Non-essential workers in the new world

One thing that I think gets glossed over in the hue and cry over the reopening debate is that we have another case in which Trump voters -- among others -- are being told they don't matter, they are inessential. Without hard data I'd hazard a guess that it's the same demographics who are most subject to "deaths of despair," in the parlance of Case and Deaton, whose self-concepts have been so battered over recent decades.

The new world of remote working really doesn't offer them much, though one has to think that they might look at the micro-economy of people busily working away at making PPE for medical providers in their garages and kitchens and think "this is something I could help with." I'm sure there is some of that going on. Certainly it would be more productive than hauling up to Raleigh or Lansing with submachine guns and yelling.

But the nub of it is that the coronavirus has not just exposed the fact that people of color living in multigenerational households with poor medical care are more likely to die, it has reminded us that lots of country white folks don't know what to do with themselves because they are used to collecting paychecks.

The new world will be different. If there is more work from home, that means there will be decreased demand for office space in big buildings, but lots more small jobs building home offices in basements or in accessory buildings in back yards.

Or maybe darkened retail space will be converted into small offices with a much higher ratio of offices to bathrooms and kitchens/fridges -- so that people will be able to leave the house to go to an office but will have smaller circles of people they share spaces with and with whom they can develop shared cultures of hygiene, sharing costs of soap, plumbing, cleaning, etc while agreeing on protocols for admitting visitors.

Certainly there will be a more distributed need for bandwidth, and the costs and means of maintaining information security will become more complex.

In any case, there will be more work in the new world. Commercial real estate will need to be more modular and fragmented, so it will be a world in which smaller, more entrepreneurial contractors will take market share away from bigger RE firms. It will be less rolled up, therefore economies of scale will be worse. But there will be work. People will just need to hustle to find it.