The rise of remote work is a tech success story, despite what one new and very convoluted study claims.
Published
Source: Reason
People like working from home. It lets us avoid commutes. It lets us live closer to family. It seems especially good for the parents of young children, and it could even boost birth rates. This seems like an indisputable tech success story. Thanks to a plethora of modern technologies and applications—the internet, smartphones, VPNs, video calls, instant messaging platforms like Slack, cloud-based software and documents, and so on—remote work has become a possibility for more people than ever, and that's a good thing. But are we all kidding ourselves about the benefits of remote work? Are we suffering from false consciousness? Do we only think we like it while it's actually making us miserable somehow? That's what labor economists Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel suggest in a very frustrating New York Times opinion piece based on a very frustrating study published in Science. "Our estimates…indicate that remote work explains a third of the deterioration in mental health between 2011 and 2024," write Harrington and Emanuel, the authors of a forthcoming book about the benefits of office life. Their claim—that remote work is responsible for a full third of mental health declines over the past 14 years—is pretty wild, and it immediately sets off some alarm bells. So let's look a little closer at how this study was conducted and what it might actually mean.