With all the talk of the impending fertility crisis, I very much believe that WFH helps significantly.
1) It makes parenting easier by letting the parent be more present. 2) It allows parents to buy houses with more bedrooms and more greenspace further from expensive cities. 3) It allows workers to stay in one location for a long time, helping form community.
It's probably too simplistic to just look at a global average. Developed countries (largely Western and Asian ones) have fertility rates well below their replacement levels, while sub-Saharan African nations (many of which are on food aid) have fertility well above replacement levels. These don't cancel one another out in terms of effects on humanity. Not economically, not culturally, not geopolitically.
> FWIW it's a fertility "crisis", not the. Globally, the fertility rate exceed the replacement rate -- there are plenty of people being born.
Right now. IIRC, current projections are for global populations to start to decline before the end of the century, and I think fall sharply in the next. I think only sub-Saharan Africa is the only region that reproduces at much greater than replacement rate, and even there birthrates are declining. Formerly high reproduction rate places like India are now at replacement rate, and their birthrates are continuing to fall.
There isn't a definitive statement that can be made about fertility crisis. The number of 2.1 as the replacement rate is based on some estimate of human labor output. This could very well be lower in reality (i.e humans can be more efficient with technology that is not currently reflected in economics)
I always understood 2.1 to be the replacement rate because it would be two children to 'replace' two parents, with the 0.1 being to cover the inevitable deaths of a person before reproducing or for infertility.
>The number of 2.1 as the replacement rate is based on some estimate of human labor output.
Replacement rate has to do with keeping the actual population number stable, not labor output whatsoever. It's 2.1 instead of just 2 because of infertility, child mortality (and mortality before reproducing generally), etc.
It has literally nothing to do with robots or efficient labor. Any TFR lower than ~2.1 will result in the total population shrinking.
> houses with more bedrooms
> further from .. cities
> low-carbon to boot
those seem contradictory. How can a suburban/exurban sprawl be low carbon? And even if WFH workers don't drive themselves, someone still needs to drive to ship their Amazon deliveries to their homes or to move groceries and gas to nearby stores.
Lower population density does not necessarily equate to higher carbon footprint, especially when commuting downtown for work has been eliminated. Above a certain point density has diseconomies of scale of its own.
For example, if you are comparing, say, a three bedroom house in a large metropolitan area versus a four bedroom house in a small town, the reduced total driving time because driving distances are less in the small town (everything is in town, but town is tiny) can make up for a lot of efficiencies of scale.
The common argument is that we should put people into apartments instead, but that isn't always a clear total system win. For example if somebody is really into fishing letting them live near a lake with space to store their own boat will be more carbon efficient than stuffing them into an apartment where every weekend they drive to the storage place on the outskirts of town to pick their boat up, then drive three hours or so to the lake.
The argument for coming back to the office is flimsy. It’s framed as fairness but in reality it is not about that. Different jobs have different downsides and different perks. She claims that because sanitation workers can’t work from home neither should anyone else. Why not take away chairs for some more added fairness?
> Parker has also made clear she wants the city’s return-to-office plan to be a model for private-sector employers, part of her effort to make a more economically vibrant Philadelphia.
At least they're being honest (as honest as a politician can be, I suppose) about what this is really about - a stimulus package for downtown businesses and landlords.
For an additional layer of irony, apparently she said during her campaign, quote "I'm uniquely prepared to make the city the safest, cleanest, greenest big city in the nation with access to economic opportunity for all". I fail to see how forcing people to commute (public transport or not) achieves anything but the opposite, but perhaps I just don't see the genius in that.
And while commuting might account for some fraction of the added footprint, larger houses mean more heating/cooling and larger sprawl means someone is driving to deliver daily essentials (grocery, gas, medicines, teaching, cleaners etc).
Said it time and time again. Why is there a culture war over this? Why is there even a debate? The servers we use daily are managed by people miles away, and the world keeps turning 24/7. If you want to fish for a living, work on a boat where the fish are. If you work in HR and Marketing and use the internet, take advantage of collaborative tools and work wherever you want.
