Remote work is the reason why Wall Street was wrong about a recession | Hacker News Reader

Remote work is the reason why Wall Street was wrong about a recession

fortune.com

38 pointsfrans91 comments

Imagine if we rolled the AI productivity gains made possible by all our data and rolled it into the 4 day workweek. It’d still leave 5-10 pp efficiency gain for shareholder presents and actually improve quality of life for everyone.

So you suggest taking a productivity gain and using it to keep production while working less.

Why not use the productivity gain to keep the same worked time and increase production?

So you get nothing and the shareholders get more, and you think that’s good? Unless you’re already a billionaire then that doesn’t serve you

> Unless you’re already a billionaire then that doesn’t serve you

The obsession some HN commenters have with billionaires is silly. If more is produced then the following can happen:

- your company is more likely to stay in business and thus your job is more secure (although if a competitor does this and your company doesn't, perhaps you could move, although you would be going in at a lower grade than your new, automation-trained colleagues)

- your job is higher paid because your are more valuable to the company; it can have more clients and/or more work from existing clients

- your company's investors are safer and pension funds etc invested in you do better

- your company's budget is bigger and they have more to spend on nonessentials to attract and retain staff

- your customers get lower prices and in turn they can offer more attractive pricing to their customers, which benefits end consumers

I know this all sounds very obvious, e.g. it's why tech salaries are so high: automation allows our work to scale absurdly, but occasionally when I read "only billionaires like productivity!!!111eleven" I need to say something.

I want to say something, anyway.

That’s all great. I work five days a week and all. I just don’t want to be oppressed by money. Notice that all points you mentioned are economically related. Maybe I’d use that extra day to paint and read poetry, or smoke cigs and drink beer on the porch. I actually don’t do that but either way I value the freedom to do what I want with my time more than money and power (edit: power as in over the rest, compared to with the rest back from the few). I’m just speaking for myself here, but I would predict a cultural increase for society as well.

Others would love what you mention. I still think they would be shortsighted, Ive been fired and manipulated by companies, more stability could even reduce that so I admit my bias, but the second order effects of the elites disproportional capital increase is more social and political power to them which I think leads to oppression. Maybe fifteen years later the people who love your perks wont even notice that they have less rights, potentially from corporate lobbying, worse health from work, and maybe they forgot to have fun and be creative as well since theres no time for that.

Well, the good news is you can't be oppressed by money. Money is just a value intermediary. What you value might require you doing something of value to someone else. That might be employing them at a steady wage, or giving them back more money later than they gave you today, or doing some task or service for someone who contracts or employs you, or whatever it is.

In terms of oppression: it's possible. I would just put the blame where it's deserved. Corporate lobbying is not bad. The government, who takes money from you to pay for itself, should be lobby-proof. That might be one of the most important things they do. If they can't just take money and spend it well without being corrupted by companies who'd like it to do things, that is a failure of government.

As for being fun and creative: up until not too long ago many lives were short and almost all were hard. Some of us, especially in the West, have been able to break away from that due to various advances. That's great, but it's not something to return to as much as it is to keep improving towards, or settle for the advances we have and enjoy them.

I’ll be direct: no amount of money will buy back my time. I would like to take power from the state as well, not just corporations, so moving the goalpost to the state is a different target rather than a nullifier. I know what money is, but who has most of it in their hands and what do they value? Get it.

As for your third point, time that doesn’t serve capital doesnt equal laziness and enjoyment of the spoils of previous generations. Rather it could increase the likelihood of a new renaissancelike period, for culture and reason. Tech and economy is alright but it doesn’t stop with a day less in the office, those four days become more creative and productive from the extra rest alone. I work much harder and effectively on my own projects, and detest the bureaucracy in state and capital. More time and freedom means more of what humans are supposed to be, not stagnation. There’s a reason our society is based on debt, it forces people to do what they rather wouldnt have.

> I know what money is, but who has most of it in their hands and what do they value? Get it.

Sorry, I don't understand this. Who cares who has most of it? My point is money doesn't oppress. That doesn't change if other people have more or less money than me. If we revert to a pre-money society, it's unlikely we lower any levels of oppression that exist.

> those four days become more creative and productive from the extra rest alone

This doesn't generalise. Does it work for the service industry? Emergency services? Electricians? I get that there are a few luxury white collar jobs (e.g. tech worker) that can probably benefit from this, but I don't think it's normal at all.

> There’s a reason our society is based on debt, it forces people to do what they rather wouldnt have.

No, it's so that people can have things earlier in their lives. I could work for 40 years and eventually buy somewhere cash, or I could borrow some money and pay it back over years. I choose the latter, and that's why there's debt: almost everyone finds that to be their best option.

