The "I've Got Mine" Economy and the perils of remote work
The "I've Got Mine" Economy and the perils of remote work
I should get this out of the way: I love working remotely. It allows me to be the kind of parent and partner I want to be, and better yet, it’s a free lunch: I’m twice as productive at home as at the office, so I have more time for work and family. When I go in now, it’s for socializing and bonding — critical elements of any job, but ones made preeminent only because office life privileged them.
Beyond my personal situation (which I know weighs heavily in your moral calculus), remote work is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine how we harness society’s productive potential, hopefully rewarding new types of talent and deeper forms of contribution in the process.
But. Okay. But.
Remote work has drawbacks. And the debate over remote work is so fraught that it’s hard to discuss them openly. After all, we don’t want to give ammunition to the executives yearning to drag us back in because “Culture.”1
Ignore them. Talent has spoken, and in the knowledge economy, talent wins. No matter how many times Lizzo performs at an office reopening, there is no going back. (Sorry, CEOs. As Lizzo would say: Truth Hurts).
The question must turn instead to unlocking remote work’s considerable potential, which means being clear-eyed about what’s going right and wrong. And what’s going wrong, at least to my mind, is the early career employee experience. New entrants to the labor force are finding it hard to find their footing. That’s a profound problem not only for them but all of us.
To adequately explain, I need to take a detour through the last two millennia of human history. (I promise I’ll be quick.)
In The WEIRDest People in the World, Harvard anthropology professor Joseph Henrich connects various research threads to trace the emergence, evolution, and consequences of WEIRD culture (WEIRD = Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). It’s a fantastic book, and even if it fails to prove everything it sets out to, it still does more to explain our world than any work of scholarship I’ve encountered.
It would be impossible to do justice to Henrich’s argument in a few lines, but here’s a sketch: To cement its power, the Catholic Church implemented marriage policies that, over time, dissolved the kin-based institutions that structured agrarian societies. As human beings became estranged from their clans, their psychology became WEIRD — individualistic, analytical, and non-conformist (among other qualities). Once our brains began running this software, they became more amenable to new forms of social organization (e.g., Protestantism, urban living, etc.).
This, Henrich argues, laid the framework for modern economic growth by hooking WEIRD individuals up to a “collective brain”:
Cumulative cultural evolution—including innovation—is fundamentally a social and cultural process that turns societies into collective brains. Human societies vary in their innovativeness due in large part to the differences in the fluidity with which information diffuses through a population of engaged minds and across generations as well as to how willing individuals are to try novel practices or adopt new beliefs, concepts, and tools.
…
The growth of Europe’s collective brain was nourished by the coevolution of the psychological changes and institutional developments that I’ve documented throughout this book. Psychological developments such as greater impersonal trust, less conformity, broader literacy, and greater independence would have opened the flow of ideas, beliefs, values, and practices among individuals and communities within Europe. At the same time, the proliferation of voluntary associations and rising urbanization, especially the growth of free cities, would have expanded the collective brain by bringing diverse individuals together and aligning their interests.
For our purposes, I want to highlight one particular consequence of the Great WEIRDing: apprenticeships, which Henrich points to as a primary mechanism by which our collective brain grew smarter.
Contrast the kin-entangled individual with their WEIRD successor. If the former wanted to pick up a skill or learn a trade, they’d be limited to learning from someone in their family, likely a parent, uncle, or aunt. The latter, however, could learn from anyone, including the most accomplished practitioners. Even more shockingly, these practitioners would invest in their pupils like they were kin — which, in a way, they were. Like all human beings, WEIRD individuals want status. What could provide more status than teaching the next generation of innovative journeymen?
Crucially, this was more than a one-way street from master to apprentice. Once apprentices graduated, they traveled, learning from new masters and remixing insights (i.e., innovating) to advance their fields. Guilds even formalized the practice of knowledge-sharing by bringing guild-members together annually — the first conferences.
Play out this dynamic over enough generations, and you can see why some societies grew so rapidly. When our brains cross-pollinate to solve problems, magical things happen. (Henrich has some fun research that underscores this point.)
Am I dramatically invoking the origins of modern economic growth to make a narrow point about remote work? I mean, yes, have you read this blog?
But, in general, I think we should take seriously the idea that what we do matters — that the institutions and social arrangements we build matter. And it’s easy to see how a laissez-faire approach to remote work might undermine them if we’re not thoughtful.
After all, even if you’re an early career employee — an apprentice — lucky enough to find a manager who cares about you and is good at remote management, your ability to tap into your company’s collective brain remains limited. The “company” is the slice happening on Slack and Zoom, and as crucial as that slice is, it’s a thin sliver of the real action.
