{"id":11246,"date":"2023-03-28T13:08:34","date_gmt":"2023-03-28T17:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11246"},"modified":"2023-03-28T13:12:05","modified_gmt":"2023-03-28T17:12:05","slug":"let-them-eat-cake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11246","title":{"rendered":"Let Them Eat Cake"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grrr. I had my blood pressure taken today and it was perfectly normal. Then I read this Slate article<\/a> and it shot through the roof. Or so I imagine. I know for sure that it infuriated me. In the article, Ben Mathis-Lilley discusses the views of Steve Rattner on remote work.<\/p>\n

Rattner, an \u201cinvestment asset manager\u201d and on-again\/off-again politico, is complaining about all those remote work riffraff who simply don\u2019t want to work as hard anymore and would rather goof off at home. He quotes Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, Meta\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg, and JPMorgan\u2019s Jamie Dimon to support his thesis that remote workers have grown soft, and no longer want to hustle. The reason they feel comfortable with this, Rattner says, is the remarkable growing prosperity \u201cwe\u2019ve\u201d experienced in the last few years.<\/p>\n

Mathis-Lilley puts the lie to this nonsense and then burns it to the ground. It\u2019s fine, he says, to talk about this remarkable growth in prosperity as long as you are in the top 1% or, better, top 0.1% of earners. If you\u2019re anyone else, not so much: your earnings have been essentially flat.<\/p>\n

In order for the great unwashed to commute to work it costs about \\$6,000 a year and if they have 2 or 3 children another \\$40,000 a year in child care. That\u2019s a lot of money for someone with no real increase in income. Rattner, on the other hand, lives 10 minutes away from work (in Manhattan) and could easily walk to work if he liked.<\/p>\n

As the title suggests, Rattner and his ilk really are like Marie Antoinette in their inability to comprehend the problems that commuting to the office imposes on the average employee. If you have a nasty, suspicious mind like mine, you\u2019ll also suspect that the main driver of their back-to-the-office crusade is really about wanting to control every second of their employee\u2019s life, or at least of their workday. But probably life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grrr. I had my blood pressure taken today and it was perfectly normal. Then I read this Slate article and it shot through the roof. Or so I imagine. I know for sure that it infuriated me. In the article, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[195],"class_list":["post-11246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-remote-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11246"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11248,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11246\/revisions\/11248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}