I think you took my sentence too literally. I dont consider money as a concept oppressive. What Im saying is the wealthiest in the world don’t have the same values, they pursue different things. Where money is, and where it moves, matters because it has social and political effects. Money is power, or energy if you will. It amplifies the values of who uses it, shaping what they have under their control to their demands.

Now the thing is, a few people own big stakes of companies, companies that employ the rest of the people. The owners want to profit, they want these employees to give as much as possible to increase profit. If the people at the bottom are powerless, they become batteries for the vision of the owner. And they can’t quit their job, because they wouldn’t be able to pay their mortgage that got more expensive with a higher interest rate. And when times are tough and they dont have liquid cash, they take credit with a high interest rate to get by the month. Now they’re in a bad debt cycle, they dont choose over their lives and have to stay in servitude until they can make that debt manageable again. Debt has good applications and bad applications but let’s not pretend that it’s not a tool for control.

Yes, new tech can’t apply everywhere. If an improvement can be made somewhere but not everywhere, it should still be made in the place it can. The elite are pulling in their direction. The rest have to pull just as hard or the world becomes less equal.

If you find it acceptable to act on your selfish behavior you should also find it acceptable that the company acts on its selfish behavior, and fires you for someone to works the same but produces more, no? Which is what actually happens.

Also, if I believe that newfound productivity is so amazing for stock price, I buy stock. What's wrong with this approach?

No because the marginal returns on utility to the average individual from working less is far, far, far greater than the marginal returns to utility to already insanely wealthy shareholders from squeezing a worker for all they're worth.

The marginal returns on the individual then manifest as returns to the broader society, happier 99.99% outweighs the earnings of the billionaires in terms of societal impact and QoL improvements. But sadly, we don’t make the rules.

If you have a 401K, it’s very likely (and for your sake, I hope) that you’re also in the set of shareholders.

That sort-of just strengthens their point then right? It seems they should then be well positioned to compare the potential outcomes.

The overwhelming majority of shareholders are anything but “insane wealthy”.

That is again reiterating their point that it is favorable only to the small portion of insanely wealthy shareholders and does not even favor the overwhelming majority of shareholders too who are not insanely wealthy.

Yes, that was exactly it although I should have qualified that's what I meant.

Man you’re going to freak out when you hear what unions do.

They start out well but often have no negative feedback loops, so everything gets a bit rubbish.

Well, their feedback loop is the employer. The point is there's a natural tension between the two.

Most unions cut across employers, do they not? That's why they break the natural competition over individual employees that the presence of other employers generates.

What is wrong with this approach is that not everyone has disposable income to buy stock.

I suggest that you come and visit Poland and live on the median salary for a year or two.

How about we start building society for the 99.99% of us?

61% of Americans own stock [0] so it’s certainly of more interest than 0.01%.

I don’t think owning stock is about disposable income, it’s about saving. I would expect many people have a savings plan, if at least for retirement. So the majority of people directly own stock and there are more who indirectly do through pensions and other instruments that own stock for beneficiary purposes.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-own...

The world exists beyond the US.

Purchasing power is also a thing. Median gross salary in Poland is $18000, and about $14000 net. They earn less than 1200 per month, of which 300-400 is spent on rent excluding utilities, add another 50-100 utilities, 200 for food, then gas and transport and you quickly see that the savings are minuscule.

How can you buy stock on 200 (at best) after all expenses?

You’re proposing a simple problem to solve. Select a percentage that you want to save (say 5-10%) and save that. So if you have $200/month put $10-20 into an index fund and retire in 40 years.

This is the same way Americans do it.

Purchasing stock hasn’t been difficult for decades and there are many zero fee index funds that you can put small amounts into each month.

I can’t find percent Polish people who own stock but I will bet you $1000 that it’s greater than 0.01%.

The difference is that for the average Polander, cutting 10% of their income means substantial significantly less purchasing power without lots to gain.

What do you mean, without lots to gain? You were just arguing that the shareholders were gonna benefit so much from new productivity gains.

I don't get your obsession with Poland. It's a country I have a soft spot for, even though it's not my country of origin, but most importantly my argument is entirely orthogonal to that.

There's no one global society, nor one global problem. Countries are the right level to look at this at. There's, say, "Poland". Why aren't its salaries higher?

They are getting higher; Poland's economy is growing, there's no doubt about that, but you also need to understand that an economically weak country doesn't have a lot of bargaining power in the grand scheme of things and is easily influenced by other countries.

