How a Recession Could Weaken the Work-From-Home Revolution

Many people are now seeing how technological progress has enabled a world where work can be divorced from the office, and married to the home. We may have understood this in theory before, but now we have been forced to see it in action. And for the most part, the technological infrastructure has been sound enough to support this shift at a fairly ... See more

My humbler assertion is that 2020 has punctured my confidence that the internet cannot encroach on the benefits of urban density and proximity. Going forward, many fledgling companies may agree, as they find that the city in the cloud essentially acts as a more accessible version of the city on the Earth, eerily reproducing its forces of agglomerat... See more

• The pandemic made working from home commonplace and the requirement to work in an office five days a week less of a default solution.

As a general rule of human civilization, we’ve lived where we work. More than 90 percent of Americans drive to work, and their average commute is about 27 minutes. This tether between home and office is the basis of urban economics. But remote work weakens it; in many cases, it severs the link entirely, replacing spatial proximity with cloud-based ... See more

There’s a case to make here, which I see being spitballed around on the Internet a lot, that the old way of doing things is over. Our year of remote-only will dispel the familiar rituals and expose our expensive addictions to these things. And after this is over, we’ll have a harder time with casually approving $4000 of flights, hotels, and lost ti... See more