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I will die on this hill: tech firms that mandated 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs, rather than a principled stance on individual performance under WFH.

My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money, and that benefit from maximum productivity of their employees, still generally have a hybrid work culture.

> I will die on this hill: tech firms that mandated 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs, rather than a principled stance on individual performance under WFH

“True work only happens in person with human collaboration! Everyone must come back”

2 years pass

“Oh wow we can replace everyone with a chatbot this is amazing”

narrator: It was the interest rates all along. Many of these tech businesses are fundamentally bad, the ROI is smoke and mirrors, energy shocks and bad macro-economics are coming, and investors are starting to ask hard questions.

Tech has never been perfect, but there was a time when it felt more hopeful and optimistic and about building cool stuff. There's always been give and take with the money side of things that's necessary to keep fueling the building, but it feels like it all kind of went off the rails somewhere.

I'd be fine with earning less (we're pretty frugal) to work in that kind of environment with good people.

I don't think it was interest rates. Tech just saw that workers were able to extract higher and higher pay and more and more benefits and the industry saw an opportunity to reverse this trend. And it has succeeded. The semi-coordinated action since 2023 has caused pay to stagnate, enabled businesses to remove benefits, and frightened workers away from changing employers.

There's a second layer of abstraction here where it's way harder to measure a big tech exec's worth.

Trading firm managers are like sales managers, you've got one number, nothing else matters, the truth will set you free.

Big Tech is a bunch of people competing for influence over the big shared number coming in from ads or whatever, it's important to have good UX etc so you get more ad money, but how do you tell who's meaningfully contributing, or who's just really good at playing internal politics? This will bias towards different sorts of decisions.

My guess is that it was a reaction to the pandemic-era trend of "over employment" where a small number of remote workers bragged about clocking in simultaneously to multiple jobs. Employers may have decided that their employees' physical body was the only unique identifier that couldn't be duplicated.

I may or may not know a guy who bought a laptop identical to his work machine from place A to do projects for B while still physically being at A.

That trick only works until place B demands RTO as well!

(And this might be why the CEOs all seem to have coordinated changing back to RTO at the same time).

Smart advice!

They should start with over-employed executives in the C-suite of more than one company or sitting on more than one company's board of directors.

When I worked at BlackBerry, it pissed me off when CEO John Chen sent out an email telling employees that they need to be fully focused on their BlackBerry job. Meanwhile, he was on the board of directors of Disney and Wells Fargo while BlackBerry was failing badly.

Yea, for some reason:

Rich people sitting on multiple boards and running multiple companies is A-OK

Poor people having to work 3 jobs to keep food on the table is A-OK

But, middle class office workers working at multiple jobs is fraud and abuse and must be stopped.

Well... Yes. The middle class haven't been rendered sufficiently replaceable yet. Make no mistake, once you're deskilled, you'll be treated exactly like the poor. Have you not been keeping up? What do you think the whole AI craze is about? Perfecting transmute money->code for the wealthy without requiring the burden of hiring.

As long as someone finished the assigned tasks for the day, idc if they want office or remote.

Not working from home is easier than from office. But in general why keep employees you can’t trust? At least on the scope of startups it shouldn’t be a problem. When you know each person face to face, everyone in the team knows if someone is slacking. Doesn’t matter if it’s wfh or from office.

Thing is, who decides how many tasks someone can do in a day? What if they get paid for 8 but only work for one, but the manager doesn't know they do, and they never communicate their workload is too low?

Same can be said for people using LLM agents to complete jobs faster than humans ever possibly can. It's not like they just fluked it. They've learned how to harness the capabilities of the tech. Now companies are introducing this stuff as a normal workflow but they are clueless as to how it actually works and expecting 10x output from people.

It will all crash when they will see that people can't do 10x, even with AI. It requires too much expertise and knowledge in the field to actually make it work as a hired professional. Look at the AWS outages... and they are professionals, right? RIGHT?

I wonder how the transition from classic hammers to nail guns went for carpenters / framers.

Nail guns are tools, just like hammers. However, you have to know how to use it and to know how to adjust the pressure for the depth you need. It also costs money, much more than a hammer. And you can't use normal nails, you have to have a specific cartridge of nails, and you must know how to adjust it, and ultimately to not die.

Now compare it again.

I think it's a fair comparison; experienced carpenters who've learned to work fast with a hammer, now asked to be 10x more productive while using a new tool they don't have experience with. It probably got more than a few a bit bothered.

This is a management issue. They should be keeping an eye on the progress and see if the pace is enough for the deadline. Estimates are a thing too, I know. But you can see if someone is slacking and falls behind. If the workload is low, why would it matter as long as the things are done?

Companies should stop penalizing people for being work efficient, and increase their salary if the workload increases.

Why would you expect Homo Economicus to ask for more work? The companies they work for chase infinite profit at zero cost as a matter of principle, why shouldn’t employees?

This holds whether their butt is in a seat in some office or at home.

I ain't mad at all. If someone can be a CEO to multiple companies, so can employees have multiple jobs.

> Homo Economicus

GOOD ONE

> My guess is that it was a reaction to the pandemic-era trend of "over employment"

I'm guessing the opposite: that these firms wanted to push back-to-the-office policies, and so either invented, or publicized, engineers doing "over employment", and that it wasn't a real problem that any of them actually faced.

How is this any different from loafers who don't do anything? If you can do two jobs at the same time, you weren't really doing anything at first job to begin with.

Such a bullshit narrative in data driven companies

Absolutely. Is about having people leave through attrition than pay severance and potentially get bad pr.

Additionally, I wonder how many CxOs have corporate real estate in their investment portfolio which might influence decisions.

My company went back to 5 days in office in May 2025. Since then 8 people out of 100 in my office have retired. They were in the 55-65 age range and 3 of them directly told me that they would have stayed working if we stayed hybrid 3 days a week. So now we are hiring people and having to retrain them. Many of them are over 50 and were laughing at our 5 days in office. But our stock is high so I think they will stay for a few years and retire.

There has always been a "retire, come back as a consultant" flow, but it's a bit stronger now. Perhaps the healthcare savings are worth it for the company.

My employer very successfully shipped a lot of brand new stuff during COVID when everyone was full-time remote. We made a lot of money off of those products. Then they sort of bragged about it. Then they instituted RTO. Now (I'm told, I'm at a megacorp so I'm far removed from these discussions) the executive team is bitching that we're not in office 5 days per week.

I think that's the question - did RTO increase productivity? I haven't seen any audited economic evidence that actually happened. Same as AI - I've seen a lot of PR and hype, but no audited company financials indicators.

Historically though, the data suggests that mass layoffs have a huge impact (negatively) on productivity after a short term "boost" by the survivors.

I think some of it was just a belief that work you can see being done by a floor of people talking with their mouths and looking at screens in the same room is more real than the slightly less visible conversations in slack while looking at screens in their own rooms.

Open plan offices continue to be designed more for seeing the work happen than for doing the work. I spend a lot of mental energy on ignoring the distractions around me. No job has ever offered me a private office with a door that closes in exchange for being in the office 5 days a week.

There is also a whole cadre of Vice presidents that needed micro manager level oversight over their teams in order to feel fulfilled.

You don’t spend many billions on the offices for nothing.

I imagine there was some pressure from cities as well since many downtown businesses rely on foot traffic.

Maybe I'm just lucky but the worst micromanagement has always been from my direct supervisors, never VP-level. In my experience most at that level (especially when it's several layers removed from the ICs) do as little work as possible, and spend most of their time hanging out with other VPs and trying to move on to the next step.

Are the tech firms the ones spending billions on office buildings? It's certainly not the VPs.

What pressure are cities applying to companies to get them to move back into the offices, exactly?

When a company looks for a new office, cities give them subsidies to open office there. Those subsidies come with strings attached beyond, "please lease this office space". They expect additional foot traffic that the other businesses near the office would benefit from.

Data from consultancies tends to show that WFH and hybrid work patterns are correlated with a significant increase in billable hours compared to 100% in-office. My understanding that a similar pattern can be seen in law firms.

The "RTO is more productive" thesis tends to come from industry sectors where quantitative measures like billable hours aren't so readily available. At best, it seems vibes-based - but, like you, I suspect that it's actually disingenuous posturing.

Also not all "WFH" is from home.

I for one am renting a desk at an office. I have all the usual office amenities and an environment in which I can focus properly, but I don't have to involve myself geographically with the company I work for.

I know that this is Hacker News and so all rich and important people must be geniuses making only rational moves, but consider the slim possibility that most aren't very good leaders and make poor decisions.