Let's take Cuba, US said don't trade with Cuba if you want to be okay with us, and the world complied. Similarly for all socialist countries, and every country in which the US intervened directly or otherwise.

Countries are not independent islands, and the American government, and the Russian and Chinese regimes sure know how to stick their fingers in every pie available.

Of course - if countries were independent islands less developed countries couldn't sell them stuff they could never develop themselves, for example. That's a good thing according to every country but North Korea, who have deliberately isolated themselves, to their detriment.

The question is: is it better to be a weaker economy in a world where other countries interact with it, or not? If it is, then said economy has to make do with what it has, and while there are geopolitical factors at play, they aren't all bad (indeed if they were even just "more bad than good" then more countries would be like North Korea). Your case of Cuba is a good one: the embargo means that Cuba is more like an independent island, and less like a weaker economy participating in a global economy.

But to relate geopolitics to "society" is still wrong, I think. A society is a smaller thing than "everyone on earth". Inherited familial, political, and institutional norms are roughly at the society level, and they play a large part in how law-abiding, productive and welcoming that society is. A lot of that is bounded at country, although sometimes countries will share cultural lineages that mean they are similar.

P.s. fantastic news on the Polish economy front. Great to hear salaries are on the rise.

> P.s. fantastic news on the Polish economy front. Great to hear salaries are on the rise.

They are, but inflation (and shrinkflation) powered by corporate greed has screwed people over the last year; I could fill my tote back with equivalent of 20 euros in September when the local currency was much weaker, whereas now I need to spend more in local currency than I did back then.

Interesting. How has corporate greed had such a macro effect?

They hide it under the guide of “inflation” and war that displaced so many millions of Ukrainians.

They hide inflation under the guise of inflation? I don't quite follow.

Certainly the war has caused inflation, in the sense of "things costing more".

If you decompose the increase in cost to the subcomponents, you will find that corporate profits from retailers are causing inflation.

I'm actually visiting later this month.

Uhm, plenty wrong with that. Someone’s left holding the bag. It sounds like you’ve sufficiently alleviated any personal risk in this hypothetical by ensuring that you get a piece of the pie.

Ah, the risk canard. Those wealthy people are so at risk! Why they're more at risk than the single mother who takes a bus to work, because of their highly leveraged position and the extreme table stakes of those so lofty!

Or that's a myth, everything is setup for them to succeed, and they've captured value that we should all be sharing in because we don't fully account for externalities or the accumulation of capital. As a human being everyone should have a piece of the pie, and we can remove force from the system if we choose to - and we will one day.

I'll let you into a little secret - you're going to die in about 40 years from now. After that, no more _hsjqllzlfkf_. Nobody will remember you in about 50 years from now. Everything you did in your life will be forgotten in about 75 years from now. In fact, it'll be as if you never existed. (*Maybe you have children, in which case revise this a little; they'll have their fond memories, but they'll also resent you for a lot of things.)

There should be a _lot_ more to life than working for other people.

How about you don't tell me how to live my life?

Not there should be. Because of mostly capitalist advances we can look forward to working less and still having a good life, but there's no should. It's been achieved, so there is more, but that's on the back of a lot of work, productivity, and progress.

Yea, I find it acceptable to be just as greedy about the middle class priorities as the 0,01% are about theirs.

What’s wrong is that you don’t benefit as much as them, and us workers outnumber them. I prioritise the quality of life of a larger quantity of people rather than the capital increase of a select few sociopaths.

Well done for accurately voicing the "opinion" of the existing system, and getting near universal criticism for it!

I hope those who object who aren't already some degree of socialist will move a little leftwards now.

Yes. 100%. Absolutely. Without a doubt.

It'd be nice to use some increases in efficiency and productivity to actually benefit something other than shareholder profits.

I believe that was addressed in the original comment: "...improve quality of life for everyone."

Why would I want to improve quality of life for "everyone"? I can improve my quality of life by a greater amount by making more money.

That's a reasonable approximation of the stance adopted by the French monarchy.

Improve quality of life for "everyone" if you want to achieve a different outcome for your kin.

Fine, you can work 5 days a week.

Only to certain point. There have already been plenty of research that indicates that after a certain point more money have a very limited effect on your quality of life. After that point other factors becomes way more important. It is individual of course, so you might very well improve your quality of life greatly by making money alone, but that makes you an outlier.

Because despite what you may think, you exist within a society of other people. Improving everyone's quality of life also improves your own. Unless you want to live alone, in a gated community surrounded by expensive security.

And that is why you are not invited to the party. Please stop calling this number.

Because we live in a society of people other than just ourselves. Life is generally better when we take care of each other.

Not everybody is like you.

