Working from home ... in Chennai and Chengdu

For more than three months, many of the employed have been working from home (WFH.)  Is this working out well?

To answer that, let's check in with the wealthiest people in whose direct or indirect employ are people working from home.  If WFH has not affected productivity, then those wealthy people would have benefited, right?

Guess what?  Those gazillionaires have handsomely profited: "U.S. billionaire wealth surges to $584 Billion, or 20 percent, since the beginning of the pandemic."

Overall, between March 18—the rough start date of the pandemic shutdown, when most federal and state economic restrictions were in place—and June 17, the total net worth of the 640-plus U.S. billionaires jumped from $2.948 trillion to $3.531 trillion, based on the two groups’ analysis of Forbes data. Since March 18, the date Forbes released its annual report on billionaires’ wealth, the U.S. added 29 more billionaires, increasing from 614 to 643. During the same three months, over 45.5 million people filed for unemployment, according to the Department of Labor.
The top five billionaires—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison—saw their wealth grow by a total of $101.7 billion, or 26%.

Incredible, right?

It is no wonder that tech companies are looking at making permanent a great deal of WFH.  Think-tanks like Brookings immediately sensed an opportunity for those tech workers to get away from the expensive real estate like the Silicon Valley and move to the remarkably affordable interior of the country. 

Suddenly, it looks as if the COVID-19 pandemic could allow not just localized telework, but a more fundamental dispersal of America’s highest-value employment away from large “superstar” metro areas and into the lower-priced American heartland.

Not so fast.

If WFH has not affected company bottom-line, then why should the geographic dispersal be restricted only to within the US?  Companies might as well hire employees in, say, India, and have them work from their homes there instead of bringing them here to the US.  We could easily see a footloose economy on steroids!

A responsible policymaker might then look at these developments and begin to worry that big tech, which has brought wealth and power to the US, could easily start creating a whole bunch of satellite offices around the world.  Well, tRump is no responsible guy--he has proudly stated that he takes no responsibility.  So, it is no surprise that he announced a freeze until the end of the year on work visas for foreign labor.

So, let's recap.  WFH is doing well as a practice.  WFH has not affected productivity, and the big tech employers are reaping huge profits.  Many of the tech employees are foreign born.  tRump wants to prevent them from coming here.  Connect the dots yourself.

Or, read Shikha Dalmia's commentary:

high-skilled foreign workers that blue states like California, Washington, and New York depend on are out of luck. What is likely to happen in these states? Will they rush to hire Americans with big bucks in hand? Not really.
For starters, there just aren't enough high-skilled Americans sitting around to be hired. The unemployment rate last month—the peak of the pandemic—for computer jobs was 2.5 percent compared to the overall rate of 13.3 percent for all jobs, according to an analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy.
So as high-tech companies are choked off from hiring foreign workers, they'll start outsourcing more operations abroad.

If you prefer a "sound bite," Dalmia offers this:

The more Trump tries to turn America into a fortress, the louder will be the sucking sound of jobs fleeing overseas, to use the immortal words of failed presidential candidate Ross Perot.

As I wrote in this essay in Professional Geographer, in 2018, even the President of the United States cannot create an alternative facts of economic geography.