I think we're still only just beginning to understand the ripple effects of Peak Office on downtown economies, the geography of labor, and the future of work
1/ First, the data.
Stadiums are packed. Travel is back. Restaurant reservations are surging. But office occupancy is moribund.
Even movie theaters—a business sometimes written off as “doomed”—have recovered almost twice as much as offices.
2/ What was once a hot take is now a stone-cold reality: The office is never coming all the way back.
Stanford economist @I_Am_NickBloom put it bluntly: “The number of person-days in the office is never going back to pre-pandemic average—ever."
3/ My Peak Office thesis is this:
Most ppl aren't remote right now. But the demise of the full-time office will be like a canon-ball dropped in a lake—an acute phenomenon whose ripples will touch the whole economy.
EG: NY subway projects pre-COVID ridership will recover...never
4/ Like all phenomena, Peak Office is unevenly distributed.
Occupancy rates in Houston, Austin, and Dallas have substantially and consistently outpaced those of coastal cities like New York and San Francisco.
5/ The most surprising and significant ricochet effect of Peak Office?
I think it could be the de facto death of the five day work week.
6/ Research from @I_Am_NickBloom has found that knowledge workers strongly prefer to move away from a full-time five-day office-week. That's why almost all companies now are pitching hybrid.
7/ Bloom told me that he’s also seeing signs of remote-work envy from people who can’t do their jobs from home.
Hospital workers, eg, are saying: "Wait, if none of my consultant friends work 5 days in an office, I want a shorter in-person workweek, too!"
8/ If the five-day in-person workweek is decaying for knowledge workers right now, it's not hard to imagine it spreading—into health care, into higher ed, into primary schools ... and at that point, you've got something very much like the death of the five-day work week.
9/ Thanks for reading. If you want more on the future of work and material progress, subscribe to my free newsletter "Work in Progress" here —>
America's biggest and richest cities are losing children at an alarming rate.
From 2020 to 2023, the number of kids under 5 declined by
- almost 20% in NYC
- about 15% in LA, SF, Chicago, and St Louis
- >10% in NoLA, Philly, Honolulu
This exodus is not merely the result of past COVID waves.
Even at the slower rate of out-migration since 2021, several counties—Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—are on pace to lose 50% of their under-5 child population by the mid-2040s. Insane.
Progressives have a family problem.
It's not the "childless cat lady" problem that Vance etc want to talk about. It's an urban policy.
Progressives preside over counties that young families are leaving. And that's bad.
1. New Fed survey: 72% of Americans say their own finances are "doing at least okay" ... but just 22% say the national economy is good
2. In all 7 swing states, majority say (a) their state’s economy is good, and (b) the nat'l economy is bad
"Everything is terrible but I'm fine" has a lot of parts to it.
But one part of it is ppl have direct experience of their own life but draw impressions of the world from media, which is negative-biased and getting more negative over time.
The most fundamental bias in news is not left, right, pro-corporate, or anti-tech. It's a bad toward catastrophic frames. An analysis of 105,000 different variations of news stories generating 5.7 million clicks found that "for a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%"
2. Extreme opinions drive in-group sharing
On Twitter, 97% of political posts on Twitter come from 10% of the most active users, and 90% of political opinions are represented by less than 3% of tweets. Because these users are disproportionately extreme, it creates a situation where the moderate middle, which might be dominant in corporeal reality, is absent online.
One myth of religion in America is that, since secularism in the west is old, the great dechurching is an old phenomenon, too.
That's not quite right.
Church attendance was remarkably steady in the 20th century. This wave of religious un-affiliation is only 30 years old.
Ppl often say stuff like: Religion declined, and Americans tried to replace faith in god w/ crystals, or politics, or UFOs.
I'm interested in the time-use piece of this. Religious rituals declined, and Americans seem to have replaced them with ... sitting at home watching TV.
But rather than frame this achievement as a win for renters—or for the arg that housing prices respond to supply growth—WSJ frames it pretty clearly as bad news across the board.
Seems important to arguments about supply side growth and prices that Austin
(a) leads the nation is apartment construction as a share of supply, and
(b) rent prices have meaningfully declined
Yes, housing is a market, producers are a part of the market, and markets don't work longterm if prices just go down.
But, again, FRAMING. Downtown housing supply in rich, high-productive metros is a national problem. Solving that problem *necessarily* requires rents to soften.