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Comment by friendzis | Hacker News Reader

Wellllll.... debatable.

This argument of expense rerouting is a bit flawed. Suppose working from home saves one some money that they spend elsewhere. Working from the office they spend that money on fuel, indirectly spend on road maintenance, directly spend on vehicle maintenance where the shop in turn spends on parts and tools and so on. The money one spends circulates in the economy much longer and reaches more actors until it eventually falls back into original pocket. Working from home then they buy more items that have been manufactured in China, spend eating out where restaurants pay mostly wages and farmers, making the chain much shorter.

There are different economic health considerations for different spending habits. While not exactly a loss it's not entirely equal too.

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This is close to the broken window fallacy. We tend to forget the flow of money is an indirect proxy for work performed. If 20% of construction workers are freed up from fixing roads because of lower traffic, they don't just sit around crying, they find other work to do. Same with tech workers, same with everyone. That's a net good because the work they'll move to will by definition be worth paying someone to do.

Wasting time fixing stuff that didn't need to be broken is intrinsically bad for the economy, but it's disruptive to suddenly have your now-pointless job taken away.

Yeah, people fixate on the money flow so much that they forget that there is another flow, in the opposite direction, the flow of the goods and labour, which is what the economy is actually all about... money is just so much easier to track, and account for, and aggregate (it's all just dollars!) so that the second flow is heavily de-emphasized.

Of course, when you look at just the flow of the goods and labour, the organization of a national economy in general seems highly, uh, round-about — the money serves as the main controlling/directing mechanism so without it in the picture things look pretty funky.

> are freed up from fixing roads because of lower traffic, they don't just sit around crying, they find other work to do.

yes, this holds up when there is something else to do, which is not always the case. I remember during the great recession, building contractors in Florida were praying for a hurricane to put them back to work. There was absolutely no other work to be found.

There is always work to do. However there is often a mismatch of skills and unwillingness to learn the right skills. Sometimes there is an unwillingness to work for the price people are willing to pay.

Traffic in general is also much more efficient with a small reduction in traffic.

If we have 10% fewer people commuting during work hours, then traffic might move twice as efficiently. Of course, that uses less fuel, which is bad for the economy /s

> The money one spends circulates in the economy much longer and reaches more actors until it eventually falls back into original pocket.

that's a total assumption being made. Who knows how the money from an office worker's commute gets dispersed. It's likely too difficult to track exactly. And it's irrelevant to the person how this dispersion happens or why.

All they need to care about is that they've eliminated a source of inefficiency, and thus have extra money for either investment or different consumption.

> All they need to care about is that they've eliminated a source of inefficiency, and thus have extra money for either investment or different consumption.

...or prices rise to balance out the extra money.

The purpose of the economy is to fulfill human desires. The only question we have to ask to understand which situation resulted in higher economic output is: which situation resulted in satisfying more human desires.

It's clear that the pointless burning of fossil fuels didn't satisfy any human need. Then the question becomes: is the distribution of currency caused by the buying and burning of the fuels preferable to the alternative distribution if the currency had been spent elsewhere? If it is preferable, does that offset the waste of fuel for no purpose except redistributing currency?

Any time I hear these kinds of reasonings the question comes to mind: if some distributions of currency are preferable to others, and we know what such distributions look like, why not let the government do the distribution directly?

> the pointless burning of fossil fuels didn't satisfy any human need.

That sentence would have a different meaning if the conclusitory (looking for real word here) word "pointless" was not there.

Abundant reliable on-demand energy has enormously improved the human condition. I'm also glad the Dutch no longer dig up peat bogs for dirty fuel.

He or she didn't mean that burning of these fuels is pointless, it was a response to a poster suggesting to pointlessly burn these fuels in order to stimulate the economy.

Driving to work, when you can/prefer to work from home, is pointless.

> Any time I hear these kinds of reasonings the question comes to mind: if some distributions of currency are preferable to others, and we know what such distributions look like, why not let the government do the distribution directly?

Because this presumes that the people in government will do what is preferable to the masses. My conception of government is that of a tool or weapon that various powers vie for control over. Why should I expect benevolence from such?

> It's clear that the pointless burning of fossil fuels didn't satisfy any human need.

Yeah, but ... how much of it was pointless? Who decides if a use-case is pointless? You? Me? The government?

If it didn't satisfy anyones desire, it was pointless.

Burning fossil fuels can of course also be meaningful.

We're talking about driving to work when you can work from home.

> If it didn't satisfy anyones desire, it was pointless.

I dunno.

There's a lot of PHBs who have petty tyrant syndrome. They desire their employees in the office.

Then there's a lot of people in the CBD who desire to continue selling their wares to the people working in the CBD.

There's letting companies who desire income from the letting arrangements, landlords who desire income enough to pay the city tax ...

On the whole, I agree with WFH; I just don't think it's a good exercise to justify anything based on what people desire.

I don't agree. It's totally fair to disqualify some desires as less important than others. I think we all agree that a tyrants desire to be a tyrant isn't worth taking into consideration.

Someone selling wares don't usually desire selling wares. They desire income. Everybody wants income. Buying something we don't want/need is waste + redistribution of currency.

Redistribution of currency is a zero sum game unless we have some reason to particularly value the desires of the ones receiving. I don't see why we should particularly value the desires of landlords.

> I just don't think it's a good exercise to justify anything based on what people desire.

