It’s allowed me time to volunteer at both the local library and my son’s school.
I’ve grown to become friends with two of my neighbors after living beside them for 8+ years. None of that would be possible if I were still commuting.
But I suppose we all have our anecdotes. You just seem to think yours are applicable to everyone.
That's not really representative of what it could be.
The basement gremlin comment is unnecessarily judgemental, especially considering that some people have movie theaters, gyms or marble floored, spa-like basements (yes, even the remote, non-elite ones may have that).
But I respect that other people's way of work is not for me. I just don't mind if someone else goes to the office, and I would just expect the same courtesy.
More than "in principle", I would be very shocked if many someones were not at least trying very hard to make it happen.
If PR firms can push "suits are cool again" or "maybe chocolate is kinda healthy for you", then they can easily push stuff like "in-office work is better", or "executives like you don't like remote-work".
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Tract_(Seattle)
Those executives absolutely have an incentive to be pushing RTO because of their commercial real estate risk.
They also have an outsized bullhorn and the industry tends to watch what they do and report over what they do, and they have PR budgets which can get articles written the way they want. Bezos outright owns the WaPo.
Further down the ladder that PR will land on businesses where it just reinforces the attitudes of management towards RTO and gives them arguments to make in meetings. The people in those meetings don't necessarily have any skin in the commercial real estate game, but if they've spent the past 3 years reading articles about remote work and RTO published in the business press influenced by those who do have a whole lot of skin in the game, how do you attribute causality?
They way I'd look at it is that you can't take it in isolation and you need to step outside of naive root cause analysis that looks at the manager in the company who has no skin in the game and says that they can't possibly be influenced by the commercial real estate issues. For any individual "atom" of a manager in this analysis their own biases will more strongly influence what they're doing, but everyone in that room has been reading the same articles, and industrial propaganda and PR actually is effective at shaping attitudes. They are blowing on the dice, or turning up the temperature, or whatever analogy you like that draws a parallel to statistical mechanics and the bulk behavior of matter in the presence of individual randomness.
LOL.
It's literally the subject of the article. Empty Corporate Real-estate, offices, is driving a Return to Work effort by those corporations. So many people here are saying it is a 'conspiracy theory' hence not true. Many financial news outlets have reported on this, the properties are public knowledge.
Even Amazon does check its bottom line from time to time. It is possible they do care about hits to it. They aren't so profitable that they don't care about expenses.
Their market cap has swung by 20x that this year. It’s fun to theorize about creepy ulterior motives but doing some basic arithmetic blows the whole thing up.
That is definitely a large enough percentage to take seriously and not call this 'Pizza Gate'.
[0] https://azbigmedia.com/real-estate/how-much-land-does-amazon...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-30/wall-stre...
> “All of our corporate leaders need to get in the room and say, let’s come up with a minimum,” Adams said in an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, referring to how many days a week employees should be in the office. “If it’s four days a week, it’s four days a week.”
You must not have been long on this world if you don't realize by now that of course most CEOs make decisions based on the same cargo cult nonsense you follow to pick the ultimate in SPA build systems.
Perhaps the author missed "US inflation means families are spending $709 more per month than two years ago" here at HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37112604
I must say, the past few months have been weird with employment numbers stubbornly staying high regardless of the Fed's efforts as fewer jobs are usually a second-order effect when rates are hiked. I am glad fewer people than expected are currently unemployed.
More content than you might expect, in a variety of “reputable” news outlets as well a veritable plague of blogs, is paid placement. Either through the outlet directly, or through a contributing writer that has (not all that) covert connections to PR firms.
PR pieces are often very subtle and difficult to detect because they tend to be on orthogonal subjects to the intended ”drive by” messaging.
After engaging PR and marketing firms for a few years now and seeing the kind of things that show up on their price lists, I have near zero marginal faith in media as a source of unbiased information. You end up seeing the fingerprints of priming, perverse incentive and commercialised bias in nearly everything.
Why do you think all those article writers write? Few of them are directly compensated.
Well, for one thing, the people who own real estate and the people who run Fortune 500 companies are the same people. What do you think the CxOs and board members do with their money after they cash out their outsized stock grants? Hide it under the mattress? No, they invest it, and often they invest it in whatever's "cool" that year - in this case commercial real estate. Even if the exact same person doesn't have feet in both camps, there are likely to be favors going back and forth between them. So, renting isn't the smartest move for chairperson X's company? That's OK, says building-owner Y. We'll make it up with deals from the other companies I own, or you can get a special bonus when you jump ship to join our other friend Z's company because they owe me a favor.
It's not a conspiracy theory when the possibilities are legion. No coordination is required; it's more of an emergent network-effect kind of thing. I've seen people I know[1] make these kinds of deals. In general they fall below the "breach of fiduciary duty" line, but even when they're clearly crooked they're unlikely to be prosecuted. Even the DAs and such who aren't hoping to walk through the same revolving door lack the resources to prosecute such complex and uncertain cases. They have more career-enhancing things to do. We could argue about how much it happens, or how much it's driving the push for RTO, but the ultra-dismissive tone of some commenters here smells just as fishy as anything coming from the other side of the discussion.
[1] No, not friends. I like my friends moral. But I'm not 100% in control of who moves into my neighborhood, who joins the clubs or engages in the activities I do, etc. Sometimes they mention these things directly, because I can pass as a business-savvy person and they don't even realize these things are wrong. Sometimes I overhear them, because braggarts tend to be loud. If you've never moved beyond the semi-rich techie circle and met people in the really-rich business circle, you might not appreciate just how bad these people tend to be.
