The price of teleconferences

I was recently in a teleconference. I am doing a lot of that, even though I much prefer email. But having people speak at the same time is a superior way of coordinating, even though it means working until 11 PM (and some people have to start at 7 AM).
Now I am going halfway around the world (almost exactly) to meet some of those people in a physical meeting. A one-day meeting. Takes half the week to get there, and half to get home. But it may be worth it. Why?
If, as the psychologists say, 80% of our communication is non-verbal, a one-day meeting in the flesh corresponds to a week of teleconferencing. And given the time difference, I do not think that would be possible. This is why, despite optimistic predictions in the 80's, the airline industry is bigger than ever, and teleconferences still a niche application. Videoconferences are even worse off.
This is also why meetings proliferate in any company, but of course they usually happen at the expense of real work, when companies start to suffer from bad coordination, resulting in managers trying to coordinate things with subordinates and sideordinates which they can control, instead of other managers (which they can not control). You get "meeting mummies" as a colleauge of mine called them, people who do nothing but sit in meetings (and survive cutbacks and reorgs by reporting in one meeting what happened in another, pretending that it was their idea).
Transparency ought to help here: Making agendas visible across the organization should cut back on things like that. But then, some of those managers would be shown to be meeting mummies. And of course, they resist the reorganization that would remove them. It would take a pair of pincers to do that. Or a promise for early retirement.