Because we don’t need that much production.

Sadly, I don’t think this is how capitalism works…

A few years ago, I read an essay that pointed out that the typewriter meant that people could write five or so times faster than before. And of course, what happened was not that people spent less times typing, quite the opposite. This plays out again and again, of course.

The typewriter is irrelevant to the value equation at that point. You're paying for "potential" human labour, and that's governed by scarcity and fundamental limitations of how much a human can physically do.

I.e. you're paying for 8 hours of that humans time, not their output. They still expect 8 hours, whether you output 10wpm or 100. Now are there some employers happy with splitting the difference in gains with their employees? Sure, but the market's emergent behavior will favor employers that get X output per $, not X-15%.

But remember, this same equation applies to the employer. So they can't tell the market "hey we can now produce this same product 5x more cheaply but pretty please will you keep paying the same while we reduce our expenses by 5x?"

In my head, it's essentially the same, perhaps I'm not explaining very well.

> But remember, this same equation applies to the employer.

I don't think it does.

> So they can't tell the market "hey we can now produce this same product 5x more cheaply but pretty please will you keep paying the same while we reduce our expenses by 5x?"

Why would they advertise their internal efficiency gains?

And even if they can't hide it, why would it force them to lower their prices? It doesn't affect the supply/demand equation. It just makes them more profitable.

It worked like this in the 80s in Europe. Too many steel mills closed, governments and unions capped thr total labor hours to create balance and ensure a healthy job market.

It can be done and if everyone for their earnings call is promising the gains to shareholders through layoffs or may end viable way to avoid an utter labor market disaster that’s brewing.

I personally think we should eliminate poverty, war and have a 3 day work week. We don't seem to like that idea for some reason.

Eventually we'll need to drop that anyway. Capitalism will always externalise to the poorer, the environment etc. We're getting to the point where it can't continue. Not just because we're screwing up the world but also because eventually a few people will have all the money and nobody will have any left to buy things.

Even the most hardline neoliberals are now seriously thinking about UBI.

> but also because eventually a few people will have all the money and nobody will have any left to buy things.

This is what Henry Ford realized back in the day.

Yes, I know, the true story is a bit more complex [1], but the general point still stands - instead of whining "no one wants to work anymore" [2], he simply paid an adequate price for labor.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-stor...

[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nobody-wants-to-work-anymore

Well, even if I define myself as a sort of anticapitalist, maybe before waiting for UBI (for which I’m for), we could also do something to halt this race to extreme inequalities.

Even neoliberalism isn’t incompatible with dismantling monopolies.

Maybe we could also top the maximum personal wealth to some billions (I’m not even asking for millions) so that after your 100th appartement or your 200th car, you are 100% taxed.

I understand the oppositions against taxing the riches but we can’t tolerate that 1% of people are able to own half the planet wealth. It’s not helping anyone, even the capitalism itself, to continue to accept that.

> Even the most hardline neoliberals are now seriously thinking about UBI.

That's interesting. Can you give some examples?

"The Libertarian Case for UBI"

https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/upload_documents...

Similar discussions from UC San Diego

https://digital.sandiego.edu/law_philosophy_scholarship/189/

The basic idea is that the state is there to create and ensure a free market exists, and that outside of that creating organs to redistribute wealth is an inefficient hack.

Glenn Beck, proving that broken clocks can be right, said something about Obamacare to the effect of: "this will cost close to $3 million per US citizen. why not just give the citizen that money, and let them fly to Korea or Mexico? prices may go up but the free market is still a thing and consumers could just go to Europe instead. Cut out the middle man"

Sam Altman

Still waiting for someone to explain why the UBI won't just increase the price of all real state / rent to be $price_before + $UBI.

When seen in that light, it would not be surprising that people with many assets support it.

That's why it will need to be linked with rent control and public housing to keep prices down.

And no, you don't need to put all housing stock under rent control for that to work... Vienna for example has around 40% either outright government owned or cooperatively owned and that's enough to keep prices down on the rest of the market [1], which in turn also means that the sales market is kept down - as you have essentially a cap on the rent because no one will pay much more for a private rental than what they would pay in a government rental, the potential income one could gain from "investing" into housing is also limited.

[1] https://neuezeit.at/wie-wohnen-die-wiener/

How are land owners kept out of the voting & policy loop, to simply remove those annoying impediments?

In the US I just assume nothing actually effective can ever happen (on almost any topic really) because the people who would need to do it are all the same people who wouldn't like it, or are at least enriched by them.

> How are land owners kept out of the voting & policy loop, to simply remove those annoying impediments?