There is a culture war because most of the world did not get a WFH advantage during covid. Tech, some sales, and knowledge workers were already moving towards hybrid or WFH, but others were not…and in a lot of cases even in the heat of the pandemic employers still required people to go to their place of work because that is where they needed to be for their work to get done.
You don’t get the advantage of the nurse, grocery worker, call center worker, shop keeper, laborer, basically the general public taking up your cause. They don’t give a shit if you have to RTO. You have no social pressuire traction from outside your industry.
Everyone complaining about RTO on HN always approaches it from how it affects them. If your company has a RTO policy and you dont like it, make the case how RTO adversely affects the organization to your leadership making the RTO decision. If you can’t make that case, your organization is likely making the correct decision to RTO.
Not a culture war. WFH for some orgs was never official, it was always temporary until COVID was over. So unless there is a WFH policy in writing at your org, always assume RTO was inevitable.
There's significantly less culture war over this, at least, I haven't noticed much of it and I enjoy keeping up on what the culture warriors are mad about at the current moment. This is strictly a war between the wealthy/aspirationally wealthy, and literally everyone else.
One group is seeing the value of their held real estate in offices cratering in the near future as it's been thoroughly demonstrated that having physical offices is a massive cost center with very little to show for itself in terms of business benefits. And the other is all the business-parasite types who no longer have a small group of folks they can lord over in the office and flex their authority upon, and who's "skill" (if you want to be generous and call it one) is best described as "politics" which largely translates to inserting themselves in the projects of others and taking credit for them. And that's harder outside of an office. Literally everyone else loves work from home and would prefer to work from home.
Two I witnessed being being born were Net Neutrality and Muni Broadband. Both were technical debates (in response to ISP practices) for well over a decade.
Eventually, those issues started to get some traction. All over the US, parroted talking points and lobbyist-written legislation suddenly appeared from the recipients of ISP campaign funds.
It's a theoretically great political wedge issue. It's available to some people and not others, something some people want and others don't, negatively impacts some people and positively impacts others, and at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.
> Mayor Parker has cited the many thousands of city employees — sanitation workers, social workers, the water department — who never had the ability to work from home.
Of all of the flimsy, illogical and back-ass-wards excuses I've heard for returning to offices, this might be the flimsiest, most illogical, and most profound 180 from asswards I have heard. Of course some classifications of workers can't work from home. One cannot remotely pick up garbage, or service sewers from the comfort of their own sofa. What on earth does that have to do with all the kinds of workers who can?
This will impact public institutions the same way it has been private ones. Those with options, the best workers, will leave, likely in droves, because they have seen what is possible and are no longer prepared to settle for what is expedient. The brain-drain is going to get quite real quite soon.
Work from home is a boon to everyone in our society except commercial real estate investors and pushy middle-managers, it just is, whether you as a leader choose to recognize the benefits you reap from it or not, you are reaping them. Productivity goes up, carbon emissions go down, morale goes up, people have an easier time just... living in our modern world with a flexible schedule, saving money on eating out less, saving money on buying less gas and running cars into the ground much slower, on, and on, and on. This is a rare instance where basically everyone wins and paradoxically, that seems to be driving the leadership of some places even more insane. They just can not fucking deal with seeing their workers lives improve.
It's hard to not reach for my tinfoil hat to explain this. I cannot fathom what the issue is, beyond the fact that workers are less stressed, less busy, and therefore consuming less... everything. Wasting less food, using less gas, buying fewer cars, etc. and like, I don't really think there's a shadowy room somewhere where the owner of the local gas stations is slamming his fist on the table about his sales being down, and the mayor promising to get people back to their commutes soon, but like... it's hard to see it as anything else than a deliberate middle finger to every WFH worker. "Yeah we know this works better for you and a ton of other people, but the downtown businesses are making less money and we can't have that. Go drive 90 minutes every day."
