People do not move to, and telecommute from, Hawaii because they must do it to survive. It also is not cheap for them to do so. 1.3 million people currently live in Hawaii, though it would be cheaper for them to live on the mainland.
If Hawaii can attract telecommuters, perhaps Earth orbit can attract telecommuters.
Indeed. Moving away from the axis-of-rotation increases acceleration. When you are ready, you can go back to zero-g, or .5 g, or 1 g, or 1.5 g, etc. Instead of having to pay thousands of dollars each for airplane parabola rides, it is all right there.
For the same reasons that ski bums live near ski slopes, zero-g bums might live near zero-g. When you live in a spinning orbital habitat, you can have rapid inexpensive access - a veritable season pass - to a variety of acceleration levels.
People do not move to, and telecommute from, Hawaii because they must do it to survive.
How many people move to, and telecommute from, Hawaii? Who counts them? By contrast, how many people move from Hawaii to the mainland to pursue the same occupation they pursued in Hawaii?
We could probably telecommute from LEO, but anything further out starts to become annoying if you need anything in real time.
There is excessive latency with satellite internet, which uses GEO satellites. However, satellite internet requires 4 hops. Telecommuting from GEO only requires 2 hops = half the latency. ~23,000 miles x 2 = 46,000 miles. 46,000 miles / 186,000 miles/second = 247 milliseconds of latency (about a quarter of a second).
For faster travel, rockets tend to be chosen. What, then, would be the point of a space elevator?
By the way, the top recorded speed of a Bugatti Veyron, the fastest production car in the world, is 253 mph - on the flat. Travelling vertically at that speed, a space elevator car (we might assume it is powered by a 1%-efficient laser-beam stationed on the ground and aimed at photovoltaic panels on the bottom of the elevator car) would take 88 hours (or 3.7 days) to get to GEO.
If Hawaii can attract telecommuters, perhaps Earth orbit can attract telecommuters.