Remote or hybrid work has become the new normal for millions of people. We are only just starting to see the impact.
4 min
The fivefold increase in working from home ushered in by the pandemic is perhaps the largest change to hit U.S. labor markets since World War II. It has touched just about every manager in America, reshaped industries including real estate and business travel, and led to an exodus from city centres to the suburbs.
And working from home is here to stay—at least in a hybrid model where a commute to the office is limited to just a few days each week. Tracking detailed survey data, we see working-from-home levels were rapidly dropping from 2020 to 2022. But by early 2023 they stabilised and have remained flat ever since. Hybrid working has become the new normal for millions of professionals and managers across America.
So, it’s time to tally up the impact. Looking ahead to 2024 and beyond, who are the biggest winners and losers from the work-from-home revolution?
The biggest losers are likely city-centre office and retail property owners. The massive shift to home working has created a doughnut effect in major cities around the world. Millions of employees are no longer commuting every day, leaving many offices half-filled and retail stores struggling for customers. The owners of this real estate—often pension funds, family firms and endowments—have collectively lost hundreds of billions of dollars of investments.
In the long run, the sector will slowly recover as supply contracts. New construction has slowed, some empty buildings are slowly being converted to residential accommodation, and some lower-quality offices will be torn down. But recovery will take years to complete. Winter has come for the office sector. One forecast that a major leasing company shared with me was it would take until 2033 for occupancy to recover to pre pandemic levels in San Francisco—perhaps the hardest hit city.
Another loser has been mass-transit rail systems. Ridership has dropped by 30% nationally as commuters shift from a five-day commuting schedule to two or three days a week. These commuter rail systems have high fixed costs due to inflexible track and train costs, alongside rigid union-controlled labor expenses.
Large drops in ridership revenue translate into larger budget deficits. To date these deficits have been bailed out by pandemic-era federal and state subsidies. But the fear is unless public transit costs can be right-sized, once these subsidies run out they will see devastating service cuts or outright closure.
Growing up in Britain, I heard about the infamous Beeching cuts of the 1960s, which cut station numbers by 55% and devastated rail travel. I fear something similar happening to U.S. transit for 2024 and beyond unless operators and unions can align cost with revenues.
The third big loser has been big cities. American cities occupy surprisingly small spaces. For example, San Francisco is less than 50 square miles, comprising just the tip of a peninsula. So, when city-centre residents fled for the suburbs, they took their tax dollars with them.
As we know from the experience of New York in the 1970s, cities can adjust by cutting expenditures. But this will be painful and risks a hollowing out of city centres if key services like police and education are cut. Indeed, bond markets have already cut the prices of many city municipal bonds, providing an ominous signal of the budgetary struggles ahead.
It isn’t all gloomy, particularly for the biggest work-from-home winners: the workers. In national surveys, employees report they value the ability to work from home two or three days a week as much as an 8% pay increase. Multiplied across the roughly 70 million Americans who are currently working from home, this is a perk valued at roughly $500 billion a year. This vast dividend has benefited employees through less commuting and lower stress, alongside more personal, leisure and family time.
One recent study highlighted how the typical U.S. home-working employee spends 40 minutes more a week on child care from the time saved from avoiding the daily commute. This will have longer-run effects ranging from higher labor-force participation rates—possibly pushing up growth rates—to potentially even a fertility dividend as parenting becomes somewhat easier.
Another winner is the environment, thanks to reduced travel and energy needs. A recent study found working from home two days a week reduces pollution by about 15%. This comes from lower commuting emissions alongside additional savings from lower office energy bills. A double dividend is the reduced congestion on emptier roads, with traffic speed data from Inryx suggesting the morning commute is 10% faster.
And perhaps the biggest work-from-home winner are companies. Research finds that hybrid working three days a week in the office has a net neutral on employee productivity, while allowing firms to save on recruitment and retention costs. Firms can save money by trimming office expenses while using remote working to lower labour costs by hiring employees outside major cities.
U.S. firms made about $1 trillion higher profits in 2022 than in 2019, an increase of almost 50%. While many factors likely contributed to this, including the strong economic growth, it is notable this happened alongside the fivefold surge in working from home. Indeed, the mass adoption of hybrid working by millions of firms across the U.S. and Europe is perhaps the strongest evidence of its positive impact on profitability.
Looking further out, the biggest change will almost surely come from the new technologies we use to work remotely. When I first started working in the 1990s, working remotely meant conference calls and emailing files. Now we telecommute and share files on cloud networks.
