In the Financial Times this weekend, Janan Ganesh is music to my ears:
This is as good a time as any to make a non-exhaustive list of things that I read in 2020 [which supposedly] had little future. Nightlife. The handshake. Buildings tall enough to need lifts. Casual sex (ha ha). Pret A Manger. The rat race. Business-class seats. Airbnb. I recount none of this in order to embarrass.
....The point is to draw lessons from their wrongness. One is that journalism has taken a neurotic turn over the past decade or so. It is there in the enthusiasm with which social maladies are talked up (the “loneliness epidemic”). It is there in the interior focus of so much feature writing.
....If you write on the regular, you have to play up the significance of transient events. “This little episode won’t change much, read 1,000 words on it”, is not a bad pitch. But it has to be rationed. The rest of the time, all the drive in media is to attribute significance to the ephemeral. Between 1997 and 2003, every other week was “Tony Blair’s worst week”. In 2020 — more forgivably, no doubt — the same impulse led to some dire futurology.
I have two points to make about this. First: duh. It was astonishing to count up the number of essays by alleged adults who insisted that millennia of human nature would be wiped out by a year or two of mild pandemic. Was this due to sweeping historical myopia? Ignorance of the power of social habits in primates? Wishful thinking about things the authors hoped would change? I don't know, but a lot of people ought to be giving this some serious thought.
Second: Ganesh acknowledges that one long-lasting change is remote work. I don't disagree with him, but I do wish there were some decent empirical evidence on this score. But nobody seems to have tracked this rigorously before the pandemic, and even after the pandemic we only get stuff like this:
Remote work has gone down from 35% at the start of the pandemic to 7.7% today. But this solely counts people who are working remotely because of COVID. It doesn't include the effect of workplaces that have changed their remote work policies more generally, even if the original impetus was COVID. At least, that's how I interpret this.
The truth is that outside the highly educated bubbles of the New York Times, progressive Twitter, and Silicon Valley, there's a lot of evidence that remote work is steadily fading away. But there's no firm evidence. It's hard to believe that some kind of consistent, semi-valid time series isn't available that covers the past 20 years or so, but that sure seems to be the case.
I started a new job working from home shortly after the pandemic hit. I continue to work from home and will continue to do so. N=1.
My job switched to remote when COVID began and 2 years later the agency heads realized they didn't want us back in the building so they could consolidate 2 other leased spaces into the HQ so only the high side works on site now and my team only goes in when actually needing to be onsite.
N=2
Talk to my dry cleaner. He used to have employees work and he has to work now and is not happy. There was also this piece on office space being converted to residential https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/07/28/should-dcs-empty-office-buildings-get-turned-into-apartments/
Remote work will fail because people would have to access the internet to do so and we all know a DEM from Tenn Al Gore invented the internet.
He's so famous he's got an English term named after him. We've all heard of an Allegory - right?
The republicans will make sure we return to the workplace rather than give a DEM credit for helping businesses out. Now if business rents come down thats a different story and I've heard there's going to be LOADS of vacancies at Trump Tower!!! That should help reign in rent increases
I full expect nonsense like this if the GOP ever gets back in control of Congress.
Office space demand is where I'd look for clues to this one.
My employer has effectively closed two offices in major cities, while maintaining a presence in both locales through reservations at another facility, on an as-needed basis.
Current fears of a long period of tight monetary policy may preclude any increases in spending, so the current environment is not representative of the longer term: What can be cut, is getting cut.
Give it a 3-5 years, and we'll see where office space demand and remote work are.
Heck, Tesla did that stupid calling everyone in and realized they hadn't enough office soace for everyone for more than half a decade.
It's hard to reconcile the stats with my experience.
I started a new job remotely during the tail end of the acute pandemic, worked for months before I set foot in the office. We currently have to go in two days a week, but no one likes it, and the company had a big across-the-board exodus when they announced they were requiring even that much. They're currently planning on taking back up to three days a week at some point, but everyone hates the idea and there's widespread doubt they'll actually go through with it.
Two days a week is fine, three would be annoying and would have me eyeballing other positions that required two days or less. I wonder how the numbers are being tallied/will be tallied. I feel like percent of time spent teleworking is the best metric but pretty hard to tabulate. I think part-time/flex work from home is here to stay.
A national (NAR) comparison of office vacancy rates just prior to COVID and now: https://bityl.co/Dq6y
Largest vacancy rate changes:
San Francisco +9.17pp
New York City +5.74
Green Bay +5.09
Austin +4.50
Seattle +4.06
Oakland/East Bay +4.03
Denver +3.90
Los Angeles +3.59
Portland (OR) +3.58
In general, offices have accelerated to a flexible but smaller space. Open work stations and several meeting/work rooms.
That doesn't count leased space that is sitting mostly empty.