If venture funded companies actually wanted to run efficiently to maximize their investment, the the last thing many should do is setup offices in posh downtown areas, yet before all of this they often signed leases in high rent spaces. Why did you think that happened so often before this wave of remote work?
You think commercial real estate isn’t disproportionately owned, directly or indirectly, by the narrow haut bourgeoisie?
Who do you think the elite in a capitalist society are? “Elite” is accurate and descriptive, and more common in casual conversation, than, e.g., “haut bourgeoisie”.
(And “bourgeoisie” alone is different, as it includes the petit bourgeoisie, who are both less of an elite, though still one compared to the proletariat, and much less significant in terms of the thing being discussed, control of commercial real-estate.)
I'd think people would be happy that at least some remote work will never go away at this point. To argue that you should never ever even have to consider going back into an office for any amount of time is just silly. But to also argue you can never ever work from home is also silly.
Most managers were people doing stuff who got promoted into 'managing' stuff with no obvious output or direct value. It's not really surprising that a chain of these people would knee-jerk react weirdly in a situation they felt exposed as not being that useful / have their limited people a management skills tested in a situation they themselves likely didn't experience.
And regardless, that sort of thing happens even when employees work in an office. People can certainly get a part time side gig and do that work from their main job's office. Maybe a little more likely to get caught, but it's far from impossible.
One common argument is if you can’t tell their performance is impacted, they must actually be performing adequately. Except, in a different context, we will happily explain how our own performance can’t be measured by number of lines changed or bugs fixed.
I think we can do better.
Given the track record, a wager that there will be giant bailouts requested is almost a certain win, and that some portion of those bailouts will accompany graft-corruption under the covers. Lots of built infrastructure that was expensive to build in its' day, but not crucial now, will be lost to water.
Smaller companies with shorter-term leases likely have more flexibility and control over their spaces, so the argument could hold more weight for them. Larger enterprises are more anchored to their existing offices and long-term leases, limiting their ability to quickly shed or change office footprints.
In any case, companies driving RTO are acting in their own perceived best interests, not their landlords. Either they’re so beholden to CRE that their landlords best interests are their best interests (eg some law firms, maybe architects, ?), reasoning against sunk costs of their existing long-term leases, playing some petty power-game, or seeing some actual benefit to hybrid/in-office schedules. Some of those seem more likely than others, but all seem more likely than all managers being part of an elite cabal and doing it as a favor to their elite-cabal friends with CRE interests.
The denial is strong in some people.
Prejudice exists, but if every time a protected class was not hired they shouted “prejudice!” you would not be wrong to question them.
Many of the elements of the claimed class war often struggle to pass basic sniff tests, as well. I like to think critical thinkers are naturally suspicious of grand conspiracy claims, requiring strong evidence and compelling argument.
None of this is to deny your basic premise- perhaps this truly is a manifestation of the class war- but instead to address your question.
Remote working takes doing things a little bit differently. Its not more challenging, its just different than what people come to know which seems challenging because they are a greenhorn again in this respect. People have been working in distributed teams or decades now. Some people at this point have probably had entire careers from college to retirement on distributed teams. Its not a new thing, its not an uncharted unknown, its not rocket science. The managers claiming it is have simply given up on learning to manage.
But the author thinks making 200k, taking selfies, paid internships and a bunch of other normal stuff for some reason is things only rich people do?
Reads very us vs them classist bullshit. The people that own enough office real estate to care make 8+ figures a year not six. WFH was a thing in certain jobs long before the pandemic and even today a lot of jobs can't be done from home.
I feel like the author doesn't get why the bullshit at office jobs exist. It's almost as if they were very used to hourly low paying jobs (same here) and recently started doing salaried office jobs. When you are paid salary (like the $200k bosses mentioned), you don't get paid by the hour, you don't even get paid for working the hours you have to be in the office, you get paid for results. You show up in the office to be available and visible for "bullshit" your manager or coworkers need in addition to results on assigned tasks. Furthermore, no one, doing any job at all in the world gets paid for the value of their work or their hard work, everyone (including salaried people) get paid for the perceived cost and difficulty of replacing them and to keep them happy enough to not look for other jobs. That's why unions are effective, because they change the variable and now replacing everyone us what the company is facing instead of individuals.
The reality for me is, I get to deal with less in-person bullshit but also I get to be more productive when doing WFH, but the again you have slack/teams/zoom bullshit and interruptions. Whereas before you could at least look busy, now you have to do enough things that show result where bosses won't think you are a slacker.
The main reason you have to look busy in the office is not because managers don't know you are not actually being busy, it is because others who see you slacking will think you never do anything and they stop being productive. But when you are a manager or even working in very small teams, nobody cares about slacking off so long as you are showing results.
Fortune 10 and 50 companies will probably mandate everyone go back to work because theyre heavily invested in the type of real estate that could crucify them in a crash, but for the 99% of remaining employers the choice is an absolute no brainer. The small architecture firm, the payment processing company, local accountants and underwriters will all ignore the shot across the bow from elites and save a ton of cash in the process.
Its not about if but when at this point. Biden sent all the federal workers back to the office but it isnt going to be enough. Elites are going to take a bite of what could wind up being a nearly trillion dollar shit sandwich they cooked up in their own kitchen.
- he sees productivity slowly but steadily deteriorating
- especially weaker and new employees are falling behind
- restructuring has become very hard
- employees who cannot work remotely (they have quite a few factories and workshops) feel treated unfair
- he does not give a shit about commercial real estate
Of course this is only anecdotal, but I only know one person who could be called a member of "The Elite" and his views do not support the author's claims.