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Comment by rblatz | Hacker News Reader

I’ve long suspected it’s a PR campaign/propaganda and talking points aimed directly at the c suite class. A lot of people with a lot of money stand to lose a lot. Banks, investors, retirement funds…

Start circulating studies showing people working multiple remote jobs at once, steer thinking around company culture, normalize it through repetition, send out talking points. Eventually dominos will start failing.

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If it would be bad for people's pension funds and such, shouldn't it be everyone's interest to actually keep showing up to prop up those real estate values?

No.

Pension indexes wouldn't be in a volotile industry as real estate.

> shouldn't it be everyone's interest to actually keep showing up to prop up those real estate values?

not if you're getting a large benefit from WFH. And the loss from commercial real estate devaluation won't hit everyone equally.

Productivity would grow the amount of value in real-estate + some i guess. Should be a little spike starting at covid where new value is generated, but old losses are not priced in.

Pensions are, in general, well diversified. The tiny loss you'd get in your pension, diluted over decades of management, is practically homeopathic in strength as a concern.

No? My impression of US (and by extension) global finance state of things is, pension funds are holding the society hostage, preventing positive changes in some sectors of the economy, real estate being particularly blatant case. "Propping up those real estate values", in general, works for the benefits of "haves" at the expense of hoping to have when they get older - i.e. it works against the interest of younger generations.

As a young'un who probably won't live to see a pension judging by how things are going in the world, I'll take a QoL boost NOW instead of potentially maybe one day when I'm 65+ and retired being able to perhaps live off of the undoubtedly meager pension I accrued over a more miserable life.

I also suspect (but have nothing to prove this, just a gut feeling) that the effect of pension funds is minuscule compared to the amount of money the elite make. It's a very convenient excuse to not do anything disruptive ever, of course, because "Think of the pensions!!"

https://www.thinkingaheadinstitute.org/research-papers/globa... says pensions control $55 trillion. you'll have to define "the elites" a bit more to have a point of comparison, but the richest billionaire has "only" $200 B.

So at the very least it's not miniscule, but it depends on how you want to calculate the other side of the equation.

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