Our obsession with city living is out of date

In March last year, the world made an interesting discovery. We found that a high proportion of knowledge-work could be performed remotely. Significantly, this came as a surprise to everyone. It should be a source of mild shame that, for all their talk of innovation, very few companies or institutions had experimented with this possibility beforehand.

Given that this technology might help solve the housing shortage, geographical inequality, intergenerational wealth inequality, the transport crisis, the pensions crisis, the environmental crisis and almost everything else people worry about, it seems odd that it attracted so little consideration until a pandemic forced our hand.

Now, at the risk of sounding smug, I was an outlier here. Back in 2018 I instigated ‘Zoom Fridays’ among my colleagues to find out what worked and what didn’t. I don’t think this was prescience on my part; instead, I was an outlier for several other reasons.

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Mark Galeotti

Why Putin is keeping Trump waiting for a Ukraine deal

Firstly, I am a bit of a Georgist. Essentially, Georgists believe that those who extract income through the control of land and location are less deserving of their gains than those who earn their money doing something constructive or inventive. This alerted me to the fact that, of every pound we pay our younger London staff, barely 25p is left as discretionary income once tax, accommodation and transportation costs have been hived off. Add other overheads and we must earn about £7 in revenue to pay a London employee a discretionary quid. This seems wasteful.

From this perspective, it is far more cost-efficient to reward employees if they do not subsist in a state of indentured servitude paying a third of their pre-tax salary in rent to some undeserving git who decades ago fluked into buying a two-bedroom Clapham flat for £190,000.