> Employees waste 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity.
It's not patently absurd, it obviously bring some benefit to their life to chose this, you're just ignoring those benefits to focus solely on the time and energy costs; which people gladly trade away in order to achieve these other benefits.
> The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful.
This view is solely focused on the "information economy," and really doesn't make any sense once you start adding in light commercial or industrial activity. We built this infrastructure for a reason, and it wasn't solely to create a trap for white collar workers.
> Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
This is probably because most people do not view their lives as part of some giant "min-max" game designed to provide maximum benefit to everyone other than themselves.
"It's not patently absurd, it obviously bring some benefit to their life to chose this"
For the vast majority of people in the last four decades working out of an office was not a decision up to the employees so I don't know where this is coming from.
I think it is more out of habit than anything else. Office work has always been information based but it wasn't possible to get the information (aka paper) out of the office easily. For this reason, people had to be brought to the information.
I don't think we would have many office buildings if information work and telecommuting would have started at exactly the same time. No serious business person would invest in something that is plainly unnecessary.
It's not patently absurd, it obviously bring some benefit to their life to chose this, you're just ignoring those benefits to focus solely on the time and energy costs; which people gladly trade away in order to achieve these other benefits.
> The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful.
This view is solely focused on the "information economy," and really doesn't make any sense once you start adding in light commercial or industrial activity. We built this infrastructure for a reason, and it wasn't solely to create a trap for white collar workers.
> Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
This is probably because most people do not view their lives as part of some giant "min-max" game designed to provide maximum benefit to everyone other than themselves.