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Twenty years from now, when everybody works from home, it will seem strange that companies spent so much money to construct showplace headquarters buildings. Right now, it doesn’t seem strange, exactly. Just kind of mind-boggling.

As you drive around Greater Des Moines and notice the architecture, it might occur to you that the insurance business must be a fairly lucrative way to pass the time. Mortgage sales and banking in general also are not being conducted in canvas tents. Hospitals are doing well, as Baby Boomer bodies continue to break down like particleboard bookshelves.

During these long months of argument about health-care reform and outrage directed at bankers, it must be unnerving for the leaders in those sectors to think about the public out there on the sidewalk, pitchforks in hand, seething about the fanciness of it all.

Simple folk don’t understand that it’s all about scale, and that a quite reasonable profit from a huge number of customers can buy you a terrific lobby and maybe a piece of sculpture. Also, they belong to the unfortunate class that never learned how to pass along cost increases. It’s a great skill to have, and everyone should take a run at acquiring it.

Besides, we’re all complicit in the trend toward the overdone, because we judge companies by their appearance. We assume that if they can afford first-class digs, they must know what they’re doing. It’s like when a plumber pulls up in front of your house; you want him to be driving a nice-looking van. But not a van handcrafted by Mercedes-Benz. You don’t want to help pay for that.

It was suggested to us once that a company putting up a remarkable piece of architecture was hoping to avoid publicity about it. The leaders didn’t want to seem boastful. It might look bad if the public noticed how much was being spent on stone and glass while the customers scrambled to pay their bills.

Our response was that it would take one heck of a blue tarp to cover up what they were doing. You can keep your five-year business plan a secret, but tower cranes draw public attention like lightning strikes.

At that point, you might as well go with breezy self-confidence, which has worked for everyone from Andrew Carnegie down through Donald Trump.

No doubt it’s a boost to employee morale and helps recruiting when you have an imposing structure to boast about. You may start out as a lowly assistant, or maybe even a Lowly Assistant II, but you feel good about your future as you stride down the carpeted hallways and dine in the tastefully designed cafeteria.

It would be tough to attract a top graduate from the Ivy League to work in an Airstream trailer parked in the boss’s back yard. (Although I knew a guy who worked in an Airstream in his own back yard, and it wasn’t bad, although a little more insulation would have been nice.)

Sometimes, however, one wonders how much money is spent on ego – or how much is spent just because it’s available.

It doesn’t have to be a brand-new building to make an impression. Over in the education sector, where all citizens contribute money even if they don’t contribute students, the Des Moines Independent Community School District bought the white-columned building adjacent to Central Campus. Not a bad buy. I used to work in that building, and it was a solid structure with decent cubicles and adequate lighting.

Earlier this year, I ventured inside to see what the remodeled version looked like. It was unrecognizable, as if I had never been there before. Clearly, many dollars had been ground up in an effort to redefine the joint.

The people with offices there probably feel a little better about settling in at work than they would have if nothing had been changed.

Whether providing wider corridors for administrators will produce better-educated students remains to be seen.