I am no doubt overly anchored on my experience, but I didn’t learn how to be a Data Scientist in meetings and chat. I learned by observing people who probably wouldn’t have even considered themselves mentors. They were simply people I respected who I could harangue daily to learn how they thought about problems and structured their work. Almost by osmosis, I began to understand how an analysis went from idea to messy R Markdown file to finished product. Some of these people became mentors, but that process would have been far more complicated and error-prone had it been mediated by clunky WFH tech.
Similarly, earning attendance to important meetings was the product of networking and promoting my work. I’m not sure whether I could have attracted the eye of company leaders if I were just another box on Zoom.
So let’s say you’re convinced. You now believe that investing in early career employees is important not only for moral reasons but because they are, quite literally, the future. We can’t allow a subpar, slapped-together version of remote work threaten their growth.
Isn’t the solution obvious? Develop a hybrid model centered principally around early career employees. Create structured onboarding programs that pair new graduates with dozens of peers, leaders, and potential mentors so they can build their networks and learn by osmosis. Sure, some of us will need to sacrifice a part of our happiness and productivity, but it’s for the greater good, right?
But. Okay. But.
Here is the critical question: Why the hell should we?
I’m serious. We have leverage. We killed the “Return to Office” fever dream because we do. American business — indeed, American culture — is all about leverage.
If it wasn’t, how could we tolerate CEOs making 324 times more than their employees or startup executives getting preferential treatment when it comes time to unlock liquidity? How could we live with Ivy League schools enrolling more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than the bottom 60%, or NIMBYs barring people from living in areas that lend themselves to economic mobility?
I’m not asking these questions to make a normative claim. (For all I know, ludicrous CEO compensation is optimal in terms of maximizing economic efficiency.) I’m simply describing what these practices signal, which is, quite obviously, “GET YOURS.” Or, if I might borrow the more eloquent phrasing of the sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson (from his interview with Ezra Klein):
And you might have brought this up because in my book, “Ministry for the Future,” I have a long chapter about the U.S. Navy where the wage ratio, so-called, is one to eight. So the able seaman gets $25,000 a year, but also room, board, and education. And the top paid admiral gets $200,000 a year. And there’s a real esprit de corps in the U.S. Navy, and it has to do with them all being on the same page, economically.
Like, if it’s one to eight for the Navy, and they work pretty well, but in American corporate life, it’s one to 350 on average between the worker and the C.E.O. That means the C.E.O makes as much every day as the worker makes an entire year. And so what do you get? You get cynicism, defeatism, a feeling of alienation from the whole project of civilization.
To put this in Henrichian terms, we’ve become too WEIRD.2
Our psychological programming was good to the extent it helped humanity unlock modern economic growth and escape the Malthusian trap. But what happens when WEIRD psychology runs into a technological, economic, and cultural milieu that can’t moderate its excesses?
I have the sinking feeling that we end up here, demanding what we have leverage to demand, hoping it all adds up to a functioning society.
Even if we can’t get CEO-level compensation, we can at least cut out our commutes.
But. Okay. But.
As much as I believe a portion of this, it still bums me out. A society in which everyone is trying to get theirs — at work, on social media, in the markets for housing and higher education — is unnecessarily short-circuiting its collective brain.
Modern technology can build something so much better if only we had the bravery to experiment. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic has some promising ideas here, and we can be even bolder.
Freed from the office, we can create modern guilds — communities of practice centered around disciplines rather than companies. With org charts decoupled from seating charts, we can build nimbler organizations capable of leveraging in-house and external talent to solve the day’s most pressing problems. Most importantly, we can supercharge our collective brain by fostering a more open and inclusive environment where all kinds of people can thrive. (That the office wasn’t this environment is something people like me — endlessly chatty and probably kind of annoying — had a hard time seeing, much to my chagrin.)
All this and more, I hope, is coming soon. (I’m working on some ideas in the space.)
Will sacrificing some leverage in the name of building better and more productive for-profit companies fix the narcissistic impulse in WEIRD society? Well, no. But we need to start somewhere, and this seems as good a place as any.
For now, I’ll try to be slightly more available when a student or someone switching careers reaches out about a Zoom or coffee. If you’re in a position to consider, I hope you’ll do the same.
i.e., “I got to where I am because I learned how to navigate an office environment, and I’m scared about transitioning to a new one. Also, I own a home in Cupertino whose value needs to remain high.”
To be clear, Henrich doesn’t make this claim in his book — I’m riffing on his work.