Remote Work and Induced Demand

Human behavior is always dynamic

I had a thought a few days ago that I thought was interesting: the way remote work changes your work routine, and your balance of professional and domestic activity, is sort of like “induced demand”: the phenomenon of highway widening leading to congestion, because more people drive more and because more highway capacity incentivizes development on the periphery.

Some people think this sounds like a too-perfect anti-car theory, but it has been widely observed, and in fact I think of it as a deeply conservative insight. Human behavior is dynamic. Social engineering fails because you can’t hold everything constant and just change one thing. People aren’t like that. Our reasoning, our incentives, our calculations all change when our circumstances change.