The future likely heralds similarly large changes. In discussions with startups and tech firms, I hear about systems for holographic meetings, wall-size screens and global connectivity. This technology means working from home hasn’t just stabilised but is now moving into its longer-run phase of expansion. Ten years from now we will look back at 2023 as the beginning of the long bull market in hybrid working.
Nicholas Bloom is a professor of economics at Stanford University.
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Rugged coastal drives and fireside drams define a slow, indulgent journey through Scotland’s far north.
A haven for hedge-fund titans and Hollywood grandees, Greenwich is one of the world’s most expensive residential enclaves, where eye-watering prices meet unapologetic grandeur.
The lunar flyby would be the deepest humans have traveled in space in decades.
4 min
It’s go time for the highest-stakes mission at NASA in more than 50 years.
On April 1, the agency is set to launch four astronauts around the moon, the deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972.
The launch window for Artemis II , as the mission is called, opens at 6:24 p.m. ET.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration teams have been preparing the vehicles to depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the planned roughly 10-day trip. Crew members have trained for years for this moment.
Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut serving as mission commander, said he doesn’t fear taking the voyage. A widower, he does worry at times about what he is putting his daughters through.
“I could have a very comfortable life for them,” Wiseman said in an interview last September.
“But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”
Wiseman’s crewmates on Artemis II are NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
What are the goals for Artemis II?
The biggest one: Safely fly the crew on vehicles that have never carried astronauts before.
The towering Space Launch System rocket has the job of lofting a vehicle called Orion into space and on its way to the moon.
Orion is designed to carry the crew around the moon and back. Myriad systems on the ship—life support, communications, navigation—will be tested with the astronauts on board.
SLS and Orion don’t have much flight experience. The vehicles last flew in 2022, when the agency completed its uncrewed Artemis I mission .
How is the mission expected to unfold?
Artemis II will begin when SLS takes off from a launchpad in Florida with Orion stacked on top of it.
The so-called upper stage of SLS will later separate from the main part of the rocket with Orion attached, and use its engine to set up the latter vehicle for a push to the moon.
After Orion separates from the upper stage, it will conduct what is called a translunar injection—the engine firing that commits Orion to soaring out to the moon. It will fly to the moon over the course of a few days and travel around its far side.
Orion will face a tough return home after speeding through space. As it hits Earth’s atmosphere, Orion will be flying at 25,000 miles an hour and face temperatures of 5,000 degrees as it slows down. The capsule is designed to land under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean, not far from San Diego.
Is it possible Artemis II will be delayed?
Yes.
For safety reasons, the agency won’t launch if certain tough weather conditions roll through the Cape Canaveral, Fla., area. Delays caused by technical problems are possible, too. NASA has other dates identified for the mission if it doesn’t begin April 1.
Who are the astronauts flying on Artemis II?
The crew will be led by Wiseman, a retired Navy pilot who completed military deployments before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He traveled to the International Space Station in 2014.
Two other astronauts will represent NASA during the mission: Glover, an experienced Navy pilot, and Koch, who began her career as an electrical engineer for the agency and once spent a year at a research station in the South Pole. Both have traveled to the space station before.
Hansen is a military pilot who joined Canada’s astronaut corps in 2009. He will be making his first trip to space.
Koch’s participation in Artemis II will mark the first time a woman has flown beyond orbits near Earth. Glover and Hansen will be the first African-American and non-American astronauts, respectively, to do the same.
What will the astronauts do during the flight?
The astronauts will evaluate how Orion flies, practice emergency procedures and capture images of the far side of the moon for scientific and exploration purposes (they may become the first humans to see parts of the far side of the lunar surface). Health-tracking projects of the astronauts are designed to inform future missions.
Those efforts will play out in Orion’s crew module, which has about two minivans worth of living area.
On board, the astronauts will spend about 30 minutes a day exercising, using a device that allows them to do dead lifts, rowing and more. Sleep will come in eight-hour stretches in hammocks.
There is a custom-made warmer for meals, with beef brisket and veggie quiche on the menu.
Each astronaut is permitted two flavored beverages a day, including coffee. The crew will hold one hourlong shared meal each day.
The Universal Waste Management System—that’s the toilet—uses air flow to pull fluid and solid waste away into containers.
What happens after Artemis II?
Assuming it goes well, NASA will march on to Artemis III, scheduled for next year. During that operation, NASA plans to launch Orion with crew members on board and have the ship practice docking with lunar-lander vehicles that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been developing. The rendezvous operations will occur relatively close to Earth.
NASA hopes that its contractors and the agency itself are ready to attempt one or more lunar landing missions in 2028. Many current and former spaceflight officials are skeptical that timeline is feasible.