Maybe there's some 19D "soft layoff" motivation, but I suspect a large part is just about control and appearance. You spent all that money on offices so workers better be there. And what's the point of having your own nice big office if you can't look out on the peons toiling for you? And more fundamentally, some people just have this deep belief that work = something you do in an office and can't compute working at home as "real" work, no matter what the results show.

There’s some of that for sure, but also knowledge sharing is easier in person. The question is whether or not it’s that much easier to justify the trade off of in person work. I don’t think so, but even most remote workers I know would agree that in person has a certain collaborative nature that remote lacks.

Sure, WFH has some downsides as does anything, but it's always funny to me that we have 150+ years of basically everyone who's ever worked in an office despising it as a place where productivity goes to die mired in pointless meetings, office politics, etc., but when WFH becomes a realistic option all of a sudden the office is now Plato's Academy reborn.

This was a trend among boards and executives, people like GE's CEO would not shut up about it, and that started the trend of boards requiring even recalcitrant CEOs to do it too.

Then the executives come up with justifications, one of which is surely the ability to trim some hires in a tight financial environment.

Of course it was. It's not even well hidden.

If they had a shred of evidence that RTO was the eminently more productive, they would smugly rub our collective noses in it.

They don't have evidence. They have vibes and a profound hatred for the labor class. It irks them that suddenly common people had access to a benefit exclusive to them.

> 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs

Look at the last 3 years of the job market: No company has any issue with doing actual lay offs. The layoffs have been about reducing capital spend, and one wants to get rid of dead wood and redundant hires, not let fate decide who stays or goes.

> My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money

If you're talking about "trading" as in financial, then this makes sense from a culture perspective. Its a group of people who, are about the job and not about any ones feelings.

It's harder for teams to be this way without the social lubricant of bonding over lunch and coffee and small "how are you" or "the boss sucks" social interactions. Things that are easy in person but more difficult when all your communication channels are owned by the company or result in "documentation" that can be used against you. It's much easier to be "professional brusk" (I need this asap) with someone you just ate lunch and talked about life with than it is for someone you DONT have those interactions with.

I have been a consultant (read: mercenary) for over a decade now. I have seen just about every team layout there is, and there are lots of distributed teams whos effectiveness is much lower than it could be. Its going to depend more on your product and ALL your teams willingness to be candid and blunt than anything else.

IMO it is just American business culture. Big boss tells peons what to do- very hierarchy based despite the nice break room.

And culture does not care about logic.

If they demand 5-in-office then they should stfu about climate and affordable housing. The commute offices tend to inflict on the staff makes such arguments bs.

I don't think it was a soft layoff, I'm sure that might have been part of it, but I think the majority of it was about telling the working class that the owning class is back in power and they want you to know it.

After all, not a single CEO cited published metrics for the productivity reasons for ending WFH, and almost all went about other power grab type moves later to show the working class the power they were able to wield during COVID was over and we were returning back to the old ways.

What are these other power grab type moves?

> I don't think it was a soft layoff, I'm sure that might have been part of it, but I think the majority of it was about telling the working class that the owning class is back in power and they want you to know it.

Or both.

If you're looking for a cheap way to lay people off, you probably dont want to have to make large investments in real estate to do so.

I think it was mostly about lack of trust and desire to regain a feeling of control over employees. The soft layoffs were just a bonus.

When my company WFH during covid the first thing they did was force-install invasive tracking software. You could practically taste the executive paranoia.

If I could afford to live 15 minutes from the office I 100% would go to an office.

But housing, transportation, daycare costs make that impractical. If they really want me in the office, companies need to engage on these issues in the metros they live in. They need to clear NIMBY barriers to urban housing, support transit, and good parental leave.

This is the right answer. I have a child, work remotely and while I appreciate the flexibility, I kind of hate it for my career. The article is mostly vibe-y without any digging into why people with children need to commute from so far.

It's rent, the answer is almost always rent. Its my rent, its my child-care workers rent, it my kids school-teachers rent. It's always rent.

Not necessarily. We happily moved away to suburbs because we grew tired of the city noise and chaos. The child can stay outside, we have a proper backyard, there are barely any cars in the street. It was much more affordable but was a side effect rather than the main reason to move. And when both parents work from home, as we do, we are doing just fine with a single car. For those exceptional circumstances when we need to be away in different places at the same time, the cab is still nearly infinitely more affordable than a second car.

I moved away to Europe where there are none of those things and my child can walk himself over to a park 10x the size of an American backyard.

The chaos and noise (especially the car noise) are just an explicit choice American cities have made.

I really hope you get the irony of being a suburbanite complaining about there being too many cars in cities when most of those cars are suburbanites who’ve given up on improving the public transit in their cities.

I live in Europe. Each country is different but every large city is more or less the same. Sure you can’t compare London with Copenhagen for example but even in the latter case suburban life is much calmer.

It's also consolidation of jobs in big cities. When I was a kid you didn't need to move away from home to find a stable income. WFH could have solved that, but I think the cultural movement to relocating has just become too entrenched.

You were a kid before Detroit automakers? Before NYC was the center of finance?

When I was a kid the Detroit automakers bought air filters manufactured at a factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin and brake pads manufactured in Peoria, Illinois and lubricants from Fort Wayne, Indiana.

And the people working in those places provided the customer base for local and regional financial services, along with the rest of the commercial base that made small towns and provincial cities good places to live and raise a family throughout the 20th century.

And of course, a household only needed one person employed, so there was less pressure to move to a bigger city that could provide opportunities for two different careers.

Point taken, but the trend has only increased since then.

Through circumstance I went from a fully remote working arrangement to working for a place that's 5 miles down a single surface street from where I live (which, during commute hours pushes up to 15 minutes). I go in twice a week, but since we have kids it's mostly a wash. I still vastly prefer the 3 days per week that I work from home. The office gets very busy and very loud, especially in the afternoons.

In this case you either live in the middle of an industrial hub or you can’t change jobs, so I’m not sure what it actually solves.

Hiring by catchment area does seem very appealing for anyone - neither the companies nor the candidates.

Companies could also do this the way they used to - satellite offices and similar.

In fact, I've never actually commuted into the city for a job, it's always been suburb to suburb commutes - part of the problem there has been it's not worth moving for a job that lasts on average 3-5 years.

Plus I need the ability to deduct my transport cost from taxable income.

I guess it depends where you live, I certainly claim commuting costs when I submit my taxes every year.

But then again I balance that by claiming some rebates for using my home office, now and again.

Recipe for endless sprawl

So the person living near the office should subsidise your choice?

> If I could afford to live 15 minutes from the office I 100% would go to an office.

I live ~20 minutes away from my job and you eventually get tired of that, too. Car maintenance, bad weather, bad drivers, etc. grind you down little by little everyday.

20 mins walking or by public transport would be fine though? GP does not specify driving.

I live 20 mins by public transport or by bike in an incredibly bike-friendly city.

Sometimes I just want to be at home to do deep thinking without anyone bothering me.

Sometimes the weather makes it so I don't leave the house.

Just let me decide where I work from.

What baffles me most about RTO is what it does to romantic partnerships. If both can find career advancing jobs in the same city, that's cool.

But what if they can't? The options aren't great:

1. One of them takes a hit on their career for the benefit of the other.

2. Both move to an area with OK-ish jobs for both, sharing the sacrifice.

3. Both take optimal jobs wherever they are and move into a long distance relationship.

With kids in the mix, it becomes even harder, you might want to be around family to have a support network etc.

RTO mandates generally seem pretty tone deaf about this aspect.

It's because there's a lot of overlap between people thinking "those damn lazy workers better get back to the office so they don't slack off" and people thinking "a woman's role is in the household, raising children and cooking".

Regressive attitudes tend to not come alone.

"RTO is sexist" is a hell of a take.

OP never said that. They said the venn diagram of attitudes promoting RTO coincidentally seems to largely overlap the regressive "women should be homemakers" attitudes.

Why? The data supports it. Women were more likely to leave during RTO efforts than men. WFH being a massive boon for workers with childcare responsibilities or medical issues is widely recognized; there’s a reason why there was a baby boom during the pandemic. A lot of the backlash against WFH workers was blatantly sexist; remember all the rage against those “day in the life of a remote worker” type TikToks? Note how they got way, way more hate than the objectively worse ‘working’ several jobs or modern hustle culture scam stuff?

I don’t think it’s the be-all end-all explanation, but the shoe fits.

