Will Work-from-Home Work Forever? (Ep. 464)
The pandemic may be winding down, but that doesn’t mean we’ll return to full-time commuting and packed office buildings. The greatest accidental experiment in the history of labor has lessons to teach us about productivity, flexibility, and even reversing the brain drain. But don’t buy another dozen pairs of sweatpants just yet.
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Morris DAVIS: I’ll give you a little back story. Last March, my co-authors and I were asked to write a paper about Covid.
DAVIS: Early on. This was when we were in full-scale panic as a country. And somebody called me up and said, “I’m putting together a special session at this conference. Do you have a paper on Covid that you’d like to present?” You know, nudge-nudge.
DAVIS: Exactly. I was like, “Sure, of course we have a paper on Covid.” We very, very quickly realized — look, Covid’s interesting, but that will go away eventually. The question is: what’s permanent from Covid? And that led us down this path of: working from home might be permanent. And then it was like, well, how do we measure the essential ingredients of economic activity related to working at home? And that’s what set us down this track.
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