If you can't beat 'em, interview elsewhere and flee low quality, malevolent employers. Mayor Parker controls her employees without caring about their wellbeing, and frankly, they have options. Unemployment is low, interest rate cuts are coming (which is going to fire the economy back up), and the federal government is always hiring remote [1].
Mayor Adams in NYC had to learn this the hard way as well [2] [3] [4]. These people always need to learn the hard way, because they're used to being in control, and no one gives up control willingly. "I'm the boss" mental model.
"What Can NYC Do
The City should take steps to modernize its hiring and retention practices, by implementing recommendations in the Comptroller’s office’s Title Vacant and the 5BORO Institute’s Solving the Staffing Crisis.
Both of those reports recommend expediting hiring, allowing hybrid work for appropriate positions, reconsidering compensation levels for key hard-to-recruit slots, and designating Chief Talent/Recruitment/Retention Officer(s) to drive this work.
In the recently-announced tentative agreement between the NYC Office of Labor Relations and DC 37 (the City’s largest municipal labor union), the parties agreed to establish a “Flexible Work Committee” to discuss options to provider greater flexibility and enhance employee morale, including remote work, compressed and flexible work schedules, and improve transit benefits. The parties’ goal is to begin a pilot program that includes remote work no later than June 1, 2023." [2]
Note the union support in NYC; Philly's union is trying to fight Parker on the return to office mandate, but that will take time. Faster to bounce from the city for individual optimization.
As a dad, wfh has been a blessing. Contrary to common sense, I'd rather have a 3 bedroom condo in a city than a big house out of the city, as long as the city is well equipped for the children (schools, playgrounds, indoor playgrounds, sports/activities).
Even if I'm working, having them around all the time fills me with joy, which makes me more productive. And I can hug them during meetings or I can save them from scary stuff, or prepare them a snack while I make my own snack
> In Philadelphia, city officials acknowledged the return-to-office decision wasn't driven by concerns about productivity. Rather, it was in pursuit of what they called a leadership philosophy.
If there is a silver lining then how the prevailing reasons for mandatory office work are increasingly revealed to be bullshit, forcing higher-ups to admit that this hasn't anything to do with productivity.
I can almost guarantee this is about commercial real estate taxes more than productivity. If agency review is months behind, they need to hire more people, not force their existing employees to lose hours a day to commuting.
A fun little thought-experiment to inject into these debates is to analyze commute-hours and fuel costs as if they were-wages/expenses that the employer had to pay for.
When corporate RTO-advocates are faced with paying the costs themselves instead of pushing it all onto employees, suddenly it becomes "impractically expensive" and "wasteful".
Hey guys, commutes were always costly and (sometimes) wasteful, if you've finally realized that you can at least stop demanding employees undertake it for dumb reasons.
I think the RTO policy is in part influenced by economic recovery research funded by the city [0]. My own conjecture is that it’s also influenced by SEPTA (regional transit) ridership recovery being a sticking point for funding from the state.
>I can almost guarantee this is about commercial real estate taxes more than productivity.
As simple as that. I was looking at the numbers of one of our partners that has gone bankrupt in Europe. He made the brilliant decision to invest everything in Office space just before Covid. They expected to recover money after Covid, but it is not happening.
A lot of big guys invested there, specially politicians, and of course expensive taxes. They will do everything they can to delay the sinking.
A city I know of mandated that the largest employer institute return-to-office or lose their tax breaks due to the impact it would have on the local economy of the city.
Readit News
1) It makes parenting easier by letting the parent be more present. 2) It allows parents to buy houses with more bedrooms and more greenspace further from expensive cities. 3) It allows workers to stay in one location for a long time, helping form community.
And it's low-carbon to boot.
Your points are good regardless of the fertility rate.
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
Right now. IIRC, current projections are for global populations to start to decline before the end of the century, and I think fall sharply in the next. I think only sub-Saharan Africa is the only region that reproduces at much greater than replacement rate, and even there birthrates are declining. Formerly high reproduction rate places like India are now at replacement rate, and their birthrates are continuing to fall.
