oh-uh... the "science" is in and the experts have spoken!
Can't work from home, plebs; gotta return to the fiat mines in dimly lit and poorly ventilated offices! #1548040, #1548719
Most Americans say they love working from home. They can skip their commutes, dodge their snippy co-workers and evade their micromanaging bosses. In 2024, nearly 80 percent of workers said they would be happiest if they could work remotely.
Both of us have experienced the advantages of remote work, especially when battling morning sickness or caring for a sick 6-year-old. But on some days, we wouldn’t venture outside or speak face-to-face with another human. We started to wonder whether we — along with the roughly 35 million other Americans who work from home — had stepped into an enormous social experiment.
"Was remote work as liberating as it felt?"
Not the loneliness epidemic and mental health problems (can't be the homelessness and the opioids, etc):
revealed an uncomfortable truth: Despite its advantages, remote work has significantly deepened Americans’ isolation and distress. Our estimates, published in Science this month with our collaborator Amanda Pallais, indicate that remote work explains a third of the deterioration in mental health over the last 15 years. Our research doesn’t suggest that work can occur only in the office. But it does mean that employees and companies should make a greater effort to prioritize face-to-face time with colleagues.
Our study compares workers in jobs that could be done remotely, such as finance and software engineering, to workers in jobs that must be done in person. People in remote-capable jobs worked from home three times more often in 2024 than in 2019. As they did, their days became far more solitary.
Not sure that's a particularly great study design, but whatever.
These workers did not compensate by socializing more outside of work. More days passed with no social contact of any kind. No hello from an office mate, no idle chitchat with a barista, no nod to a fellow commuter. These lost interactions are not trivial.
Yeah, I mean this is critical... your being wants that; speaking from long experience, this is critically what you must do to compensate. Family helps:
The pain was not evenly shared. People who lived with their spouse and kids saw their mental health hold fairly steady, while those who lived alone experienced a 20 percent decrease in mental well-being. Overall, we found that the rise of remote work increased distress by 7 percent, which accounts for a third of the total increase from 2011 to 2024.
Twenty-six years after Robert Putnam warned that Americans were bowling alone, many of us are now typing alone. To ensure that work remains a source of connection, we must change not only where we work, but how we work, so that our jobs continue to bring us together.
BEAUTIFULLY PUT. Leeeesgo
The authors have a new book out, In Person: How Working Together Fuels Creativity, Productivity, and Growth
Den likes plugs; the NYT likes plugs. everybody likes plugs!
archive: https://archive.md/9eMXS
I fit in the "has wife and kids" category and so, as the study found, my perception of wfh is positive.
I worry though about the increase in learn-from-home options and how my kids will handle it when they hit their late teens. It would be very easy to isolate oneself physically. I don't think there is anything wrong with learning at home, but I do think it's good for young people to be forced to socialize with lots of others.
(I wonder why I don't think it as necessary for adults...is it a belief that we aren't as insecure and so will go have the interactions we want whereas young people let all sorts of internal things get in the way? I suspect this may apply to adults as well.)
Without diving into the details, which I don't plan on doing, I think the point is to show that the mental health measures only worsened for the group that decreased their in-person work.
Selection across these types of workers rules out simply comparing levels, but you would expect a broader societal trend to have a similar impact on both types.
My concern is that remote work largely ramped up with the covid insanity and remote capable workers probably bought into it way more than others. I would be curious how/if they remove the effect of the relentless propaganda campaign that was intended to increase social isolation.
Aah, I see it's a clever selection/filtering mechanism. I see... It just struck me as immediately inapplicable ("look, our cancer-curing drug had no effect on people without diagnosed cancer!")
Your broader point is even more interesting, yet I doubt these woke(?) authors could even conceive of that idea
Even woke economists would realize that lockdowns might confound the analysis. Not sure about non-economists.
I mean, I think the answer to this is obvious. The negative effects are not a fait accompli... it depends a lot on your own behavior. Perfectly possible to have remote work and a rich social life, if you put some effort into it. And people tend to overestimate their ability to make the right choices when the time comes, and they tend not to think that they'll suffer the plight of the averages