>Because they are? There are whole industries that are more or less total BS. Whatever you do for these companies you are pretty much not contributing anything worthwhile to the society.
Well, according to you maybe. The customers/patrons of the company probably have a differing view.
not necessarily. so many products are bought from a top down approach where the end user is not the decision maker. i mean, how many times has a company's top managers purchased abysmally awful software, taht then needs to be used by it's employees. it happens govt all the time. our school district has purchased subscriptions to an absolutely awful online homework platform: it's clear the designers of this platform didn't do any usability studies. and now all the students and teachers in this district are screwed and forced to use this abomination.
I'm reminded of the way Star Trek explains in the 24th century the Federation doesn't use money[0].
By that yardstick, all jobs whose only purpose is moving or charging rent on money , e.g. the entire banking/finance sector, is pure bullshit waste. I tend to agree. (Not that there wouldn't need to be some efficient algorithmic distribution of resources to maximise human wellbeing, of course; To each according to their need etc.)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rh3xPatEto
>By that yardstick, all jobs whose only purpose is moving or charging rent on money , e.g. the entire banking/finance sector, is pure bullshit waste. I tend to agree.
If you think "the entire banking/finance sector" is just shuffling money around, then the problem is that you have a simplified view of what they do, and therefore think their 10% (or whatever) contribution to the GDP is oversized. Banking/finance is far more than what you encounter day to day (ie. retail banking). They also assess risk, make forecasts, and make decisions on how capital is allocated. All of that requires staff and costs money.
>(Not that there wouldn't need to be some efficient algorithmic distribution of resources to maximise human wellbeing, of course; To each according to their need etc.)
Given how DAOs turned out in the past few years, I'm skeptical that'll ever work out.
How much rent seeking and regulatory capture that goes on is enabled by modern finance?
What about bailouts for financial institutions that are too big to fail - the idea of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses?
Real wages are down and income inequality is up over the last several decades, coinciding with a lot of growth in the finance industry. Subprime and payday loans, 30 year mortgages backed by the government, leveraged buyouts, stock buybacks, tax havens, etc. Private and public debt levels are way higher than at any time prior to WWII. Right from the age of 18 we have kids signing large student loans, the banks don't care about their risk since the loans are federally backed and will follow these kids until the day they die.
A lot of people feel that the general public is being squeezed by financiers. Are they wrong?
> They also assess risk, make forecasts, and make decisions on how capital is allocated.
I think they were making a critique of neoliberal capitalism, which might be represented as:
1. Capital efficiency
2. ???
3. Social benefit
Obviously, if you've bought in, #2 doesn't feel at all vague to you. But it's not uncommon for many to step back and see the whole enterprise as an underpants gnome scheme that's on track for a lot of underpantsless global citizens.
What's your suggestion to eliminate landlords from the equation, then? CCP-style regulations where there is no citizen landownership? Only the government is allowed to own land? Property owners should be forced to operate as nonprofits and maintain the property, but donate all profits to taxes?
Getting rid of 1031 would be a good start. But contrary to what most people/economists falsely proclaim, land value taxes are actually a regressive, punitive tax to those who commit the grave sin of living in an area that other people decide to gentrify. A complete non-solution to the problem.
Precisely why the LVT is inherently flawed and regressive, and prone to abuse and exploitation by the rich and powerful, instead of being dictated by the aggregate market demand of regular citizens.
>Empirical data from the US and France, however, indicates that ownership of land value (in absolute terms) is negatively correlated to the social welfare weight. Middle income households would pay relatively more land value taxes than high income households, but less in absolute terms.
Unfortunately, the "relatively more" aspect (to one's income) is what matters.
LVT is predicated on this idea landowners will be forced to "make efficient" land for common good, as an empty lot is taxed the same as the skyscraper. In practice, this just makes desirable areas unaffordable for the middle class and completely forces out the lower class. e.g. it _makes explicit_ into the tax laws, what is already happening in practice with property tax.
property taxes in a desirable area say "sorry you're poor and your house isn't nice, but you pay less tax than your rich neighbor". LVT says "don't let the door hit you on your poor ass on your way out, but if you want to stay you can pay the same tax as Mr Moneybags next door".
Not to mention the irony that LVT actually decreases the value of the land.
>If buyers know that they’ll have to pay £10,000 in tax on a piece of land they valued at £100,000, they’ll only be willing to pay £90,000 for that land. The tax lowers the returns from land ownership which is reflected in the value of the land. The current owners of land are the ones who bear the full cost of future tax bills.
Again this disproportionately affects the middle class landowner and unceremoniously kicks the lower-class former-landowner who inherited the property out of the landowner class.
