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Comment by DragonStrength | Hacker News Reader

It’s more there’s a bunch of people who put their life savings into cheap structures on expensive land in SF and Seattle. If the next generation of high income professionals doesn’t have to buy their shitty 100 year old money pit, they’ve now taken a loss on the single biggest purchase they’ve ever made while the schools they bought for get worse. Many of these folks work at places like Amazon.

No conspiracy needed for a bunch of people to act in their own perceived best interest and work backwards to a justification.

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If anyone needs a convenient label: game theory

People need not work together to conspire, only vaguely in the same direction. Incentives do that like radio waves

Why would the interests of those companies be aligned with those of their landlords in the first place?

Because the leadership who makes decisions, or even just has the potential to voice their opinions and have them weighted, own real-estate.

Better yet, those leaders maybe also love exerting control over their employees and find this more enjoyable in an office environment.

Companies ARE NOT a democracy. In my mind, there's a huge overlap between being high company leadership and also being a self-serving narcissist. Are we then surprised that narcissists prefer to do things in their own self interests, and prefer to boss people around while looking at them? To me, that's not surprising at all. I think people don't understand these decisions aren't made by hundreds of people, but rather less than a handful per company.

I think most people do understand that. It's just unintuitive that companies would prefer to pay rent for offices they don't need.

I think if you reframe company leadership as egotistical man children, then it becomes very intuitive. Most companies aren't that, but in my mind, there is serious overlap between being a career executive and having narcissistic tendencies.

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