When you also consider the nation as you know, a nation, and not a rat race of individual interest, the best thing the government could do is encourage working from home. Break the hell up these "hubs" of white collar industry and let's disperse this work and compensation across the country. I'm betting we would see quite a lot more growth anyhow if these jobs were distributed across the country vs just concentrated in like sf/nyc/boston. like there are limits to how much growth little old south san fransisco can sustain. there are finite amount of office space. only finite amount of housing accomodations in the bay area (forgetting for a moment the rampant NIMBYism).

And what else is that everyone loses in this present situation. People in the job hub in SF also lose, because they are operating in this fundamentally broken local economy, way too enriched for high income workers making their home cost 2.5m and their compensation actually pretty poor as far as what it can get in the local economy. West Atherton would be a 400k median home neighborhood in most of the midwest. Literally same floorplans, lot sizes, fit and finish. Same country club down the road. Same private school up the road. Boutique shopping and steak dinners still available.

> why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment?

This makes sense when you consider that all of these big companies are run by leaders who talk in similar networks and listen to the same consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc). I know someone who is going through a McKinsey run structural re-org, that is identical to one they ran (and failed horribly) at a company I was in 8 years ago.

> why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?

There was a decent lag between the peak of equity nonsense and RTO, plus the evidence is that DEI/Equity/etc hurt workers and disrupt organizing tremendously.

> why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)

Company I was went from 1 quarter talking about the increases in productivity WFH brought to the next quarter town hall talking about RTO for the culture and productivity.

Correct. Workers were starting to get power, people had seen through the fog at what was actually happening and were acting out against it. Agency is a direct threat to the owner class.

What if I actually like the office?

It is a nice building in a nice area.

I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride.

I like my colleagues. Sometimes you need to meet and solve problems face to face, and not have it be planned.

I like dressing up a bit, not a full suit but nice pleated pants and OCBD/sweater/blazer.

I have a shift schedule, sometimes I am the only one in the office, that is bliss :)

But my work is 100% in office. But not being shut at home is nice.

I can't speak to your sector, but from the perspective in my management role (in law) the explanation is quite simple: managing remote workers is more difficult and less pleasant than managing workers in the office. I actually hate it. And even granting that remote and in-office workers are "productive" in the sense that they bill hours (though not even this seems true in my anecdotal experience), we find that people with less in-office time tend to have qualitatively worse performance. At least in my field, being in the office, spending time with your co-workers, and getting to know them has value.

Of course, other things have value too. Often, our folks who prefer to work from home do so because they have small children who they want to spend time with, more fully share parental responsibilities with their partner, etc. I'm glad that they have the opportunity to do that, but it does generally seem to come at some professional cost.

or was it capital becoming more expensive as that happened during the same period...

I think these conspiracy theories about RTO are really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements.

Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.

A few of your notes are actually just wrong as well. Salaries jumped during covid due to over-hiring and software booming. "Productivity" is not a number, but a business-by-business decision. The vast, vast majority of people don't want politics at work, and it's exclusively the viewpoint of the laptop class who demand that stuff. (Again, people who work toiling jobs for 10 hours a day don't create petitions and demands like that)

At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to. But, believe it or not, many many people, including young people, like the office environment.