Women being more likely to leave than men because of a policy does not inherently make that policy sexist. You could say the same thing about a policy that requires police officers in full patrol kit be able to scale an 8' wall or drag a certain amount of weight a certain distance in a given time frame - that instituting that policy in a department that didn't have it previously would result in more women leaving than men doesn't make the policy sexist unless it's both actually unnecessary for the job and implementation with sexist intent.

Those meme-level DITL and older hustle culture stuff are two completely different things, targeting different audiences, and using different methods, so it makes sense that people would have two different reactions to them, even if you think both of them are stupid?

Are there any reports of someone moving their company from WFH to full RTO in order to get women writ large to leave their company? I think it's much more likely that capital owners just want their building full so they don't lose their investments, business owners and executives don't like WFH for various reasons including the extremely overblown risk of overemployment, managers on average want to micromanage and find it easier in-office, and there's no public health backstop to justify WFH like there was 5 years ago.

Separately but related, I don't think there's anything wrong with a factory worker getting paid $18/hr watching someone spread 2 hours of work over 7 hours in the office with two catered meals plus snacks and making jokes about "email jobs" not being real. I probably watched all the DITL things that went truly viral and the comments were never any more sexist than any other viral video on the internet.

Enabling women to be with their children during their early years is a good thing. Mothers are not replaceable by fathers or by strangers. You can do it, sometimes you must, but it's sub-optimal for young children. Being able to live on a single income during those years is fantastic, but when it isn't possible, WFH can be a big improvement.

(That being said, this isn't an excuse to be an absentee, deadbeat dad. Traditionally, most people lived in villages, living agrarian lives. Family life was much more involved. That meant both parents were generally present throughout the day. And with age, the fatherly role becomes increasingly important for development. The strict division of mom-in-suburban-home/dad-away-at-urban-office is hardly traditional or representative of historical realities.)

It seems like this comment boils down to "relationships require compromise and sacrifice and this scales with more people" which is almost tautological.

Sort of. I was arguing that I see WFH as the superior model for people in relationships, because it eliminates the need for sacrifice and compromise on one dimension: Career beneficial location.

Not on all dimensions, of course. People with kids e.g. will have to find a solution for who gets to work how much, it's a similar conflict WFH addresses partly at best.

Most people are not in a niche where finding a job depends on location, and those that are already live in that city.

Doctors can find a clinic to work at nearly anywhere. If their partner needs to move they can go with.

Sure, depends on the field. Some fields can't realistically WFH to begin with. Some easily can though. If you have a doctor and a programmer, the doctor can work at a hospital that provides the best career opportunity for them, while the programmer can work at the place that provides the best opportunity for them, given WFH.

If both can WFH, they can even choose the place they want to live in regardless of where their optimal employment options are based.

I have been thinking that this is a reason why the megacities are winning. In the largest cities, a couple can cohabitate and both find jobs. In smaller cities, you have to get lucky, and if one partner's job falls through (which may be unavoidable) then you might have to move! In a one-income household you can live in a city with one industry. Two is a coordination problem. The eleven largest cities have reached escape velocity. Detroit is hovering right on the edge. Seattle has favorable climate and a port. Other cities are boom and bust.

You might be the first person I've ever heard say "Seattle has a favorable climate."

I associate it with cool summers which are rare in the US. The rain and dark won't be everyone's cup of tea, but other places with similarly cool summers either have very harsh winters or rhyme with "Nabisco".

I live ~30 minutes from the city center, and the office locations I've had for the past ten years or so.

I enjoy sitting on the tram/bus, reading a book and getting into the "work time now" mindset. Having half an hour to relax, look at the scenery, the people, and so on, is always nice.

Time to chill out and read was definitely my favorite part about commuting by train (SEPTA). Unfortunately it also ate a lot of my time, but it was time I could spend reading so I didn't really mind that too much.

> getting into the "work time now" mindset

This is actually the reason I never liked WFH. I don't want to be in the work mindset at home, it degrades my ability to relax at home.

I'm on a hybrid schedule, same "distance". With a balance of days between home and office, I no longer get tired of the commute.

Commute "distance" is definitely measured in minutes and not kilometers.

there is a secret 3rd solution that alleviates most of these issues: mass transit

Mass Transit isn't the solution on its own. It needs to be Mass Transit PLUS people living around mass transit stops.

Mass Transit will never, ever, ever work in rural areas where houses are 2-5 miles apart from each other. It would barely work in suburbs, and only certain kinds like bus transit. You're never going to get a subway to work in the suburbs. Mass Transit is great for cities though, we should be building more of it.

Trolleys and Regional Rail work great in the Philadelphia suburbs. When the state actually gives SEPTA funding so they can keep their vehicles up to date and pay their workers fairly

Not to mention safe neighborhood!

Funny to read this as a consultant. My job is an hour away from my job.

Unfortunately, much of the US, and elsewhere, has been taken in by decades of successful American propaganda promoting and romanticizing the suburb after the War. The taste for the suburb, like the taste for cars, is very entrenched in many people's minds. In our vapid consumerist culture, they have become elevated to virtual rites of passage: buying a car and buying a suburban house are marks of manhood and adulthood.

Furthermore, there's a vicious cycle that keeps cities at a disadvantage, to a large part driven by the parasitic nature of suburbs themselves. Suburbs are financially completely unsustainable. Tax revenue doesn't come close to paying for the maintenance of suburban roads, infrastructure, and utilities. They survive by draining state and federal money, which itself is disproportionately drawn from urban centers where economic activity is highest. This takes money away from cities that should be reinvested back into cities.

One thing we should do is tax municipal bonds. There are other ways in which suburbs are actively and artificially propped up, of course. The point is that the suburbs has always been a Frankenstein on life support that's been bleeding cities.

So I think one way to address the suburb is to attack the parasitic dimension. By forcing suburbs to pay their own way, no one can be accused of robbing suburbs; it would incriminate the suburbs and call out their hypocrisy. It would also strike at the heart of the "adulthood" and "manhood" artificially bound up with owning a house in the suburbs. How adult and how masculine is it to mooch off of others to maintain the suburban lifestyle?

This would then fortify the urbs and also push back on the stupidity of the housing market in cities, the poor land use in many of them, as well as bad public transportation.

Thank god you're a software developer and not a cleaner.

My comment from a thread last week

We saw how much less pollution there was during the pandemic

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/04/8110190...

I worked from home but a few times I needed to go to my parents house during what used to be rush hour. Less than 5% of normal traffic and fuel demand dropped so much that prices were lower.

My job went hybrid in 2022 and then return to office full time last year. Everyone hates it. It's a waste of time and resources.

Less pollution, less traffic means we don't need to use tax revenue to expand roads and less wear and tear means less repairs.

Take it one step further and give tax breaks to businesses that let employees work from home and close physical offices. Then this means less new office construction which can be used for housing to help the housing crisis. It's a win win for everyone except control freak managers.

> Take it one step further and give tax breaks to businesses that let employees work from home and close physical offices.

At this point I'd rather use the stick than the carrot. Make employers 100% shoulder their employees' commute costs. Don't like it? Allow WFH or pay them enough to afford to live close to the office.

In some recent recruiter calls for hybrid positions in New York, I asked if the employer would pay for roundtrip Amtrak tickets 3x/week from where I live (a ~1.5 hour train ride). Of course the answer was no and I knew that already, but if the company policy is that all employees must live within 50 miles of the office, surely they know that a 50 mile commute by car could be as long or longer than an 85 mile train ride.

That's so weird. Employers have always paid for employees' commuting expenses here in Japan [0]. It's not even mandated by law and there's a legal limit of 150k yen / month, roughly $1000 though most companies limit it to 25k (~$200). Still it's enough that commuting by bullet train is a thing [1].

Even part timers get reimbursed.

[0]: https://japan-dev.com/blog/employee-benefits-in-japan

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/y1nurn/places_outsid...

In Europe post-pandemic rush back to the offices revealed more than anything that the Green Deal has actually been just the greenwashing. Bureaucrats just sat there not even once mentioning that WFH was actually a great opportunity to fight climate change, clean the air and revive small towns.

Also:

* Less time wasted in commute/traffic, which adds up to a significant portion of your lifetime

* Lower vehicle expenses (car-centric people often forget just how much the total cost of ownership for vehicles really is)

"One or two hybrid days per week capture nearly all the fertility upside."

That is an interesting point, and not obvious why it would be so. In fact, it kind of calls into question whether the whole relationship is causal. The people who were able to WFH longer were more often in high-income jobs (service workers never got to do it in the first place, it was almost entirely an office worker thing). They were thus more likely to be in an economic position where they felt comfortable having another child.

