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It's not a conspiracy theory, it's how the system works. You are taxed on pretty much all of your income either from the state, the landlord, the credit card company or the lifestyle obligations that stems from the area you are living in.

> And that's right where they want you.

This is the part where we diverge, and I think where people confuse emerging phenomena for conspiracy.

There is no one orchestrating this.

> There is no one orchestrating this.

I think there are thousands of people orchestrating this, independently.

That's kinda what an emerging phenomena is.

My point is that it's still the result of human action, it's purposeful and intentional.

It's just not conspiracy.

It's not emergent out of nowhere. It's emergent out of shitty people being in positions of power and influence.

>it's still the result of human action, it's purposeful and intentional.

Orcheastras imply a conductor, a central figure with the score to direct their symphony to play.

1000 conductors means there is no conductor. Each one may have a purpose and intention, but a conspiracy implies... well, conspiring. That isn't a conspiracy, it's a mob. Even if somehow the symphony manages to make a melody out of the madness, it's not a result of a conspiracy because it never happened.

You are doing incredible mental contortions to avoid acknowledging the concept of a cartel.

When OPEC raises global oil prices, that's the result of a collective, negotiated action, and a conspiracy.

I'm simply invoking Hanlon's razor. I've seen enough of the sausage to acknowledge that 95% of these "top brass" are just making it up as they go along.

> 1000 conductors means there is no conductor.

1000 conductors means that there is 1000 conductors and 1000 orchestras.

They've all done their research, and they've all independently decided to have their orchestras play mostly the same songs as all the other orchestras.

They've arrived at this decision by copying what the most successful orchestras are doing, reading in orchestra magazines about best practice for orchestras, going to orchestra conferences, talking to other conductors over expensive meals and games of golf, etc

I agree it's not a conspiracy. There's no big room where all the conductors get together and all agree which songs to play.

But it's not accidental either. Each conductor is seeking the best song list, and by using the resources available to them they are all coming to similar conclusions.

I think I've tortured this metaphor enough.

I just do not want the human element to be abstracted from the equation here. Yes, I agree there's no conspiracy. Ultimately this crap is "emergent" from the systems in place. Those systems were built by humans, and then the "emergent" behavior is just humans concluding "based on this system in place this is the best set of actions I can take". Those humans then are successful so other humans try to copy them.

There is a word for it, stigmergy. It is just conspiracy minus the direct communication. A network where nodes each behave according to their observations rather than communicating. Termites don't conspire either.

Not if it’s being orchestrated on lines of class And wealth

It seems that everything is a tax to you. What would you like to spend your money on besides lifestyle?

they're not saying lifestyle expenses are a tax in themselves, but rather the inflation on the lifestyle expense is a tax (ie. "cost of living"), as well as the need for certain expenses to begin with (eg. the need for a nanny because both parents need to work long hours bc of high COL and commute times)

I still think "expense" is more appropriate than "tax".

The difference is that you get to blame someone else for a tax, but expenses are something you bring on yourself. Victim mentality.

So having to pay $1.2mil for a 3 bedroom home instead of $300k because I need to be near the office because RTO is an expense I choose?

Obviously no one would rather pay 4x as much for the same thing. In that sense no one chooses the price of their house as they'd clearly pay $1 if they could.

But yes, you choose to pay a lot to live near work (you value your time), in a place with great weather and public schools and natural beauty (since we seem to be talking Bay Area here). The $300k house in BFE Ohio does not have these properties.

At one point in my life I chose to live in a basement for about 10% of my monthly post tax income. Why don't you choose that? Turns out you do, in fact, have agency in choosing your living conditions.

We have agency in that we could choose to renounce careers in tech. That’s it.

There is a price/quality tradeoff in every housing market; all complaints about price can be interpreted as insufficient willingness to compromise on quality. A cardboard box under a bridge is free! “You’re actually obscenely wealthy because you don’t live in a basement and drive 6 hours to work” is not the argument you think it is. Tech workers are telling you how they feel about Bay Area weather, schools, and transportation every time they complain about RTO. We all want nothing more than to get the fuck away from here. Nothing more except, perhaps, to do the work we were meant to do.

You can easily find big tech jobs in Seattle, Austin, NY, Denver, Los Angeles, etc etc.

Actions speak louder than words, so no, they are not telling me they want to live elsewhere. They're telling me they like to complain.

That $1.2 mil figure wasn’t any of those cities, nor was it from SF. You seem to be detached from reality.

And btw, I spent a large portion of my life living out of a rack on a warship so don’t talk to me about compromise kiddo.

Moving to New York or Los Angeles for affordable housing is ridiculous on its face. Austin, Denver, and I would add Miami were basically flash-in-the-pan situations: first movers got some great deals, but the housing markets have priced it in by now & the forward-looking job market outlooks are uncertain.

