Steven Rattner's NYT op-ed about remote work does not live in the same universe most workers do.

Last week in the New York Times, investment executive and former Obama administration adviser Steven Rattner argued, in a piece called “Is Working From Home Really Working?,” that the increasing prevalence of remote work reflects a change not just in technological capacity and social circumstances but in the United States’ entire attitude toward labor—a change that is “not for the better,” he says, and that “threatens to do long-lasting damage to economic growth and prosperity.” I read Rattner’s piece on my phone while walking from my car to my son’s 2:30 p.m. elementary school pickup. It is true that I prefer to work from “home,” as the case may be, although home is sometimes a coffee shop where I type while my son plays games on my phone—he has to read for 30 minutes first; we’re an industrious family!—or the front seat of our car, where I connect my laptop to my iPhone hotspot while parked outside a school or day care center. It’s true that most Americans live in a world of material abundance relative to, say, the bog people, but it’s questionable whether their “rewards” for working are “growing,” or whether the United States’ prosperity, as described by measures like gross domestic product, is being made available to them in a way that affords real choices about how to spend time. Salesforce’s Marc Benioff asked, passive-aggressively, in company Slack if performance was suffering because not enough employees are in the office helping their colleagues build “tribal knowledge,” while Mark Zuckerberg of Meta instructed staff in a memo to “find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person”—elsewhere, he referred to those colleagues as “teammates”—because it’s easier to “build trust” in those settings.