The reports I hear from demographics is that is not true
Depending on your definition of "plenty"
Below replacement rate in most developed countries.
Upending economic arrangements everywhere.
IMO not a bad thing.
Replacement rate has to do with keeping the actual population number stable, not labor output whatsoever. It's 2.1 instead of just 2 because of infertility, child mortality (and mortality before reproducing generally), etc.
It has literally nothing to do with robots or efficient labor. Any TFR lower than ~2.1 will result in the total population shrinking.
those seem contradictory. How can a suburban/exurban sprawl be low carbon? And even if WFH workers don't drive themselves, someone still needs to drive to ship their Amazon deliveries to their homes or to move groceries and gas to nearby stores.
Lower population density does not necessarily equate to higher carbon footprint, especially when commuting downtown for work has been eliminated. Above a certain point density has diseconomies of scale of its own.
For example, if you are comparing, say, a three bedroom house in a large metropolitan area versus a four bedroom house in a small town, the reduced total driving time because driving distances are less in the small town (everything is in town, but town is tiny) can make up for a lot of efficiencies of scale.
The common argument is that we should put people into apartments instead, but that isn't always a clear total system win. For example if somebody is really into fishing letting them live near a lake with space to store their own boat will be more carbon efficient than stuffing them into an apartment where every weekend they drive to the storage place on the outskirts of town to pick their boat up, then drive three hours or so to the lake.
Many people don't want to be in dense cities. Lack of open/green space, noise, crime, and the worst place to be during any sort of crisis.
At least they're being honest (as honest as a politician can be, I suppose) about what this is really about - a stimulus package for downtown businesses and landlords.
For an additional layer of irony, apparently she said during her campaign, quote "I'm uniquely prepared to make the city the safest, cleanest, greenest big city in the nation with access to economic opportunity for all". I fail to see how forcing people to commute (public transport or not) achieves anything but the opposite, but perhaps I just don't see the genius in that.
And while commuting might account for some fraction of the added footprint, larger houses mean more heating/cooling and larger sprawl means someone is driving to deliver daily essentials (grocery, gas, medicines, teaching, cleaners etc).
Who cares? In the real world, the sprawl already exists. Forcing RTO re-introduces commuting that had been eliminated; it's not green at all.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/10-cities-with-the-highest-t... (Its #2)
You don’t get the advantage of the nurse, grocery worker, call center worker, shop keeper, laborer, basically the general public taking up your cause. They don’t give a shit if you have to RTO. You have no social pressuire traction from outside your industry.
Everyone complaining about RTO on HN always approaches it from how it affects them. If your company has a RTO policy and you dont like it, make the case how RTO adversely affects the organization to your leadership making the RTO decision. If you can’t make that case, your organization is likely making the correct decision to RTO.
Not a culture war. WFH for some orgs was never official, it was always temporary until COVID was over. So unless there is a WFH policy in writing at your org, always assume RTO was inevitable.
There's significantly less culture war over this, at least, I haven't noticed much of it and I enjoy keeping up on what the culture warriors are mad about at the current moment. This is strictly a war between the wealthy/aspirationally wealthy, and literally everyone else.
One group is seeing the value of their held real estate in offices cratering in the near future as it's been thoroughly demonstrated that having physical offices is a massive cost center with very little to show for itself in terms of business benefits. And the other is all the business-parasite types who no longer have a small group of folks they can lord over in the office and flex their authority upon, and who's "skill" (if you want to be generous and call it one) is best described as "politics" which largely translates to inserting themselves in the projects of others and taking credit for them. And that's harder outside of an office. Literally everyone else loves work from home and would prefer to work from home.
Generated wars are playbooks in action.
Two I witnessed being being born were Net Neutrality and Muni Broadband. Both were technical debates (in response to ISP practices) for well over a decade.
Eventually, those issues started to get some traction. All over the US, parroted talking points and lobbyist-written legislation suddenly appeared from the recipients of ISP campaign funds.