This would also explain why it impacted the intensive margin (children per mother) but not the extensive margin (percent women who are mothers).

I don't have a problem with WFH where it makes sense, and I do think many societies need to look at how to help young adults become parents, but I am a bit skeptical of this particular relation. If you've ever been a parent with a young child at home, your estimate of how much work you could do would be possible is a lot more modest.

> They were thus more likely to be in an economic position where they felt comfortable having another child.

Just a reminder that if you pull up a chart of countries with the highest birth rates, they all have poor economic conditions. If the theory that a better economy correlates with more babies then countries like South Korea would have the world's highest birth rate.

Correlation is not causation. A huge part of this high birth rate is that in these poor countries people leave in rural areas, farming or doing similar work, this essentially “working from home”. They can have many children because they stay close with their families and also having more children is a survival strategy.

There is evidence that improved economic conditions and flexible work arrangements increase fertility in meaningful amounts. Is it enough to achieve 2.1 replacement rate? It isn't, but the evidence is robust that wealthier people do have higher fertility in some circumstances.

TLDR Fertility declines as countries urbanize, income rises, and women are educated and empowered to make more affirmed fertility choices, but also slightly increases when prospective parents feel economically secure enough to have a child, or more children (within some intent or desire band).

Higher incomes are increasingly associated with higher fertility: Evidence from the Netherlands, 2008–2022 - https://www.demographic-research.org/articles/volume/51/26 | https://doi.org/10.4054/DemRes.2024.51.26 - October 8th, 2024

More Babies For the Rich? The Relationship Between Status and Children Is Changing - https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-rela... - March 18th, 2024

> Yet the trend at the aggregate level of the whole country disguises trends that are emerging among individuals in these countries. In my new book, coauthored with Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber, Not So Weird After All: The Changing Relationship between Status and Fertility, we document that while in much of the twentieth century it was poor people in countries such as the United States who had more children than richer people, there is a new emerging trend where better-off men and women are more likely to have children than less well-off men and women.

I suspect that if you have a situation where people's "situation" (to use the word twice) doesn't change much from year to year but they feel they're slipping behind/worse (e.g, inflation but everything else is basically the same) - you'll find a decline in the birthrate.

If you have a situation where suddenly your life improves noticeably, birthrates will rise - even if the first group is always better off than the second. It's relative.

So WFH may have contributed to a birth rate rise simply because people felt more secure and more in control (or better) than they did before.

Strongly agree, the sentiment must be of a longer term improvement, not a temporary one. “Applied hope” if you will. The hope must be "sticky."

Because if both are at home working, well, you can have some couple time (also called "sex") during lunch break or at any given moment when there are no meetings etc.

Ask me how I know it...

Deciding whether to have a child seems much less about finding the time for sex, than about thinking you have the time and resources for actually raising the child that you would have. The actual act is a rounding error in the time requirement.

IF both are very fertile, sure. Otherwise, it can take a while, months probably. There are just 2-3 days a month when the woman is peak fertile. So, just the mere physical presence can boost possibilities.

I disagree. It is completely irrelevant if you can "afford" raising a child. Your children are not gonna die because you "can't afford" them in ANY western democracy once you have them.

Actual affordability of children has zero direct effect on fertility, the only thing that really matters here is "perceived affordability" (=> and by implication, effect on lifestyle)!

So if you can "trick" people into having more sex, then expecting higher fertility is quite reasonable, while decreasing the monetary cost of raising kids might not really help much at all.

I can't speak for anyone else.

Me and the wife only decided to have a child after finances were in order. If finances were not in order we wouldn't have had a child.

Affordability was definitely a factor.

> The actual act is a rounding error in the time requirement.

this is patently wrong. getting pregnant isn't just something that magically happens once you decide you have enough money

And… that’s just not how the time factor actually works. If wife and husband are home during her most fertile time window in a cycle, she will instinctively “find him” for some magic moments that may not be particularly planned or even romantic, rather more characterized by a delightful and clumsy urgency.

> If wife and husband are home during her most fertile time window in a cycle, she will instinctively “find him” [...]

Have you known many couples who had trouble trying to conceive? There's a reason fertility monitoring strips, apps, etc. are such a huge market, and it's not because people are trying to avoid pregnancy.

> [...] for some magic moments that may not be particularly planned or even romantic, rather more characterized by a delightful and clumsy urgency.

I guarantee that if you interviewed couples who had been unsuccessfully trying to conceive for a long time a large number of them would strongly disagree with using "delightful" to describe the urgency of sex during the fertility window.

Don’t misunderstand the situation to which I’m narrowly referring:

Man available to the woman effectively around the clock every day, setting majority of the time is private and comfortable enough that sex can just happen, in compressed and sometimes exciting timeframe, i.e. even if busy with WFH and childcare.

I am aware of couples who struggled or are struggling with fertility, and using the various tools and techniques to increase the odds. I am not discounting their experiences and hardships. I am saying that, on average, if more couples of child bearing age are sexually accessible to one another effectively 24/7, then there are natural instincts that can and do play a role in them coming together sexually at the critical time for conceiving a child, and so more children would be conceived.

Anecdotal, but...

I have a commute that varies between 30 minutes and 2 hours (one way). I am in office 5 days each week, eight hours of work, and hour for lunch. That's 11 hours gone each day (sometimes more, occasionally less). Add in getting ready to go in, doing stuff around the house when I get home, and the only time that I am really available to my spouse is dinner and Saturday/Sunday. Due to the time lost, I end up doing household work at least one day each weekend. My spouse and I now have 1 full day together each week. Where in that is there really time for romance?

I can fully understand where even two days with more time and less stress would create opportunity for romance that otherwise may not exist.

The other reasons given make sense to me, but I bet there is also some psychological benefit in having a regularly scheduled escape from home, and having a guilt-free excuse for it built in, which partly compensates for being forced to come in a few days a week. The contrast makes it easier to appreciate the company of your spouse and probably makes child-rearing seem less oppressive. People theoretically could manage this without work imposing it on them, but in practice, having to make and justify the choice creates stress.

Escape from home is healthy. But not when you are escaping into the office. It’s healthy to escape for a hike, for groceries, to take a walk, go to the gym, etc.

I think it's simpler.

two working people, trapped in the same house together during working hours.

if there are kids, they might be at school.

> you've ever been a parent with a young child at home, your estimate of how much work you could do would be possible is a lot more modest

Believe Switzerland allows professionals to choose the percentage of work time they want to sign up for. For instance, if 100% is 8h, 5d/week, 80% would be 4d/week. The parent can then both take 80% each & have 2 work days free for childcare.

Which means that kids can be with a parent, or both, for all of most days. That is a huge benefit for them and the parents.

I have kids, so it seems obvious to me. It is much easier to coordinate kids related duties when at least one is at home every day. Things like, picking the kids up, taking them somewhere, being there when the kid comes home.

When the kid is sick and not in school daycare, that one person can do supervision. A sick kid usually does not need super involved care whole day, but they cant be left alone whole day either.

Just being able to say "I don't commute every Thursday so if I make this commitment for a random Thursday six months from now, I won't need to adjust my schedule." takes a bit of the cognitive load off.

When I had a sick baby I could work from home quite happily, but after he grew to be a toddler or older I don't even try.

If my kid is sick I stay home and look after him, sure half the time they'll be sleeping/reading, but the other half the time its just constant interruptions and caring for him.

At least I'm lucky that I'm allowed about ten paid "care of sick child" days a year.

Yes, but this doesn't explain why even a day or two of WFH increases fertility.

While pregnant, additional intercourse does not make one more pregnant. You just need enough WFH days to get people pregnant.

You don't need whole days. Ten minutes should be fine :-)

I love this new information about birth rates and WFH, and totally support following it to higher birth rates.

But the article framing as if the pronatalists somehow knew of the birth rate benefit and maliciously used it to counter their stated goals is too heavy-handed.

How about framing this as the new information that it is and getting the information out there in a positive way so that it can be used in both government and corporate policy?

Wasn't it pretty intuitive back in 2021 or so that wfh would make childcare easier?

It's good to have exact numbers of course, but I can't see how anyone would think RTO wouldn't impact fertility or households in some fashion.

At the start of WFH, we were all* rather more worried about the pandemic and what the shops had in stock than childcare.

By the end of the pandemic, it was more of a social battle between those who wanted to maintain the new normal and those who absolutely loathed it, and again nobody* really cared about childcare.

Closest anyone got to caring about childcare at any point was home-schooling and the value of air filters in classrooms.