Shouldn't these numbers be a lot bigger if In-Office work is dead? Sure, SF is near 10% but SF is weird. The 4-6% increase for all the other heavy hitters would be considered noise in any other data stream.
I am among the knowledge workers who was remote before the pandemic. Employers have to find the talent where it is, not where they are. So, sure, some segments will be increasingly remote but never discount the Backlash (tm). For some reason it always takes people by surprise when in reality we should be watching for it.
Count me in on Team Wait-a-Few-Years-Before-Calling-The-End-of-History.
When it hits 10%, the owners stop renting and just take it as a loss.
Also, it doesn't count offices rented but not used (like my spouse's office, it's a long term lease.
A drop that averages around 5% is hardly a sign the world is changing.
A drop that averages 5% is pretty significant.
One of these is not like the others.
Hm, I'm not sure I buy the premise. If it turns out that things are getting mostly back to what they were pre-pandemic, that's largely because the vaccines were developed on a much faster timeline and were much more effective than anyone could have thought when some of those predictions were made. So we were able to get the death and hospitalization totals down to a manageable level even though a third of the population are idiots.
Plus I'm not sure handshakes, nightlife, Pret a Manger, etc are really back to where they were, and one wonders if they ever will be.
Worse of both worlds....Zoom meetings while at the office.
Now that we don't have to reserve a meeting room, we can have meetings all day long!!!
But you have to be on site to get your actual work done--you know--between meetings...
I've been banging on this drum since the beginning: The death of cities! Nobody wants Manhattan apartments! Say goodbye to offices! Mostly BS.
I wouldn't have minded seeing the death of the handshake, truth to be told...
Check back at the end of the decade to make a determination. If anything annoys me more its writers and pundits determined to prove or disprove historical trends in a short period of time. History isn't like that.
Over the last few months i have noticed a strong marketing and messaging push from those who want things to go back to the normal precovid state of things.
Usually it's the groups that have lost status (Corp executives) and those that have lost business (business real estate, work commuter related business).
There has been a big push in articles and commentary pretty clearly designed to convince everyone that things are back to 'normal' so they should change their behavior to readjust. Lease some office space, come back to the downtown Starbucks, get in the public transit system, look for work at the companies that can't fill their in office jobs....etc, after all everyone else is getting back to normal, you should too!
Kevin seems to be looking to reaffirm his priors?
Yeah, this seems to be part of it as well. It's a bit like how the US press only ever seem to want to interview "Trump" voters seemingly even now.
My own anecdotal evidence is that a lot of companies and organisations which have work that can be done remotely and which also (a) have a proper managerial culture and (b) strong union presence have happily adapted to being hybrid (indeed, were probably on the way anyway.) You know, businesses that actually think their employees are people, not just assets on a balance sheet. And those places seem to be doing just fine, thank you.
Yes, it's pretty blatant and pathetic too. Most of the "reasons" are fairly silly if we're talking about a typical back office job where everything is electronic.
I dunno.
Nightlife (I'm married and your age, Kevin, so nope before and nope now.).
The handshake (Regularly before, but only when absolutely forced to now.).
Buildings tall enough to need lifts (?).
Casual sex (See answer to "nightlife, supra.).
Pret A Manger (Ate at one once, like in 2013. Meh.).
The rat race (Not sure what this even means.).
Business-class seats (What's he getting at? Are airlines getting rid of them? Or does he mean that companies don't allow them anymore?).
Airbnb (I definitely don't travel nearly as much now for fun, because I won't during variant spikes, and that has led to long stretches of no "fun" travel and even cancelling prepaid hotel rooms.).
The UC is still doing most of their work remotely and doesn't know when they'll go back.
They removed the restrictions, but in-person still work is still fraught with sick days and covid scares and lack of real desire by workers.
1 million deaths in a little over 2.5 years is a "mild pandemic"??? Now the 4th leading cause of death in the US. No biggie, I guess.
I'll give K.D. a break because I suspect he has adjusted his attitudes toward death and life over the past few years... okay.
But in the general population, the tendency to to treat COVID-19, which is not yet done with the human race, as insignificant is, in my opinion, wishful thinking.
"It was astonishing to count up the number of essays by alleged adults who insisted that millennia of human nature would be wiped out by a year or two of mild pandemic. Was this due to sweeping historical myopia? Ignorance of the power of social habits in primates? Wishful thinking about things the authors hoped would change? I don't know, but a lot of people ought to be giving this some serious thought."
Uh, the FIRST STEP in swallowing the woke koolaid is to deny every one of these points. Who cares about history? Only rightwing reactionaries believe in sociobiology. Wishful thinking is the bedrock of the woke program.
Is it surprising that these people interpreted the world according to the way they have been programmed?
And is it surprising that none of them have updated their priors even after seeing that the world did not oblige with their model?