Of all of the flimsy, illogical and back-ass-wards excuses I've heard for returning to offices, this might be the flimsiest, most illogical, and most profound 180 from asswards I have heard. Of course some classifications of workers can't work from home. One cannot remotely pick up garbage, or service sewers from the comfort of their own sofa. What on earth does that have to do with all the kinds of workers who can?
This will impact public institutions the same way it has been private ones. Those with options, the best workers, will leave, likely in droves, because they have seen what is possible and are no longer prepared to settle for what is expedient. The brain-drain is going to get quite real quite soon.
Work from home is a boon to everyone in our society except commercial real estate investors and pushy middle-managers, it just is, whether you as a leader choose to recognize the benefits you reap from it or not, you are reaping them. Productivity goes up, carbon emissions go down, morale goes up, people have an easier time just... living in our modern world with a flexible schedule, saving money on eating out less, saving money on buying less gas and running cars into the ground much slower, on, and on, and on. This is a rare instance where basically everyone wins and paradoxically, that seems to be driving the leadership of some places even more insane. They just can not fucking deal with seeing their workers lives improve.
It's hard to not reach for my tinfoil hat to explain this. I cannot fathom what the issue is, beyond the fact that workers are less stressed, less busy, and therefore consuming less... everything. Wasting less food, using less gas, buying fewer cars, etc. and like, I don't really think there's a shadowy room somewhere where the owner of the local gas stations is slamming his fist on the table about his sales being down, and the mayor promising to get people back to their commutes soon, but like... it's hard to see it as anything else than a deliberate middle finger to every WFH worker. "Yeah we know this works better for you and a ton of other people, but the downtown businesses are making less money and we can't have that. Go drive 90 minutes every day."
Mayor Adams in NYC had to learn this the hard way as well [2] [3] [4]. These people always need to learn the hard way, because they're used to being in control, and no one gives up control willingly. "I'm the boss" mental model.
"What Can NYC Do
The City should take steps to modernize its hiring and retention practices, by implementing recommendations in the Comptroller’s office’s Title Vacant and the 5BORO Institute’s Solving the Staffing Crisis.
Both of those reports recommend expediting hiring, allowing hybrid work for appropriate positions, reconsidering compensation levels for key hard-to-recruit slots, and designating Chief Talent/Recruitment/Retention Officer(s) to drive this work.
In the recently-announced tentative agreement between the NYC Office of Labor Relations and DC 37 (the City’s largest municipal labor union), the parties agreed to establish a “Flexible Work Committee” to discuss options to provider greater flexibility and enhance employee morale, including remote work, compressed and flexible work schedules, and improve transit benefits. The parties’ goal is to begin a pilot program that includes remote work no later than June 1, 2023." [2]
Note the union support in NYC; Philly's union is trying to fight Parker on the return to office mandate, but that will take time. Faster to bounce from the city for individual optimization.
[1] https://www.usajobs.gov/search/results/?rmi=true
[2] https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/understaffed-underserved...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/06/nyregion/nyc-workers-hiri...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/nyregion/labor-shortage-n...
Even if I'm working, having them around all the time fills me with joy, which makes me more productive. And I can hug them during meetings or I can save them from scary stuff, or prepare them a snack while I make my own snack
If there is a silver lining then how the prevailing reasons for mandatory office work are increasingly revealed to be bullshit, forcing higher-ups to admit that this hasn't anything to do with productivity.
When corporate RTO-advocates are faced with paying the costs themselves instead of pushing it all onto employees, suddenly it becomes "impractically expensive" and "wasteful".
Hey guys, commutes were always costly and (sometimes) wasteful, if you've finally realized that you can at least stop demanding employees undertake it for dumb reasons.
[0] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...
As simple as that. I was looking at the numbers of one of our partners that has gone bankrupt in Europe. He made the brilliant decision to invest everything in Office space just before Covid. They expected to recover money after Covid, but it is not happening.
A lot of big guys invested there, specially politicians, and of course expensive taxes. They will do everything they can to delay the sinking.