What alternative do you propose?

If the same work gets done without the burning, I’d say yes, it’s pointless.

The one true God, clearly.

> Working from the office they spend that money on fuel, indirectly spend on road maintenance, directly spend on vehicle maintenance where the shop in turn spends on parts and tools and so on.

It's arguable whether all of this is needed everywhere in the world, to such a degree as is presently done.

In the cities, the transportation needs of most folks can be covered by public transportation (depending on the country, admittedly) - it is more efficient, more green and also results in fewer traffic jams.

Furthermore it scales up and down better: whether at 50% or 80% of capacity it will do its scheduled route, as opposed to all of those people otherwise needing cars and parking spaces for those and so on, which isn't always entirely feasible in densely populated cities.

I guess it's just a different take on things, but if there's commute, we might as well make it more efficient, as opposed to spending 1-2 hours per day in traffic, which is essentially wasted time. Or not have the commute altogether.

In more rural areas or many places in the US as opposed to EU it's a slightly different story.

I live in Cambridge, MA (a city for sure) and used to work in an office near the Waltham/Lexington line. Not some out in the rural woods places at all.

I looked up and wrote up my “what if I tried to commute on public transit to make a 9AM meeting?”

It’s ugly to the point where no one would voluntarily choose it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197

It probably depends a lot on your circumstances, location and other factors!

In my case, in Rīga (the capital of my country, Latvia), it was approximately:

  - leave apartment at 7:45
  - walk to stop in around 5 minutes
  - wait 5 - 10 minutes for a trolley bus
  - ride in it for 20 - 30 minutes
  - walk from stop to work for 10 minutes

I think it averaged out to around 40 minutes per trip, and 1 euro per day, given a monthly ticket: https://www.rigassatiksme.lv/en/tickets-and-e-ticket/types-a...

With a car, the same trip would be around 20-40 minutes.

For comparison's sake, walking would mean upwards of 100 minutes for that trip.

Regardless of whether in a car, or using public transportation, coming home in the evening often included waiting in traffic jams for close to an hour. In comparison, when coming home before 4-6 PM, the streets were relatively empty and there were no such traffic issues. Fewer cars, fewer issues of that sort.

But what holds here true doesn't hold true elsewhere and vice versa. Once you go past a certain scale of the city in question, transfers and other complications become unavoidable. Just how much of an issue it is, depends on many other factors as well (car ownership cost, possibility of accidents, the disadvantage of not being able to easily transport things when not owning a car and so on, lack of freedom without a car, especially when you want to visit less popular rural areas).

Neither beats rolling out of bed at 8:45, turning on the computer and brewing some coffee or tea, doing a morning shower and "being at work" 10 minutes later, though.

Bad public transit exists all over. That doesn't make the idea of public transit bad, it just means we need better management of it.

Random route service is difficult to efficiently serve with mass transit. Public transit doesn't have to be specifically mass transit, but the collective need of "I need to go from random place A to random place B and later return" is almost never going to line up with a mass transit solution.

Having high frequency mass transit service and decent transfers is better than the current situation, but it's really, really hard to compete with "sub-minute latency, personalized perfectly random route".

True, but I still firmly maintain that with good transfers you can get transit close enough to car levels of service so that it doesn't matter. Of course such service is a lot more expensive to run than current service - but it is still cheaper than the costs of owning a car.

Having your own vehicle is an enormous benefit in quality of life, why would anybody want to take that away? Why should we then eat nice food when we can survive on dull rations? There is so much more to the use of personal vehicles than just "transportation needs", but yes - some places build their infrastructure too much catering to cars.

The best way to beat traffic right now without having to wait for anybody else to change is to get a motorcycle - if the climate where you live permits.

Only if the alternative is bad. While it is true that most public transit in the US is bad, that doesn't mean it has to be that way.

It is impossible to build public transport that gives the same freedom of movement as a personal vehicle.

But that vast majority of the time, in the US, anyway, the car is used just to get to work and back, not people exercising "freedom of movement".

It seems to me it would be preferable to have mass transit for regular commuting, combined with perhaps some sort of rental system for those times when you need greater flexibility, or need to haul lots of stuff, etc.

That is false. In areas with heavy traffic you can give more freedom of movement. In the typical city without congestion (including US suburbs!), while the car is better, it still doesn't have to be enough better to matter. That you think the car is always better is a reflection on the bad service you have had on public transit.

Public transport runs on a schedule and you have to adapt to that schedule. I live in a place where public transport is good, cheap and safe. You can never achieve public transport that could even compare to the freedom of movement a personal vehicle gives you, and that's not the purpose of public transport.

> That you think the car is always better

Make your arguments without inventing what other people say and you will make better arguments.

I'd say roads that need less maintenance are a win long term, otherwise we go back to original argument about breaking all the windows.

The rest... pure speculation from poster's own limited view, the world is more complex than 'I stay home so just order more stuff from China', definitely not true for me. I can chip in mine - ie during travel restrictions forced to buy in more expensive smaller local shops for whole family. One heck of help for local economy. Spending vacations much closer, meaning tons of money flow back to local economy. Having time to plan and do some home repairs with local workforce.

And so on, random tiny examples have little significance in hyper complex situation that is called reality.

In your example you're actually valuing the local community more than the global community. Ordering something from China probably contributes to more people's wages than commutting. There are the workers in China, land and sea transport, it's a huge infrastructure.

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