Vienna has been a social democrat (SPÖ) stronghold ever since the first democratic elections in the 1910s (called "Rotes Wien" for that reason), interrupted only during the association of Austria to Nazi Germany, and the Viennese population is proud of having their Gemeindewohnungen - calls to sell them off would probably lead to political obliviation of the idiot dumb enough to call for it. Even the far-right FPÖ didn't dare to go that far, all they attempted to want was a requirement to speak German (2011, [1]) or prioritise ethnic Austrians (2018, [2]).

[1] https://www.derstandard.at/story/1297818846747/fpoe-nennt-de...

[2] https://www.vienna.at/fpoe-wien-will-vorteil-fuer-oesterreic...

If you can pay rent without a job, you don’t need to live near a strong job market (which is where most of the housing shortages are).

If the premise I put forward is true you won't be able to pay rent without a job because rent after UBI would be $previous_rent + $UBI.

Yes. But hopefully someone eventually figures out a (higher) disproportionate part of the economy happens on the weekends. That is, if two days off is good for spending, three days is even better. Aside from more of the usual, three-day weekends would, for example, be good for tourism.

China is implementing proper time off regulations because of this, to increase domestic consumption.

Recently I read, tho not in reference to China, that more "down time" likely leads to more sex, and more sex leads to more babies. Perhaps the four-day week is the answer to contracting population numbers in The West?

Maybe, until someone else figures out what you're actually maximising for is total spending, not the frequency of it.

An optimal system would probably require people to work 6 days a week and buy everything in a single day.

Nah. Weekends are already a shit show with traffic, waiting in line, etc. Plus, soccer games, Little League, etc.

There's not enough excessive capacity in the system for that.

Isn’t that exactly how capitalism works?

Increased productivity increases competition so new firms using AI, remote work, and short work weeks can attract and retain a superior workforce and be cheaper than older firms that can’t adapt?

I’m not sure what method other than markers would be best suited for making such a large industry shift.

It’s really hard to not adapt when the barrier is a rest API and microsoft office / photoshop

Humans need work for meaning.

Just ask many retired people.

What a pithy and pointless comment, and kind of sad even. You can work your 5 day weeks, hell you can work 12hr days if you want. Please, don't let anyone here stop you.

I find significantly more meaning in my life from the things I do outside of work and having an extra 1 day per week for those things is literally a personal career goal.

Even taking that at face value, "work" doesn't necessarily relate to full-time employment.

Work can be crafts, social work, volunteering, actually taking time to raise one's kids, hell even playing ball games in the park with friends can constitute work for meaning purposes!

(Some). Many of us found meaning in other areas and are very happy about it.

Wrong way around, humans need to do meaningful things, that's why mental health suffers when people doing meaningless work.

That's what those 4 days are for I guess?

The evidence given in the linked Axios article is a stronger justification for unlimited holidays and/or summer Fridays than anything else.

The real reasons appear to be revenge spending (which was predicted) and higher personal incomes.

It’s hard to see how any of this is tied to remote work specifically from the actual article.

The reason is because for the price of things to crash relative to dollars, there needs to be a shortage of dollars relative to the things that can be bought with dollars and since more dollars are being printed constantly and at zero cost by the government and banks, it's simply impossible to create enough goods and services in the economy to vacuum up all those dollars.

Attempts have been made to make dollars appear scarce to the masses by manufacturing extreme wealth inequality but the inflation we're seeing today likely comes from wealthy consumers, not from the masses. The masses are already totally squeezed out of all wealth-creation opportunities and the system is just creating tons of wasteful bullshit jobs for them instead. The system we have today is utterly incapable of using the masses for anything other than bullshit bureaucratic jobs because it doesn't want the masses to compete against existing corporations; it needs a way to keep them busy but, as a side effect, this anti-competitive economy just destroys innovation through the systematic deprivation of opportunities.

Probably not.

Mostly it is because we're still dealing with bullwhip effects from the pandemic, and the interest rate hikes from the Fed haven't really had time yet.

It takes 6-12 months from the end of rate hikes for a recession to hit, and given how fast the rate hikes were and that policy was still accommodative up until earlier this year my expectations are closer to the tail end of that range--and we're not even certain the Fed is done with rate hikes yet.

If this strong economy results in a resurgence of inflation and more tight labor markets then the Fed may continue with a terminal policy much higher than we think is possible right now (and that kicks the end date of Fed rate hikes even further down the road, along with the 6-12 month recession expectation).

https://archive.is/4fxkV

Edit: link fixed

It didn't work for me - the text is blurred. What helped though was turning off JS (one click in uBlock Origin).

Sorry, I've replaced the link now.

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