> What evidence is there for this supposition?

To develop evidence, you would need to generate examples of vague, intangible but fundamentally valuable work. Since that is difficult, research on this subject is going to proceed slowly. Since it takes effort, on the part of the leadership, to define vague, intangible but fundamentally valuable work, doing so clearly has a cost associated with it. This extra cost is the starting point of Coase's theorem. Rather than define this cost exactly, most workers, and most management, proceed on instincts. So management says "I'm willing to pay an extra $30k a year to get workers into the office, because defining their work will cost me more than $30k a year." And then some workers say "Working in an office costs me more than $30k a year, so I won't go to the office" or some say "I'll make a profit if I take the $30k and go to the office." Rather than work out this value exactly, most are proceeding on instincts.

Still, we can reason about vague intangible factors by looking at the behavior of the top leadership. Top leadership prefers to meet other top leadership in-person. In New York City right now, the pattern I'm seeing is that leadership meets each day in the office, while less essential workers are allowed to work from home. Likewise, with the pandemic ending, most meetings of the Boards Of Directors have gone back to in-person meetings. And the best salespeople I know greatly prefer in-person sales calls rather than Zoom calls. In every case, those at the top behave as if in-person gatherings give them some extra benefit, which might be difficult to define, but whose importance is revealed by the behavior of those at the top. When a CEO meets with their Board Of Directors, they prefer to do so in-person.

This is too large a subject to get into in comments on Hacker News, but the starting point would be the question "Why do firms exist?"

That leads to other questions:

"When does a firm want to hire an employee, rather than outsourcing the work to another company?"

"Why does hierarchy exist?"

I don't think much work has been done on the specific issue of "work from home" but presumably the arguments for and against outsourcing apply in lesser form to "work from home".

Module theory can contribute something to the conversation, there is a nice overview here:

https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...

It is possible that the issue is best understood the other way around: look at the failures of outsourcing and then notice what they have in common with "work from home". Here is a good essay on the failures of outsourcing:

https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/coase-carillion-a...

Consider this bit:

"Carillion consisted, essentially, of a sales and contract management organisation that hunted public-sector service contracts and then hired subcontractors to carry them out. This is a fairly pure statement of the firm as a network of contracts. It grew largely through a succession of mergers and acquisitions, buying up the facilities management divisions of British construction companies to get their government contracts. This had an important effect on the company – it became a conglomerate that had only one real specialisation, bidding on government contracts. It is not surprising that it didn’t do a great job."

Many advocates of "work from home" argue "Why should it matter where I do my work, so long as I get my work done? If I'm doing excellent work, and getting it done on time, then I should be allowed to that work from home." This argument depends on someone up in the hierarchy defining the work to a high level of specification, so that everyone can clearly understand what the work is, and what it means to get it done on time. In such cases, the managers have to become specialists in defining the work to a high level of specification, in the same way that Carillion became a conglomerate that had only one real specialisation: bidding on government contracts. Some managers feel they have other work to do which is more important, so they'd rather just pay extra and get people back into the office. That is why work-from-office is going to survive, and that is why it will be better paid than work-from-home.