# The penny post, walking distance, and the history of work

- **Episode:** [156](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/156.md) (2024-12-24)
- **Type:** other
- **Tags:** history, work, postal-service
- **Time:** 14:40–19:16 (start 880s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/156?t=880](https://truthliesandwork.com/156?t=880)

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[14:40] Leanne Elliott: So unless you owned a plantation so vast that people weren't within walking distance, okay, if they lived outside, you suddenly had the upper hand in the negotiation because your home was movable. And I tend to look at quite a lot of technologies through— one of the most important technologies, by the way, I think, was the British Postal Service in 1840
[15:06] Al Elliott: Oh, yeah
[15:08] Leanne Elliott: Because previously, if you lived in London, you had a penny post system and it was pretty much same-day delivery, possibly next-day delivery, possibly same day. When they brought in the national penny post, it was effectively a penny post for the whole country. So suddenly you didn't have to be in London just to stay in contact with people regularly and affordably. And so quite a lot of technologies, I think, deliver their value The car being probably the greatest of all, I would say, in allowing people to escape from the constraints of their surroundings. And so the internet and the car and the chattel house are all, in a funny way, solutions to the same problem. And the car, for example, is one of the reasons I'm not against public transportation, but I'm a skeptic about mass transportation. For the simple reason that mass transportation— there's no reason why public transportation can't be individual. If you look at things like, you know, the Heathrow pod system, you know, you can have little forms of public transport which we all share. You could argue— I would argue that Uber is a form of public transportation, by the way. It's consumed at a private level by individuals and families, but it's still an asset to the to the environment in which it sits. And the problem with mass transit is it concentrates people. Okay, whether you're an airport, you know, whether you're an airline and you, you don't— okay, there are literally 100 more places, times more places you can fly to from London Heathrow than there are from Aberdeen Airport, right? And so it creates winner-takes-all effects where human movement tends to get overly concentrated into the hubs. It's centripetal in that sense. Okay. And, you know, what happens is that, you know, why are all hotels historically near railway stations shit? And the reason is then that those hotels are not there because they're good hotels. They're there because of where they're located. Now, when you gave people cars, rather than saying, well, I'll get the train into town and I'll go to the restaurant that's close to the railway station, They could go, this bloke's just bought a derelict pub in the middle of the countryside, but he's turned it into a really good gastropub. So I'm going to drive there. And the extent— it's always fascinating to me. I used to watch Little House on the Prairie, which is a lovely TV series, of course, some fantastic books. But I was— I don't quite understand at first why they really hated the Olsens so much, who are the shopkeeping family within their small town. And then it occurred to me, of course, before the car, your local shopkeeper, particularly if they had a monopoly, basically had you by the balls. Okay. You know, yes, you could buy somewhere else, but it involved literally a one-day journey in a cart to the neighboring town, you know, 15 miles away. And the second Henry Ford came along, the Olsen monopoly was broken. So anything that frees people up from the tyranny of their landlords or the tyranny of locational requirements strikes me as potentially economically valuable. So that, in a very, very long digression, is why I'm very, very— I'm not a total evangelist for complete remote or flexible work, although, you know, you obviously are because you're in Bosnia rather than in London. But I am very, very opposed to people who take a very narrow, Luddite knee-jerk hostile view. We need everybody back in the office. That strikes me as sort of effectively turning your back on a potential game changer. You know, now, this is what Jeff Bezos would call a two-way door. If we try too much flexible working, and in some aspects it doesn't work, we can walk back through the door