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The chief effect of remote work appears to be putting upward pressure on less desirable markets, not downward pressure on more desirable ones. I don't really think they have to do much to goose the market at the moment either.

I don't disagree, but will point out that if demand isn't being met in an area, pricing changes won't happen until it is. So there is a LOT of demand for houses in the bay area (for example) that is unmet and people with salaries to pay the really high prices. As people move out it frees up real estate which should, as a trailing indicator, lead to lower prices. It certainly was true during the dot com bust when people moved out in droves.

> It certainly was true during the dot com bust when people moved out in droves.

Buy during crisis when no one wants a particular asset, sell after the crisis when it becomes hot.

Rinse and repeat.

Well, if the crisis ever ends. Any crisis can in principle lead to a new Detroit, with 40 years of depressed asset values. Assuming that a crash is just a temporary decline requires a selective memory.

In the meantime, you own a home. You know, a place to reside and keep your stuff.

It's interesting that you seem to think this is a bad thing. If you can't buy a house when no one wants one, when do you consider it permissible to buy one?

Having occasional down years doesn't mean something is not red hot or not an investment. It's all about the expected total return.

Remote work doesn't scale to society. It's a thing mostly privileged, educated, or experienced people are capable of.

At some point, someone has to make or do something physical. With very few exceptions, like entertainment, all of our remote jobs eventually tie in to some good being produced. Even pure services jobs ultimately feed some machine that produces physical products, and those will always need to have access to cheap labor and good shipping lanes to succeed. You can be a cloud engineer, but the people buying cloud services are eventually selling something to people making things.

The impact so far has been more people with more money getting to live in places where their previously "city" salaries give them an edge in cheaper areas. It's also been that some companies have started to adjust salaries for remote work downwards, both of which will flatten out the temporary advantage being a remote worker brings to society.

The only answer is basically socialism, and most of us (myself included) don't like that answer because human nature is to compete.

It's true that remote work isn't compatible with every job but I think it'll have more of an impact than you're predicting because those jobs don't all have to be in the same places as they have been historically. We've seen an over-concentration in certain areas where existing major businesses drove demand up stratospherically in places like NYC, SF, etc. I'd predict that remote work will spread things out more by making it more viable to make living decisions based on things like proximity to family or lifestyle amenities which would be completely inconsistent with being in the office in Manhattan at 8:30am every day. That should be good for a lot of those service industry jobs in smaller regional cities where the cost of living is much lower.

Socialism is an interesting angle because that term has a lot of different meanings and it's loaded in the U.S. because Americans try to use it as synonym for communism, despite many counter examples. I wouldn't, for example, consider Europe or Canada devoid of competition and those examples show how much money we could be saving with more socialist policies in ways which actually improve competition. For example, unlinking health coverage from employment removes a significant risk for small businesses, improves job market competition, and significantly lowers one of the factors driving prices up. Similarly, subsidizing childcare both helps parents work — with costs in the $20-30K range per child there are a lot of lower-income people who could work but are unable to make the finances work. I'd prefer to pay that out of general tax revenue than expect every coffeeshop to be able to pay baristas that much more since that's a big expense to spread over a small pool of workers.

I live in Iceland now (but I'm American, and this is only a few years old move). We have state-run healthcare, but the quality is seriously lower by I'd say an order of magnitude than what I experienced in the US. I don't know if it's possible to get the quality of care without individuals paying. Yes, there's obviously some bloat in the system - a lot of bloat, but people tend to forge the US has world-leading health care. It's just really expensive.

That’s interesting because my only experience with the Icelandic medical system was the opposite: a relative needed an ER trip & the experience was faster and far cheaper than they’d experienced in the U.S. (their copay on MIT’s insurance was greater than the total).

The thing with U.S. healthcare is that it’s very unevenly distributed. If you’re in something like the upper 10-15% income wise and live in a major urban area, you can definitely get quite good care but many people have worse coverage, especially given how much more they have to pay and the time required to wrangle insurance and providers. I’ve known a number of people from outside the U.S. and they’ve generally commented on the greater cost & much greater inconvenience compared to Europe, Canada, Israel, Japan, etc. but a few who needed specialists mentioned that was easier as long as you could afford it.

So, what you've described isn't health care, it's trauma care. In that respect, you're absolutely right. A fellow expat here had a turn over car accident requiring a helicopter flight and it cost him almost nothing.

I'm talking about health care, as in staying healthy. Regular visits, monitoring conditions, things like that. You have to schedule anything like that months in advance, you never see the same doctor twice as they tend to import temporary doctors from other Scandinavian countries, and every time you see someone it's starting over. Something as simple as hypothyroidism can be an uphill battle that the patient basically has to monitor themselves. Simple surgeries like hernias, etc. you can end up waiting months to get. Test results are hidden from patients, many very good prescription drugs simply aren't allowed in the country, and in many cases, we're using two generation old cures when much better ones exist.

The hospitals are also IMO disgusting. Yellowed dirty walls, people walking around in socks due to custom (which is a great way to spread around foot fungus, something a TON of people here have). That paper that you pull down between patients on the beds only gets changed if someone gets it wet or bloody. I could go on, but it feels like low quality care every time I go.

You're also right that being in the top 15% (I'd argue it's more like 30%) in the US means you have excellent health care in the US.

> because human nature is to compete.

Do you seriously believe this?

Both cooperation and competition has been advantageous and disadvantageous at different times and in different contexts..

Personally, I’m at least happy that my mum didn’t decide to compete with me for survival…

Prices are going up! Buy now before it’s out of control and you miss out!

Prices are down! Buy now to get a great deal!

>Prices are going up! Buy now before it’s out of control and you miss out! Prices are down! Buy now to get a great deal!

Hurry up and buy now, in a few months a new crisis can come and we'll lose the opportunity to make nice profits.

Establishing a sense of urgency has always been a common sales tactic.