An interesting furore erupted this month following an order from the new chief executive of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, that employees accustomed to working from home would henceforth have to turn up at the office. The edict, unexceptional in many industries, scandalised many tech workers, for whom the freedom to work anywhere is an article of faith.
You can see why. Since the chief use of information technology is to free us from the constraints of place and time, what is the point of all this wizardry if people must still spend hours commuting to jobs they could do at home?
At the risk of sounding Marxist, I do think it is time for technology to benefit labour as well as capital. Research suggests that a typical employee works for an extra ten hours a month for no extra pay when given a work Blackberry (this is one of the reasons for the declining sales of newspapers — the time commuters once devoted to reading the paper is now spent sending emails). There has to be a trade-off somewhere, surely?
But at one level Yahoo is right. Nothing fully replaces face-to-face contact. And many of the most important interactions between employees are serendipitous. Electronic contact needs to be interspersed with personal contact. For this reason I strongly suspect the wider adoption of technologies such as videoconferencing will not diminish the demand for air travel, as many opponents of airport expansion suggest, but will in fact increase it. Videoconferencing and air travel should not be seen as mutually exclusive alternatives but as complementary goods. Once it becomes easy to do daily business with people everywhere, the need to visit those people will grow.
Predicting future work and travel patterns is of great importance to cities such as London. The problem with knowledge industries is that they are insanely centripetal. Unlike wealth derived from agriculture or manufacturing, say, which tends to be geographically dispersed, the wealth created by knowledge increasingly concentrates in just a few centres (think of Hollywood, Silicon Valley or the Square Mile). This concentration exacerbates inequality and puts rising pressure on infrastructure and rents.
Two-income households have boosted this network effect: when both partners in a marriage work in a knowledge industry, the odds of both finding satisfactory new employment simultaneously outside a major centre becomes tiny — so the pull of the megalopolis grows stronger still. Migration patterns show the same effect. We talk of UK immigration, but it is often London -immigration.
Part-time teleworking could relieve congestion; longer commutes might be tolerable if Londoners were allowed to work at home on one or two days a week. We shall need to do something, because the ‘big cities get even bigger’ effect isn’t going to go away.
What is ironic about this is that it is another case of technology having the opposite effect to that which we predicted. Fifteen years ago everyone thought electronic networks would reduce the magnetic pull of cities — and that everyone would end up living and working by a lake. Instead the opposite has happened.
The same surprise effect happened with the contraceptive pill. People confidently predicted this would end single-parenthood and out-of-wedlock births. Instead, both rocketed. As the economist George Akerlof proposed, the pill allowed men to see pregnancy as a female choice and removed the idea of paternal obligation.
This is a complex world, full of unintended consequences, and we don’t really understand it. The problems arise when we think we do. As the great Charlie Munger advises, ‘Always invert.’
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