464. Will Work-from-Home Work Forever?

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4.6 • 32K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2021

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'll give you a little backstory.
0:04.2	Last March, my co-authors and I were asked to write a paper about COVID.
0:08.8	Last March.
0:09.8	So early on.
0:10.8	Early on.
0:11.8	This was when we were in full scale panic as a country.
0:15.5	And somebody called me up and said, I'm putting together a special session at this conference.
0:20.1	Do you have a paper on COVID that you'd like to present?
0:23.8	You know, nudge nudge.
0:25.6	Would you like to write one in a week, in other words?
0:27.7	Exactly.
0:28.7	Of course, we have a paper on COVID.
0:31.9	We very, very quickly realized, look, COVID's interesting, but that will go away eventually.
0:39.0	The question is, what's permanent from COVID?
0:41.9	And that led us down this path of working from home might be permanent.
0:46.5	And then it was like, well, how do we measure the essential ingredients of economic activity
0:52.7	related to working at home?
0:54.3	And that's what set us down this track.
0:57.6	Boris Davis is an economist in the business school at Rutgers University.
1:01.6	My specialty is real estate, but I also work on finance and economics.
1:05.4	The track that Davis and his co-authors went down is the same track many of us have gone
1:09.5	down since the pandemic began.
	...

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