* I am of course being excessively absolutist with this language, very little is all-or-none.

Sure, but I didn't think about this specific topic in any direction until this article. That's the great thing about articles and media, they spread thoughts and connections that might not be obvious to folks who are focused on other things.

Actually paying someone to take care of your child 7-5 is easier, it's just wildly unaffordable and therefore less attractive.

I don’t understand the reasoning to have children if you don’t want to spend time with them and rather would pay someone to do that for you (not addressing directly at you). Being able to spend time with your child is a gift which passes by very quickly.

I'm thankful I live somewhere I can pay $300/month for daycare. I think it's even cheaper now and capped at like $400 no matter how many kids you have in daycare.

We tried to have them at home while WFH a few months during covid when everything was shut down. That didn't work. lol.

One WFH scenario I've never seen brought up is trying to hold a career while needing to care for elderly family members. That's not something people can just choose not to do, if family cultural norms require it.

Yup, that’s me! And it’s a rewarding life despite all the noise from anti-WFH ideologues. A string of open-minded startups have benefited from my labor.

I've been out of luck unfortunately. My experience is somewhat specialized, and the intersection of adjacent jobs with WFH all seem to want a different experience.

We only get one life. I admire the path you’ve taken.

Drive to the office and sit on a video call you can hardly hear because the coworkers next to you are on their own video calls

I once took two planes to visit a client office so I could do a video call with them at their other office on the other side of the city I just flew to and then flew back home.

I once did a six-month project where I'd go the office to sit on zoom with my team in 3 other cities. One of those cities was our offshore dev team that we hired because they cost less and could do the job remotely. How the hell did CEOs get away with telling us that offshore dev teams would be fine because in-person collaboration wasn't necessary while simultaneously saying we all had to be in the office?

> How the hell did CEOs get away with telling us that offshore dev teams would be fine because in-person collaboration wasn't necessary while simultaneously saying we all had to be in the office?

Because of workers who let them get away with it (apparently, including yourself). Workers who do not collectively act in their own best interests get taken advantage of, that is what CEOs exist to do.

> How the hell did CEOs get away with telling us that offshore dev teams would be fine because in-person collaboration wasn't necessary while simultaneously saying we all had to be in the office?

Hopefully those particular CEOs are now in line for being replaced with an AI.

It's clear that post-COVID, white collar employees had the upper hand over their employers. Quiet quitting and other stupid acronyms, lengthy LinkedIn posts about "this generation doesn't get their hands dirty" was the canary in the coal mine for what's coming.

Interest rate hikes, increased unemployment, austerity (...sorry fiscal prudence), are all tools that can be deployed to reduce the bargaining power of labour. So is return to office, layoffs, AI.

I think the supply shocks is the part of the pro-natalist view that is hardest for me to accept.

My counter-argument: the full expression of human achievement is not genetic; it depends on the resources given to the human; If we accept that someone cannot reach their entire potential if living in poverty, and we accept that a lot of the advantages of rich children are due to the environment and opportunities that wealth provides, then it naturally concludes that we could get all of the advantages that pro-natalists look for by creating a higher standard living for all existing children.

Only when we can provide the sustainable resources for all people on the planet can we accept the idea that we have room for more.

I guess I'm pro-natalist. I do agree with you on the goal of eradicating poverty, although to me that's a goal in itself that does not need to be justified. But I don't agree that all people on earth are fungible, and a birth in Mongolia is the same as a birth is Sydney, Australia.

Your "human achievement" viewpoint is highly reductive. The culture of a place is maintained by it's local population. When you have a low birth rate situation to the point that you need to supplement the workforce with immigrants, that signifies that the local culture is slowly dying. While some mixing of cultures is beneficial, we should also try to perserve our local cultures. We should not turn every city in the developed world into a little NYC.

I don't think Musk and Andreesseen are who most people would associate with the concept of pronatalism. The headline was surprising to me because most of the people I know who could be described as "pronatalist" are strongly for WFH policies.

>I don't think Musk and Andreesseen are who most people would associate with the concept of pronatalism.

Musk is for sure. Doesn't he have like 100 kids because he's constantly trying to get women to become pregnant by his sperm?

I associate the concept of pronatalism with also wanting to be involved in your kids' lives, which Musk seems to have no interest in.

>I associate the concept of pronatalism with also wanting to be involved in your kids' lives

Then don't because it's just wrong. Very few, if any, of the "more babies, bigger families" types have any interest in or concern for the children after they're born. In fact they're usually the ones fighting tooth and nail to prevent any kinds of programs or services that might help the resulting children and families.

For them it's just a pure numbers game/bizarre sexual fetish disguised as a philosophy.

This is not true among the people I personally know with large families.

WFH may be dead in the US, but it sure is alive and well in Europe.

Same in UK (from my anecdata)

Not in most of Europe.

Most of the CEE along with Western European countries like Netherlands and Ireland have ass-in-seat requirements for American companies to unlock FDI subsidizes when opening a GCC. Additionally, management culture in London as well as Paris is very hybrid work oriented.

There is a decent proliferation of WFH roles in Europe, but those are the same roles in the US anyhow - we're posting those in Europe it's us offshoring.

Germans need to stop using "Europe" as a stand-in for Germany.

> Not in most of Europe.

I live in Spain, and received WFH job offers from Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish and German companies. For all intents and purposes, WFH doesn't seem "dead" in Europe at all, as far as I can tell.

> like Netherlands has ass-in-seat requirements for American companies

That might be true, but doesn't really tell us about Dutch companies, just what American companies want/does in Europe, doesn't really reflect what European companies are up to.

The Dutch companies I've worked for tend strongly towards a single office day per week, which is an acceptable balance to me.

> doesn't really reflect what European companies are up to

Most tech employment in Europe is via American FDI.

And for a large number of "European" companies it's the same management, board members, and investors as in the US. Heck, I'm on the board of a European company as well.

> Most tech employment in Europe is via American FDI.

Coming from the person who said "Germans need to stop using "Europe" as a stand-in for Germany"... I don't think whatever you personally experienced applies to all of Europe, it's not a tiny place with heterogeneous employment situations across the continent exactly.

Not really, it varies a lot by region. UK and Ireland, absolutely. In Germany or France it's waaaay more mixed. Overall by employee count, most tech jobs in Europe are domestic, not by American FDI

Huh? Where do you get that from?

Mix of anecdotes and law of large numbers - for every 10 person startup founded by hipsters in Berlin you have a 500-1,000 person GCC opening up in Warsaw, such as Google.

Gulf Corporation Council? GNU Compiler Collection?

Google & co have very little footprint in the EU.

citation please

In 2022 they had 25K employees and interns. That's tiny.

Source: https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/di...

You should really try to write abbreviations in full the first time they're used. I have no idea what CEE, FDI and GCC mean.

FDI = foreign direct investment

GCC = global capability center

As a German living in Germany, I had the impression most companies here are anti-WFH.

It got better with COVID, but you still have to dig, to find something 100% remote.

This is way more serious than Covid - there it was a demand-shock.

This is a supply shock - one with no alternatives. For people who aren't aware of just how much we depend on petrochemicals, see this video on the perils of peak-oil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOMWzjrRiBg

Peak-oil may have proved "false" (not quite - only that Hubbert didn't expect a bimodal distribution), but this is a good time to come out of our illusions, not only about the "unlimited"-ness of oil, but also about creating societies that are so toxically dependent on oil.

Ok, this is wrong but it's not your fault for believing it because for reasons I can't really fathom, nobody talks about it. There were several causes to the massive Covid inflation spike but the biggest factor was actually supply shock. And it was 100% Donald "Art of the Deal" Trump's fault. It requires a little explanation.

Let's wind back to March-April 2020. If you remember, there was a brief period where because of shutdowns oil prices went negative. Commodities are generally traded at spot prices and with what are called futures contracts. A future contract allows you to schedule the purchase or sale of a commodity at a price that's agreed upon today. Producers and consumers use this to de-risk prices.

Oil futures contracts are standardized with fixed delivery dates and sizes (usually 1000 barrels per contract). So in April there was a glut and nowhere to store it becasue people stopped buying on the spot market and had trouble accepting deliveries anyway. So for a brief moment, producers had to start paying people to take oil because they had nowhere to put it. Technically, this is an example of an extreme contango market.

So the world produces and uses roughly 100M barrels per day ("bpd") of oil. OPEC+ produces 40-50% of that and they like stability in the oil market. Too low and they don't make enough money. Too high and it create political instability and economic distress. The current guidance is a floor of $70 and a ceiling of $80 is considered "ideal".