Seattle is interesting in that it's clearly a durable tech job center and is meaningfully cheaper than San Francisco. It's still twice as expensive as a normal place ($862k vs. $400k) and its street conditions reflect a housing crisis every bit as severe as San Francisco's, but it's true that you could keep your career while paying ~30% less there. So I guess the delta between SF and SEA could be interpreted as a lifestyle splurge.

This is absolutely being orchestrated, right out in the open. OP’s entire post is fundamentally about the balance of power between labor and capital. The Fed’s stated goal is to cool the labor market so that wage growth will calm down. In other words, the Fed thinks labor is too strong, calls too many of the shots in negotiations and so wants employees to be more desperate so that their employers will have the upper hand.

Note that this also aligns with incentives of the largest voting bloc, retirees and near retirees.

Obviously capital would prefer to pay lower wages, all else being equal, and in this case the Fed backs them up on that to prevent a wage-price spiral. What’s less obvious is how to keep even very-highly-paid employees from deciding they’ve made enough and checking out.

> There is no one orchestrating this.

Very true, and the reason why it's important to spell this out explicitly is because any solution that hinges on identifying and blaming a single or few orchestrators is dead on arrival.

> There is no one orchestrating this.

There wasn’t before.

There is now.

Lobbyists are pushing for it. Big investment firms like Vanguard and Blackrock that have a lot to lose if the commercial real estate market collapses are pushing companies to mandate RTO policies if they want to keep getting investments. Makes sense.

source?

Yep. Hence the economic alarms about salaries being “too high”: remote work enables geo-arbitrage, which removes a significant portion of employer leverage.

If employees could buy their way out of the system, then, by definition, capital is leaving power and money on the table. And it absolutely loathes that.

They get what they pay for. Companies that offer remote jobs will be able to pick from and retain a wider gamut of talent. I suspect a lot of this RTO is related to the tech market just generally being down. Once things heat back up, recruiters will be knocking down doors to get people to interview for remote gigs just like before. It may take some time to get to that point though, because there are a number of factors at play currently that could prolong the depression in tech.

My contention is they won’t be able to sustain it, because either the wages will be uncompetitive or remote workers will pay off their houses and no longer need to work (as much).

Wages aren't even close to being high enough that companies won't able to afford workers. Developers in the standard ranges don't even need to consider what a company can afford when doing salary negotiations. With the exception of small businesses, it's about what they are _willing_ to pay, not what they are able to.

I'm not saying they can't afford high wages. I'm saying levels.fyi-scale wages for a few years in a normal housing market would leave an employee much pickier about companies/projects/conditions vs. someone who still needs to grind hard for his first 1BR in New York or San Francisco.

Thanks for posting this. I always found it odd that the transition from labour to capital seemed to be so hard, even with mid-figure 6 income TC's it always seemed like you can't quite escape the rat race, you can definitely live more comfortably, or maybe as comfortably as you can as one of the rats in the race but never escape. Of course with very disciplined saving and LCOL arbitrage you stand a chance, however it seems like these methods are being purged with COL adjustments, inflation purging cash savings, markets tanking 401k's. Just when you think you are out they pull you back in. I often wondered whether this was by design, because it seems a bit too convenient for labour pools, or whether its a feature of the economic system we operate in.

Seems to me that it’s central to the economic system we live in. If advancing from labour class to capital class was not very very hard, there would be far fewer workers, which is untenable in our society.

Labor demand was sluggish for a decade after 2008, it’s only now that the economy wants a lot of workers.

I assume everyone had roughly the same thought around 2012. Mid sized city jobs paying 100k+ and you could still find homes with half an acre for $300k. As salaries got inflated due to FAANG and startup competition it really seemed like an easy out was just keep a lower cost place or rent. The dream of WFH was find a HCOL job and buy LCOL place and a helicopter or maybe just save for retirement at 45.

Now given the cost of living increases, the $300k places push $900k in midsized cities. The HCOL areas have gone up in value and the mortgage due to interest is almost twice as high over 2019. Assuming a $15-$20k net take home the housing will be half of it. Grocery bills seem about twice as high. Even with much higher salaries it seems like everything has been squeezed back to the 2012 math. Not everyone ended up riding the salary train and it's even harder form them. And that's assuming you get to keep your job in the shuffle back to the office/layoffs.

The last 40 years of economic policy has been about aggressively loosening restrictions on capital movement, while keeping in place or strengthening restrictions on the movement of labour.

The WFO wave was an disruption in that cycle. But only for the professional class. It won't last, at least not for the lower end of the market.

Yes, I think you’ve really got it there. The federal government is absolutely trying to orchestrate this situation for the benefit of companies. They try to keep unemployment at a sweet spot number where not too many people are living on the street, but companies have a pliable and plentiful labor pool. It’s achieved through a careful balance of monetary policy, taxes, immigration, education, and laws limiting reproductive choice. The CEO of every Fortune 500 is working towards the same in their own realms, such as all the lobbying that tech companies do on H1-b visas.

