Grant's on New York City, telecommuting and out-migration of wealthy taxpayers

Covid-19 dealt New York an especially cruel blow, and what with the lockdown and riots and looting and curfews and the absence of baseball and the virtual cessation of commerce (a tentative reopening began Monday), the city had come to look like a ghost town.  Nobody doubts, or should doubt, its resiliency, but not even the great fire of 1776, or the draft riots of 1863, or the almost-bankruptcy of 1975 carried with them the threat of a crippling, perhaps permanent, out-migration of the kind of wealthy taxpayer who can telecommute - and who gave that alternative lifestyle a proof-of-concept test over the past three months by not taking the subway to work.  Some seem to prefer it.

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Perhaps the emerging new freedom to work remotely will cut short the co-dependency of high-earning citizens and their big-spending state and local governments.

~ Grant's Interest Rate Observer, "Only a painted moon," June 12, 2020

Phil Duffy on the Covid-19 scare and telecommuting

The electronic cottage idea was at first opposed and mocked by the old order.  Today, during the COVID-19 scare, many organizations are requiring employees to telecommute and use the Internet from their electronic cottages.  At first we rushed to mob grocery stores to hoard staples such as toilet paper, then realized that we were compounding our exposure to this newly discovered risk.  Reacting, we started to return to a method of acquiring groceries abandoned in the 1950’s ordering on line for delivery...

Futurists, curiously, do not predict the future – they open our eyes to the possibilities.  But only if we allow our minds, which are certainly capable, to consider the deeper forces of progress and resistance that are in constant conflict.  We are in the middle of the newer force for decentralization against the old order of centralization.

~ Phil Duffy