Working From Small Homes

Ray Dalio's Great Powers Index dropped recently. It's a sort of deep overview of the world's twenty-three most important economies, their current strengths and weaknesses and their future prospects. As a Brit, it makes for mostly predictable reading. We're in poor economic shape - high debt, high labour costs, low productivity, depleted natural resources - none of it's news and none of it's going to improve in the short term. But our two stalwart positives are holding - the rule of law is strong and we're in excellent health (and getting healthier!). What might shock you, however, is that Ray Dalio thinks we're the happiest of all major economies.

I'm inclined to agree. I left London a few years ago, and I've been amazed at how happy the average person is out in the rolling, green heartlands. I like to say that it's thanks to the weather - because you can't live under this much cloud without learning to make your own sunshine - but I have a theory that it's actually down to housing. Particularly the way our housing supports working from home, which has been embraced to such an extent in Britain that any tech boss who doesn't like it might as well close his UK offices.

And while we're mentioning tech bosses, may I point out the irony of people who made billions from selling connectivity solutions now claiming that connectivity isn't sufficient for remote teams to work together. Do we all get refunded for our smartphones, internet connections, video call software and synced file systems now that the sellers admit they're not good enough?

I digress. On any standard metric, British housing is abysmal when compared to other English-speaking countries, principally due to our house sizes averaging less than half of those elsewhere. That negates anything we gain through build quality because you don't care about bricks when you need advanced geometry to fit two children into an ostensibly four-bedroom home. Then there is the lack of your own outside space (gardens are usually tiny) and the perennial annoyances that garages are too small to hold anything bigger than a bicycle and that the roads are too narrow for parking.

But there is another way to look at our modest dwellings. Small houses with little space around them mean lots of houses get built near each other, and that means lots of neighbours to make friends with and lots of customers for local service businesses. And those local service businesses really matter.

I can walk across my town in about fifteen minutes, but there are two grocery stores, three restaurants, three cafes, two chip shops, a pizzeria, a kebab shop, and seven pubs. Not to mention the schools, hairdressers, florists, tattoo parlour, funeral directors (ominously, more than one), doctors' surgery, veterinarian (everyone has a dog), community centre, bowling lawn, tennis club, skate park, you get the idea - my tiny town has everything anyone needs within a few minutes walk.

And that's normal in Britain's moderately affluent small towns where the "laptop classes" generally live. The key thing is that we can spend hours at our home desks without feeling disconnected from the world because we'll have taken coffee breaks chatting with neighbours, had a lunchtime stroll to a cafe, caught up with other dog walkers (seriously, dogs are mandatory) and probably invited someone over for wine in the evening. It's a fantastic way to live, made possible by the simplest of everyday digital technologies - a computer and fibre broadband.

It is not, however, proving to be a great way to impress economists. The numbers people are so bearish on Britain that several are openly downgrading us to a developing country without any development. Then again, the combined brainpower of every Davos conference thought WeWork was a tech company when it was obviously just subletting office space. I have wine to open.

Thanks for reading. If you know anyone who might like this article, please feel free to forward it, and let them know I can be found at benjclarke.me.