There are tangible benefits here, but the loss of wealth is a very real and very painful reality for people unlucky or foolish enough to be long stocks at or near retirement age.

That being said, as someone who works from home as an independent contractor, I appreciate the concept of telecommuting. There’s no reason to keep people in a stockade for 8 hours a day when some studies recognize you might only get 2 hours of actual work out of the average employee under any circumstances. We’re not making model T Fords in most offices. We’re making great big pillowy cakes filled with meetings and meetings about meetings. When I worked in an office, we would have a 30 minute meeting every morning and a 1 hour meeting every afternoon, mostly about nothing at all related to what I actually needed to do to push the needle. Couple that 90 minutes with the 40 minute round trip and I could have spent that same amount of time actually getting things done and depending on my workload, I could take the afternoon off.

Of course no office is seamlessly aligned. So, instead of wasting people’s time in meetings, the drag coefficient should move to actual production, which never lets any single employee be perfectly, dynamically utilized. An 8 hour day is still reasonable, but we should eliminate pointless, archaic ideas of sweatshop labor from 100 years ago dictate our work flow — even though many people find it satisfying to mimic.