So how does OPEC+ do this? They meet every 3 months and look at projected demand and adjust supply accordingly.

In May (give or take), Trump went to MBS (Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Pricne of Saudi Arabia) and asked--begged really--him to cut production because the administration believed there would be a prolonged demand slump. Now this was largely unnecessary because OPEC would do this anyway with their 3 monthly rolling cycle.

For reasons I won't get into, this was an opportunity for MBS to get back at Donald Trump for screwing over OPEC in 2018 when Trump intentionally crashed the oil market.

Starting in June 2020 and lasting 2 years, OPEC would cut production, initially by 9.7Mbpd (going down in stages to 6.3Mbpd). That's 10% of world supply. Don't believe me? It's documented [1]. And nobody talks about it.

This was, as we now know, a disaster. Demand exploded in 2021. The now-Biden administration quietly went to MBS and asked him to reverse the cuts. He refused. It was payback. The Biden administration could've absolutely talked abou this but didn't. No Democrat did. Because no establishment Democrat wants to actually upset the oil and gas industry and interfere with American foreign policy, no matter how much huffing and puffing they do about caring about such things.

So when people ask "what happens if the Strait of Hormuz closes?" we don't need to speculate. We know exactly what happens because it's already happened. Except this time it's worse. And all of these consequences were completely foreseeable and known but were ignored. And the war with Iran is 100% unwinnable.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump...

If you can WFH you've demonstrated to your employer that one impediment to offshoring your job is gone.

Thats not to say there aren't other impediments. Maybe your job is legally protected onshore (military)

Nor is this a value judgement, or a prescription of a solution. Maybe lowered tech wages are the best solution for this problem. I work in a lab, I'd love for these coders to make less money and not have to compete with them economically.

But WFH is a demonstration of ability to off-shore. That's indisputable.

My suspicion is that WFH/remote living doesn't increase fertility so much as pulling it forward. I.e. those who will have children already have them sooner and may be more likely to have the marginal child. Those who are single are probably likely to have fewer children and have them older.

This is a pretty terrible distributional effect, all things considered.

it'll be interesting to see how wfh and 4 day week policies play out in SEA, and that's more interesting than the domestic us conversation here really. If the us could follow suit we could probably do some great work on families but it seems very unlikely.

> (Amazon could not even find enough desks for the 350,000 corporate employees it ordered back five days a week) but decisively.

I wonder if they can fit they people in available desks by now (After the layoffs).

It's too bad nobody likes Freud, because all the discourse around pro- and anti- natalism reveals a rich vein of sexual and other anxieties that are the true content of the "debate" outside of the handful of David Benatars of the world making rigorous (if niche) arguments.

I would say that the healthy response is to promote human autonomy alongside policies that show that a society cares about its most vulnerable, but what do I know.

Everyone on HN: "people are so irrational, they never see the importance of embracing technology; why are people so close-minded? It's all vested interests. At least us nerds use _logic_ to evaluate the situation. All these idiots post-rationalising things."

Also everyone on HN: "there is absolutely no good argument for working in an office and anyone who suggests it is evil."

The second one is mostly accurate, yes. There aren't really many good rational arguments for requiring full-time in-office attendance.

There are, you just don’t believe in them.

That’s different.

The one thing I can't find a quick is a definition for "pronatalist." The obvious definition without the scare quotes is "those in favor of families having children." But we have scare quotes and references to men who definitely desire extreme levels of control over others.

It looks like "pronatalist" policy is "say you support increased birth rates while simultaneously being against any economic policy that would support families."

Which looks like the conservative playbook for decades. "Yes, more people in need, with limited education, so we can scare them into supporting more of the same."

Do I have that right? Or did I miss some nuance?

I think the quotes is to say that these people who say that they are pronatalist have revealed preferences that indicate that it is not a serious concern for them.

The author of the submitted content also wrote this:

Yes, I am a pro-natalist - https://www.governance.fyi/p/yes-i-am-a-pro-natalist

Like many <label>'s, the group isn't seen as homogenous from within regardless of how smooth and unfeatured they appear from outside.

There are a lot of flavors of "pro-natalist". For example Elon Musk is a "pro-natalist" but he seems to clear favor white Christian people and himself especially. Others are pro-natalist but have a general eugenics bent, rather than just white/Christian supremacy. And then others are pro-natalist in a more general sense, in that our culture in general should encourage at least rough replacement levels of fertility so that that we should avoid a population collapse.

Christian? Musk says he is not religious. He has said he is a "cultural christian" - a description also used of themselves by a lot of people ranging from Richard Dawkins to Anders Breivik.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2024/1218/elon-musk-cu...

That would still match "[favouring] white Christian people". Or at least that part matches the "Christian" part, the other stuff Musk associates with seems to suggest at least some racial (and not simply cultural) biases in his thinking, e.g. how he regards DEI as being a promotion of undeserving people rather than a way to give equal opportunities to deserving people who are demonstrably under-represented given their qualifications.

On that basis Richard Dawkins matches the Christian part.

It is entirely unimportant how Richard Dawkins is categorised, isn't it? Last I checked, the "pro-natalist" part isn't there for Dawkins, so how other things modify a pro-natalist stance don't connect to anything.

I am suggesting that a definition of "Christian" that includes Richard Dawkins is flawed.

You're the one who chose to combine Musk and Dawkins in the same group here with "cultural christian", that's absolutely a straw man if this is what you're doing.

I mean, your own link up there has a sub-heading of "Everyone has their own definition".

Especially when you're replying to "he seems to clear favor white Christian people and himself especially" rather than "is a Christian". Queen Victoria wasn't a feminist, neither.

You are saying they are Christian in the same sense of being "cultural Christians" rather than actual Christians. if you say one is a Christian it follows that the other is a Christian.

The point is that given Musk is clearly not an actual Christian he cannot favour Christians "himself included".

Some seem to use it as cover for being predators. Musk exposed his genitals to an employee without their consent, in a confined space without ability to escape, for instance.

I don't think those groups are as distinct as you're implying, certainly not in the US.

I think there is considerable overlap, in the form of people who believe in the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory. Essentially "we need to make sure there are enough white babies so that white people can outbreed <insert preferred minority scapegoat>." That thought is inherently eugenicist because it implicitly holds that white people are "better" in some way. "Christian" is also often implicit in "white babies," especially in contrast to Muslim or Jewish people being a common choices of scapegoat.

I guess I would like a distinction because I personally would like to avoid population collapse, thus I am pro-natalist in wanting a replacement level fertility, and I would prefer if that fertility was well distributed rather than highly concentrated in the most conservative religious folk. I do fear what will happen if we continue to shrink, it has to stop somewhere.

That's why I specified the US, where the population is still growing, and the remnants/echoes of the baby boom aren't as stark. I don't think it looks like we're headed for population collapse, and if we are, it's far enough in the future to course correct pretty gently.

I have less insight into the culture of natalists in countries like Japan or South Korea where their population pyramids are heavily inverted. I don't know what they're doing to address their age demographic issues, nor do I have any ideas for what they should do.

The Christian "Quiverfull"[1] movement embodies that "Out-Breeding The Others" idea.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiverfull

It isn’t political.

What isn't political?

TFA? It certainly is.

The term pronatalist? Maybe it shouldn't be, but TFA is a political commentary on the term.

I'm just trying to understand how this word is being used. And all the answers thus far indicate that it does indeed encompass political beliefs.

what is TFA?

The "fine" article

"featured" ;-)

If people want their government services to continue to work without destroying the economies that support them, it absolutely is a political issue.

Oh, and how do you propose politics is even able to have an impact? Force people to have sex with each other?

It may be an ideology but I don’t think this is a red/blue topic and certainly not a legislative one imo. It is more of a geographical issue and a byproduct of industrialism that isn’t really reversible, you just hope the ride down is more of a slope and not a cliff.

For a huge number of pronatalists it absolutely is. And/or religious, which often also boils down to being political.

It isn’t exactly a red/blue issue is what I should have said. I thought given the parent I was replying to that was the implication anyway. You can make anything political, of course.

Well, there's a little two-step here where pronatalists will insist “it's not political” with one side of their mouth, and then invite Jack Posobeic to be the opening night headline speaker at NatalCon with the other.

Its a a general term that a lot of people adhere to.

It's just that those people tend to be about 2 standard deviations out on whatever normal distribution you're dealing with.

Here in the US, you get a lot of these incel-y types with women control and breeding kinks.

But in China, it's more the very hardcore commies worried about the future of the party in 30 years and maybe have one chubby grandchild.