But at the same time, we also have a brutally efficient marketing and advertising discipline that taps into our emotional biology and keeps people wanting more and always looking over their shoulder at what everyone else has.

I’ve thought before that by default, most people will be pushed to work ceaselessly, barely affording everything they think they should have and saving nearly nothing. It takes a choice to and self denial to step off that treadmill and start building the wealth that can set and individual free from living off their labor.

Remote work is a huge threat because of geo-arbitrage. Clever employees can quickly get ahead of then saving curve and throw off the reigns. Hungry employees are the easiest to manage. Fat employees have the power to say no.

Is it really possible for an individual to “build wealth” without exploiting the working class

Save 50% of your gross salary, invest in index funds, and be patient. You can speed up the process via geo-arbitrage, climbing the career ladder without lifestyle creep, working at a FAANG, being more frugal, or side hustles. Search for FIRE for more details.

It’s not easy by any stretch.

Let's be honest, it's only possible for people with rare skills and/or prestigious credentials (which are largely a function of your parents social class).

Earning median wage most of that goes towards rent. There's nothing left to save. Move further away and you lose big on earnings.

ordinary behavior is unlikely to bring extraordinary results

> Earning median wage most of that goes towards rent. There's nothing left to save. Move further away and you lose big on earnings.

If you are in your teens or 20's in a median wage income, then I advise considering vanlife grinding towards FIRE. I spent so much time in libraries or labs at that stage of my life that in hindsight, I should have dismissed the stigma of "homelessness" and adopted vanlife, scraped enough together for a duplex down payment, rent both sides out initially until one side is paid off, and then settle in that side should I want out of vanlife at that point.

Aren’t index funds just based on the profits of exploitative companies?

this doesnt work if you have kids. I honestly think the only way to actually achieve financial independence to is to an entrepreneur

Exploited? Working for a living is called being an adult. The inverse of which is sticking your hand out and demanding that everyone carry you through adult life. People who agree to work for someone else are, in no way, being exploited. You have a choice to be a bum, as much as you have a choice where to work. And your options are greater when you're not a bum and have marketable skills that employers are willing pay for. Furthermore, if you're not a bum and you acquire skills, you can start your own business and do extremely well for yourself, and support dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of families if your business requires employees. I'm interested in discovering where you learned that successful business owners are "exploiting" people who willingly work for them.

Absolutely. I’m not a fan of the overly broad definition of exploitation meaning “anyone who has a job.” Clearly voluntarily selling your labour for money isn’t exploitation. Save your money and live off the interest.

For some definitions of wealth, sure. I think the minimum definition is that you are freed from at least some need to labor. Clearly there’s a wealth point at which you need to capture excess value from the labor of others.

This is too “brilliant villain”. Too many chain links of logic to actually implement and make work.

I suspect it’s the far more evil banality of “we paid for this office space and it’s pretty awkward to explain to the board why we have this red line item for a ‘10 year lease - office space’ and nobody is in there, so let’s just force 100s of people to come back in against all common sense and metrics that show this is a bad idea.”

That’s surely a factor for remote work in particular, but we must also ask why engineering orgs that embrace globally distributed sites & happily span SF, SEA, and NYC allow for so few seats in places like Chicago, the Triangle, or the Sun Belt. It’s cheaper & the collaboration setup is no different!

I don’t think it’s really a conspiracy theory, this a fundamental aspect of American capitalism.

Health insurance is a perfect example of a carrot that companies want to maintain control over in order to maintain a dedicated workforce. By keeping “affordable” (eye roll) access to healthcare tied to a full time job, they keep butts in seats. This isn’t new or isolated to tech companies. It’s always been about maintaining control from the top.

I’ve always thought this. Having healthcare primarily accessible through your job must be a strangely subservient place to be. You could literally die if you lose or leave your job!

Im not one for conspiracy theories, but that’s a great position for governments and big business to find themselves in!

Health insurance equivalent to what an employer subsidizes is pretty accessible without the employer at healthcare.gov, but the tax deductibility is not if you are working for an employer too small or cheap to offer or, or not employed at all.

The premiums just happen to be very expensive (even for the employers’ subsidy portion) to the tune of $10k/$30k+ per individual/family.

Healthcare is just another cost in your life and you should view the benefit as part of your TC. It's only slightly distorted here in that companies can use pretax money but it isn't like it's a small expense to companies either.

I've personally never used Cobra, because it is in fact cheaper to buy individual plans.

Ironically making it pretax harms employees long term by making them more dependent on the employer for healthcare

https://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/titles/barbara-ehrenreich/...

Fear of Falling by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Very well said. Forcing employees to live in high cost of living locations and commute to an office reduces employee leverage. High housing prices keep you on the treadmill and dependant on your employer. Employers want you to be dependent on them

Fascinating and thought provoking "conspiracy". Thanks for sharing.