LVT is ultimately the billionaire's dream. It's a dressed up neo-Eminent Domain, pretending to be progressive while being punitive to those without means.
Worst of all* is the suggestion LVT it discourages land speculation - it actually does the exact opposite. It severely exacerbates speculation, akin to how people scalp concert tickets or limited edition Jordan shoes today.
*there's also countless issues with trusting the government to evaluate the land; the issue of value vs. area; subjectivness of varying types of land value from agricultural farmland vs. industrial land vs. service-oriented vs. transport/logistics vs. inherent value from resources, but "make the poor family living in a shack pay the same tax as the rich guy who build a skyscraper" is sufficiently flawed without going in depth into those issues.
Asset multiples will collapse if unemployment rises significantly and the labor market weakens. Surely the investor class will still come out ahead, but it's interesting they seem to be ignoring this fact (except Warren Buffett, who's cash reserve to equity ratio is far greater than most of his peers)
This doesn't add up to me. The priorities of corporate executives are to please the board of directors. BoD priorities are to please shareholders/investors. Shareholders/investors are pleased by growth/profits. That is, the investors care not about "how things look" but instead how they actually are, as in quarterly reports, share price, etc.
If employees are happier and more efficient working from home, it satisfies the priorities of all the above parties. If RTO makes people unhappy and either less productive OR makes them not want to work for that employer, it goes against the incentives and priorities of all the above parties.
>I think it is illuminating to consider how these debates would go very differently if employers where the ones whose budgets paid for all the hours/fuel spent in office commutes
A significant number of employers do allocate budget and incur expenses for employee commuter benefits. And unclaimed commuter benefits results in cost savings for the employer, I'm not really sure I understand the point being made here.
So let's say they go full remote for jobs that allow it - why should they hire you, then? Why not hire someone in Vancouver for 80% of your salary, or Mexico for 60%, or Brazil for 40%?
All the reasons companies already don't successfully do that at the scale the RTO fear mongers claim they will: work culture, language barriers, various workplace and taxation laws that are/aren't in their favor, and frankly, experience and expertise. I bring value to a business that's worth paying American wages for, and so do so many folks I've worked with. This isn't to say there's not excellent engineers in other countries - there absolutely are. But (1) the tech industry has been centered on the US for so long that a lot of the top talent in this industry is concentrated here, and (2) the folks in other countries who bring the expertise and experience a senior or staff or beyond engineer in the US does aren't that much cheaper, because they know companies can and will pay high rates for the right talent.
Funny you mention Vancouver, which I used to live in and, talking to tech folks there, it was routinely called the "H1B holding pen" at the time - the place tech companies would hire folks and bring them to work at US wages while awaiting visa paperwork to head down to, say, Redmond or San Francisco. And BC famously has a huge brain drain to WA and CA on account of - you guessed it - salaries, and those folks often never went back to Canada. Back to: the talent concentrated here and demands a certain wage.
Surprise, companies have been outsourcing for decades and not slowing down, and WFH or not does not change any of that. My company's current headcounts are almost only in India, yet they are asking people to come in 3 days a week.
Right - and this resistance against RTO from a basis “companies are doing it just because of sunk costs” has a logical conclusion companies should increase outsourcing further.
>It's not the perfect medium because it requires living in some of the most expensive real estate markets on the planet.
This applies to the entire United States if everything that could were to go fully remote. Why hire someone for 6 figures in <a US state> when you could hire someone in Brazil to do it for 40% of the salary?
Because they have tried it and failed. There was this whole massive push for outsourcing to India in the 90s and 00s. Customers hated it, communication suffered, and more problems were created than solved. It’s why there has been a massive on-shoring of things like call centers to LCOL parts of the US.
And they continued to pay their US based employees more (including employees relocating from cheaper locales) because CEOs believed (whether rightly or wrongly is irrelevant) that there was a significant advantage to having them physically collocated with their teams in the US.
Essentially, US workers have spent the last 2 years screaming at CEOs that no, they’re idiots, there is absolutely no benefit to physically collocating employees in the US and they should not have paid them anymore.
I am not sure I find this explanation convincing. If a corporation thinks it could increase profits without RTO and after eating office real-estate losses, it'll do so. The real estate companies and the middle managers do not make decisions for these companies. If wasted office costs are $10M, but more happy, productive, and efficient remote employees make an additional $20M, there wouldn't be RTO.
Are certain cities (like NYC) taxing unoccupied office space? If so, how much? This information is much more convincing than a claim that companies are enforcing RTO to make middle managers feel like they are "presiding over their kingdom".
Well, according to you maybe. The customers/patrons of the company probably have a differing view.