In Korea and Japan, you get a lot of Moonie types and that sort of folk.

In the Middle East (huge, I know), these are the hardcore Muslim folks but with a family bent (think strange uncles without children themselves).

South Americans here will be the turbo Catholic variety typically with a lot of kids already

Generally, the person that is in the pro-natalist camp is generally a person that is conservative in their social ideas. They want yesterday to be like to day, and today to be like tomorrow.

But, their individual ideologies and day-to-day-life are about as opposed to each other as can be and they may outright hate each other.

Marx would have a field day with these people.

As far as I can tell it's mostly these weirdos https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-elite-breeding-couple-ar...

"...they went on to become the faces of the pronatalist movement, and so far they’ve been given several long profiles for mainstream media outlets to share their pronatalist ideals. This week, it was the Telegraph. In January, it was the New York Post. Last year, it was Business Insider. As Business Insider put it, pronatalism—espoused by Elon Musk, for example—is about breeding supposedly “genetically superior” people. The Collinses have expressed in multiple profiles that certain traits like empathy and even political beliefs are genetically inherited, and so breeding among people who hold those beliefs will carry them forward. In an email to Motherboard, the Collinses disputed this characterization and described pronatalism as “a movement that urges individuals from low fertility cultures to have kids to preserve as much genetic and cultural diversity as possible.”

Pronatalist also usually implies a racist/nationalist angle, some of the reason you want more births is because your people are genetically better than immigrants in some way. This isn't universal, but it's often true.

There’s important history and connotation behind pronatalist narratives—particularly with eugenics, xenophobia, and gender (in)equality.

Vogue did a decent overview of this[1] and history is littered with all kinds of examples if you go looking.

1. https://www.vogue.com/article/dark-history-of-the-far-rights...

USS Tripoli will solve this

In order for companies to save face, we should rebrand WFH as “fertility days” instead. This way, companies can say they do not have work from home policies and are a full on site shop, however employees have “fertility days” they can use where they are not required to be at the offices, for purposes of encouraging childbirths.

The best employees get more fertility days as a reward, to encourage more such good employees into being born!

"Pronatalists" and this administration that they support is anything but. They've made employment more precarious, driven up costs, attacked public education, destroyed public health policy and on and on. Any claim on their part to be pro-family is either delusional or an outright lie.

Yes, work from home is beneficial for employees, but what's best for their employees is not what they're interested in.

I had no idea that WFH made an actually noticeable impact on birth rates, but it really drives home how completely fucking ludicrous our societies are. At any point we can just flip the switch and stop burning fuel for no reason. We've done it twice now, once for COVID and once for this oil crisis, and it turns out nothing changes, or better yet, things change for the better. We burn fuel to make people miserable commuting 1~2hrs of their life away every single day, to decrease life satisfaction, to decrease their productivity, to decrease birth rates. At any moment we can just not do that. And yet in normal circumstances, we keep doing that. Just because we can.

Those evil people who don't want the human race to go extinct, how could they.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

-- W. B. Yeats

Special mentions to Paul Ehrlich (the "population bomb" guy). Got all his predictions wrong, never changed his mind, got a lot of money for it eg from the Ford and the Rockefeller Foundation. His ideas led to millions of forced sterilizations and abortions in China and India, with his full support, by far surpassing anything the Nazis did in that regard.

> WFH delivers more fertility impact than the entire U.S. early childhood spending apparatus, at zero taxpayer cost.

It's (mostly) free! The tech bros just have to get over their status and control issues about forcing workers back into the office. Can they? Remains to be seen.

I mean Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta, then forced everyone back into the office. So I'd say outlook not so good.

Made me giggle so hard. Guy tells his company to create a virtual reality platform, says it can be used for work, forces employees back to office proving his product sucks.

The tech bros are also funded by the tools of wfh

> And the loudest pronatalists in American life, the ones who claim declining birth rates are civilization’s gravest threat, are the same people who just spent two years dismantling it: Elon Musk, who has fathered at least fourteen children and called declining birth rates “a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” told tech workers on CNBC to “get off the goddamn moral high horse with the work-from-home bulls**.” Marc Andreessen, whose Techno-Optimist Manifesto declares “our planet is dramatically underpopulated,”testified before his local town council that he was “immensely against multifamily housing development.” The network around them (Thiel, Altman, Armstrong, Buterin) has poured some $800 million into fertility technology while the companies in their orbit dismantle the workplace flexibility that actually raises fertility.

This article frames the behavior of Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and others as being hypocritical or misguided, that their aims are not aligned with their actions. Either the author is completely missing the point, or they're crafting a particular narrative to provide plausible deniability for these billionaires acting fully in accordance with their philosophies as they've many times publicly espoused. Far from being "pronatalist", Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, and others are only interested in rising birthrates among a particular portion of the population. Like many SV elites, they have a cozy relationship with the HBD movement within the rationalist movement, including Thiel's close association with Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug). It's /very/ obvious to anyone who has spent any time comprehending things that these billionaires are very invested in increasing birth rates among other people they consider worthy of having children, particularly elite whites, and decreasing birth rates among those they don't consider worthy of having children, particularly anyone who is not white.

To not put too fine a point on it: Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen do NOT care if their policies prevent their workers from having children. They don't want their workers having children, they only want children from the families of elite whites. They cannot be too loud in their statements, but these people are eugenicists.

Huh?!?

Pronatalists didn't kill WFH - offshoring did.

I've mentioned my experiences in board meetings about this topic as well [0].

WFH proved to the leadership of a number of previously hesitant companies that async and distributed work doesn't impact delivery.

But wait, why should I even keep paying a Silicon Valley salary for someone living in Tulsa, when I can have my existing Eastern European or Indian employees move back to the old country and open a GCC hub for me?

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40730052

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This conversation is incomplete without bringing up transhumanism [1], which is basically just Silicon Valley themed eugenics [2]. It is the belief by SV billionaires that their genes are superior and their goal is to "gift" those genes to future humanity. It's why the likes of Elon Musk is the absent or no-contact father to so many children.

It's just vanilla (pardon the pun) white supremacy combined with the myth of meritocracy and prosperity gospel. By this I mean there is the belief that one's genes are superior because they're a billionaire. It then throw in some Nazi-era conspiracy theories like "Great Replacement" [3][4].

It's worth adding that pronatalists, as a general rule, don't believe in higher birth rates for everyone. It's inherently racist, just like banning abortion [5].

The irony is that the curent end result of this movement is that the absolutely dumbest and most incompetent people have ended up in charge because of it.

Just think about the sequence of events here. We had to WFH so companies could survive. Billionaires saw massive increases in wealth in Covid and, briefly, there was real wage growth. RTO mandates are part of a wider movement to suppress wages, combined with the permanent layoffs culture we're in now. It was never about productivity or culture.

And now because of the biggest self-own in American history (ie by starting an unwinnable war with Iran for literally no reason) we're going to see massive gas and diesel price hikes, higher food prices (because of fertilizer shortages) and higher prices for everything because of the fuel price hikes (just like 2021-2022). And now it's OK to WFH again?

It's hard to calculate how much harm and misery the wealthiest 10,000 people in the world inflict on almost 8 billion other people, so much so that the world would be demonstrably and immediately better were the billionaires actually garbage collected.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism

[2]: https://www.seenandunseen.com/transhumanism-eugenics-digital...

[3]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-is-great-replacem...

[4]: https://archive.ph/Sp4WH

[5]: https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/the-racist-history-...

I think the more mainstream understanding of transhumanism is closer to "post-genics" than eugenics.

> And now it's OK to WFH again?

To be fair, the SV is not moving toward home office. Asian governments are moving to WFH because of high oil prices.

Unfortunately this is an argument from the wrong angle, because it assumes what the pronatalists 'mean' by their belief. It's the same way that arguing with Musk about being a free speech maximalist is fundamentally a failed argument, because he doesn't actually believe in free speech.

The silicon valley pronatalist stance is because they want to be patriarchs in full control of their family. They want absolute control over women and absolute control over their kids. Or they want to exert control over particular minority groups.

> Unfortunately this is an argument from the wrong angle, because it assumes what the pronatalists 'mean' by their belief.

Thank goodness you didn't assume what they mean as well, then.

They've made their stance clear. If you are unsure, look at the sessions from NatalCon.

I believe in, quite simply, the fact that their actions outline what they truly believe. Elon Musk said he was a pro gamer who was top of the ladder in Path of Exile 2, then he was found to be cheating having hired folks to play the game for him.

