Everything is done in the name of 'maintaining stability.' New York real estate owners (and those of other big cities) don't want to allow remote work because it would tank their property values and rents... So they conspire with the media and government to craft false narratives to bring people back to the office... The costs of renting there are so high however, that they have to artificially inflate salaries of people who live there in order to make it add up... But then with such high salaries, this increases company operating expenses and this makes them vulnerable to foreign competitors who don't have to pay their employees such high salaries, so they need to lobby the government to come up with regulations to block foreign competition and they need the government to keep printing tons of money (pumping it into big cities) to keep the scheme going. They also need to reach secret deals with foreign states to agree not to compete in certain industries... Again, all in the name of 'global economic stability.' The amount of wasted human potential is unfathomable.
Most of the population's mental capacity is focused on keeping this artificial centralization scheme going which harms almost everyone and destroys economic value... But they have a solution for that too in the form of 'Global warming' narratives 'worst than we thought'... Even if you can see through it all, the controlled demolition of the economy is fine because 'Everyone needs to make sacrifices to reduce CO2 output'.
The scheme is so complex and intricate... So many bureaucrats working on it... Reality has become some kind of fiction. Every white-collar worker is contributing to the fiction in some way but almost none of them realizes it because their own manipulations represent a tiny piece of the whole scheme. A scheme which involves millions of individuals concurrently crafting and maintaining a massive illusion. Engaging in monetary manipulations, regulations, cultural manipulations (e.g. DEI, ESG) and of course algorithm-based media filter bubbles to ensure that people are kept in the dark as much as possible...