If someone calls themselves a free speech maximalist followed by banning people who criticize him, then he cannot by definition be a free speech maximalist.

You are projecting your thoughts on Elon Musk (which you do have some evidence to support) to a much, much larger swath of individuals.

I believe if you reread my post, you will find I isolated out my criticism to a very specific group.

I read it. My take is unchanged, because again you are equating Musk with a much larger group.

Do you think anti-natalism is or should be the default for humans?

What does your question have to do with OP's post? Did OP suggest an "anti-natalist" view, whatever that means?

I think the label is completely useless.

There are tons of (valid) reasons for and against boosting birthrates, but you have to break it down to the actual reasons that people are "natalists" or not.

Throwing all (anti-)"natalists" into the same pot makes as much sense as labelling communists, fascists and anarchists "anti-capitalists" instead; yes your label technically applies, but the group it describes is so heterogenous that you can't meaningfully talk about it anyway.

Edit for failing to address your actual question: No and no (people are not anti-nativists by default and shouldn't be).

If "anti-nativist" means someone that wants to keep birthrates below 2/womanlife long-term, than this is basically advocating for suicide at a species-level, and "unhealthy" from an evolutionary point of view.

But is that actually what your "anti-natalist" believe? If people just live lifes that lead to <2 children/woman, but don't really care or consider the whole question, does that make them anti-natalists, too (I don't think so)?

Saying you don't think declining birth rates is the highest priority does not mean you think people should not have children.

Correct. Pronatalism is a just a front, sometimes for pure racism. Remember that Musk grew up in Apartheid South Africa. They're worried about demographic shifts away from white dominance of the US.

Also, according to the article, Musk "called children and called declining birth rates a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming," which is not so much pro-natalism as it is dismissive of global warming, because Musk no longer cares about electric cars and has pivoted to ventures that are much less friendly to the environment such as AI and mass rocket launches.

> Remember that Musk grew up in Apartheid South Africa

And cited his opposition to apartheid as the central reason that he left the country as soon as he could, at age 17, because he didn't want to be a part of that system.

There are so many legitimate reasons to criticize Musk, but this isn't one.

Considering who he is now, what he wants politically, who he supports and how he treats his employees ... is there really anything about him that makes it sound like a real reason?

At this point, there's no reason to take anything Musk says at face value. He's proved to be an unreliable narrator. Here's just one small example: https://web.archive.org/web/20201006045204/https://slate.com...

You didn't mention how "opposition to apartheid" also meant avoiding mandatory military service. Interesting coincidence, I would say. Serious question: if one cared about ending Apartheid, wouldn't it be much more effective to do that from within South Africa than from across the ocean?

See also: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk...

>The silicon valley pronatalist stance is because they want to be patriarchs in full control of their family.

I am not sure what % of pro-natalists that applies to, exactly, but keep in mind most people in Silicon Valley voted for Clinton/Biden/Harris in 2016, 2020, and 2024 and most are not weird traditionalist cultural conservatives. There are many progressive left-liberal pro-natalists who just 1) don't want humanity to go extinct and 2) know that population decline in a country can lead to various issues, including economic problems. Immigration can help with some of that, but reproduction rate is declining or low in basically every single country and so immigration will eventually also not be a sustainable solution.

I think the majority of vocal pro-natalists are probably right-wing/racist/misogynistic, but the core pro-natalist stance in itself (as opposed to a stance of "whites are being out-reproduced", or something) is, in general, still a completely reasonable and I'd argue moral position.

Most people in Silicon valley also are not Musk, Zuck, or Andreesen.

If someone tells you they are a pronatalist, odds are they are actually a eugenicist. And they probably espouse other tech bro oddball philosophies and pseudoscientific beliefs.

How did we get to this place where a small number of strange white men have soured an industry that used to give us marvels that expanded our freedom and made our lives better?

Basically all of human history can be described in similar terms, and it's not melanin-specific.

If you can name a historical figure, they were probably some flavour of non-standard mental processing and beliefs.

Even just coming up with "marvels that expanded our freedom and made our lives better" is inherently a non-standard position relative to how most people live and think.

What you're saying amounts to: ambitious assholes know they need better PR than people who just get the job done. In principle this is an approach open to anyone, but in modern America, it is just a clique of strange white men.

No, I'm saying oddball philosophies and pseudoscientific beliefs are the default.

Even coming up with the scientific method took millennia, and actually trying to take that seriously is still really unusual in the human species.

It may happen to be a clique of strange mostly white men in the USA, but it would be wrong in both directions to label this under "modern America": the founding fathers of the USA were, by both modern and contemporary standards, more than a bit odd. And that was true at almost every point in US (and indeed world, not just USA) history. And it's not just a uniquely American thing, as anyone who points to, say, the Chinese Great Leap Forward's famine will point out. (And that was just the first example that came to my head, basically everywhere and every-when has something weird to pick up on).

Science is hard. Thinking critically and logically is hard. As Feynman said:

  The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.

Conservatives have always been hypocrites at heart.

They want cheaper gas but they want to halt electric car sales.

They want more babies but oppose maternity/paternity leave and work from home.

They want fewer unwed teen pregnancies but oppose comprehensive sex education.

They want religion to be more popular but continually protect and associate with priests and pastors that are sexual predators.

They want more people to own guns but freak TF out when their darlings get assassinated (by gunfire).

They want less fraud in government programs but spend vastly more than ever gets lost to fraud trying to catch it.

They want a better economy but oppose nearly every measure that would improve it such as a higher minimum wage, affordable housing programs, socialized medicine, etc.

it’s postmodernism. they have core interests around making money and opposing worker power but everything else is about the appearance of strength and appearance alone. sometimes referred to in the literature as spectacle

> Return-to-office is functionally anti-natalist policy beloved by “pronatalists”.

> ...

> The loudest “pronatalists” (Musk, Andreessen) spent two years killing workplace flexibility while funding nearly a billion in elite fertility tech.

So the message here is SV pronatalists aren't actually pronatalists, because pronatalism is way down on their list of priorities, especially bar below the priority of "be an imperious boss."

Capitalism seems to like to choke everything that's not maximum capitalism, reproduction in this case. It has no future unless humanity can be replaced by capitalist machines, but fortunately we've got top men working on that.

Imagine this for a sci-fi story: a dead world, its dominant technological species extinct, but it's mindless LLM-powered machines live on, mining raw materials and trading on a stock market.

Correct, the term "pronatalists" is in scare-quotes, suggesting that their belief/concern is fake.

> Correct, the term "pronatalists" is in scare-quotes, suggesting that their belief/concern is fake.

Or it's genuine, but almost completely trumped by other concerns, which I think is the more psychologically plausible explanation than conscious deception. They only pursue pronatalism without contradicting their other priorities, which makes their actions ineffective.

Or their belief is twisted: they're pronatalists, but not pro your natalism (e.g. they're really only interested in a master-race of SV founders reproducing).

Pronatalists are outwardly concerned with birth rates while simultaneously railing against immigration while simultaneously begging for more H1-Bs. The implication is really "we need more white babies" but always taking a back seat to "I need more money".

> Pronatalists are outwardly concerned with birth rates while simultaneously railing against immigration while simultaneously begging for more H1-Bs. The implication is really "we need more white babies"...

No, and I think that's a slander. If you look at the numbers, birth rates are falling everywhere. There's no fecund area pumping out babies at a rate to use immigration to solve the labor component of the birthrate problem. And even the most fecund area may drop to sub-replacement rate in a generation or two, if the follow the patterns of everywhere else. It really is a global problem.

And the progressive immigration solution is kind of imperialist: exporting problems from rich countries to poorer ones, who are even less equipped to deal with them (e.g. "let's export our trash to Africa and plunder its youth").

I mean Elon Musk is not really subtle about his white supremacy and how it dovetails with his calls for more babies. I don't think he'd even be upset by reading this.

I'm well aware that birth rates are falling in the rich world. It's a universal problem across all wealthy countries regardless of immigration or social policy.

I'm also not certain that this is some kind of urgent issue we need to do anything about. It seems like a natural cycle. And maybe we're better off letting the global population taper off.

I think you're also off base on immigration policy but that's a separate topic.

On the topic of capitalism, one can't make money from wfh policies like one can from the "fertility tech" one funds. It's synergy, you see.

Please do not use the occasion of the death of thousands of Iranians in a war we launched against them as some sort of illustrative point about return to office and birth rates in the West.

Yes, ignore the natural experiment that is unfolding before our very eyes, and gain nothing at all from the war that is causing it.

Like the saying goes: lemons -> lemonade