The American worker is on a productivity tear and it may have more to do with a surge in working from home than the effects of AI, according to a Stanford economist.
For the past five years, the output for non-farm businesses has increased by a sizable 2% per year, The Economist reported citing statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is a marked increase from the 1% productivity growth per year that defined most of the 2010s, and a trend that has taken even Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell by surprise.
Yet, while the hype around AI over the past several years makes it a logical candidate for the main driver behind the productivity boom, Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economics professor who is known for explaining the Great Resignation of the early 2020s, says it’s more likely work-from-home policies since the pandemic are fueling the trend.
We knew this. Economists were shouting it over and over during COVID, when this productivity boom started as much of the world began working from home.
Microsoft said that people working from home would never work before COVID, and then they saw a massive boost in performance when people did. To the point where they eventually had to openly admit it. Before demanding people return to the offices as soon as they could.
The only people who refuse to listen are C Suite execs, middle managers, and people with a stake in commercial property.
Managers don’t like people working from home because they enjoy lording over their subordinates, which is more difficult when they’re not physically present.
Nicolas Cage “you don’t say” meme.
This is honestly extremely fucking obvious.
We can’t have a remote work paradigm for two main reasons.
1] C Suite / Managers are narcissistic sociopaths who need to feel important, competent, dominant and better than people, in person.
2] Moving to a remote work paradigm would crater commerical real estate values. This is far from impossible to fiscally manage without catastrophe, but it would expose the immense amount of fraud and corruption going on in that sector.
That’s it.
Every other talking point you’ve ever heard against remote work are rationalizations to avoid these two points.
… the skill set and task set that LLMs are currently most well suited to replace in the workforce are C Suite and Upper Management.
Those are also the most expensive employees and the ones most likely to make catastrophic or consistent mistakes.
But they enjoy having a lot of money and power, so, we get clown world where they do everything they can to gaslight us to avoid realizing this.
Our entire business is remote and work from home unless they need to be in the field. Currently the execs support it because we provided overwhelming documentatio. About the productivity going up.
But we had to work for it, in the sense that we needed to change how we did business, to accomodate for writing things down, asynchronous work etc.
But our biggest threat to all this are certain managers, like you mentioned, and these weirdos who think we should have friends at work. They want to get together and nothing kills remote work faster than hybrid meetings. They start to blather on about needing more hall meetings and knowledge from “bumping into someone”. They can bump into whoever they want on teams, stop with the damn hybrid meetings!
And the dumbest part of this is we already had several office hundreds of miles away from each other. We already we not bumping into most of our 7000 employees.
LLMs aren’t even good at management. They gave one like $30k to run a coffee shop and it did shit like buy several years worth of rubber gloves and thousands of cans of tomato sauce. Iirc it spent $21k and only made like $5.6k
Didn’t they perform really good in that test recentlyish?
Yep. Luna performed exceptionally well and is currently running a profit at Anthropic’s shop.
That’s been kinda swept under the rug though; not sure why
There are some things you need a shared workspace for. Most of what we do in the US, having converted largely to an email-and-spreadsheets-based economy, does not.
My full-flavor, everyday workspace requires a comfortable chair, decent internet, and intermittent access to elecricity. It fits in a backpack. All of my coworkers are similarly equipped. Our 40-person startup has a minuscule office that we couldn’t begin to fit everybody in. We are making lots of money.
Imagine:
- matching employees to jobs they are good at and enjoy, even if not physically nearby (a lot of good people have to take care of family, or have support networks they can’t/shouldn’t leave)
- having a minimum of 30 more minutes a day back because you don’t have to commute
- having a private quiet office to work in. Virtually no offices have private offices anymore.
- having all your accessibility requirements met by default
- being able to have healthier and cheaper lunches because you’ve got your full kitchen
There are things I miss about the office for sure, but I like remote work a lot.
But think about it from the business’s perspective!
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lower rent
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lower utilities
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distributed IT
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all employee work online/archivable by default
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happier/healthier employees
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access to global talent pool
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easier to replace employees with LLMs!
The rabid return to office push is what really convinced me that most businesses are not in the hands of people who are trying to Do their business the best. At minimum it’s extrovert CEOs, and feckless middle managers that didn’t want to adapt
The lower rent point is one of the problems. Many of these businesses own the real estate or lease for many years at a time. If the space is 70% unused, that increases costs and looks bad.
Their investors also have lots of money stuck in commercial real estate. And everyone knows golden egg geese are only good to bail out failed investments.
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But how will your owners exercise arbitrary control and surveillance of you? I’m sorry but you just can’t be productive like thay
The wost part is they already have control and surveillance with all the endpoint management software installed on company devices.
That’s not as satisfying as in personand you know it
Return to office mandates should be climate crimes and the people responsible should be punished appropriately. I want to see these CEO ghouls and souless VPs on the side of the road picking up trash for the rest of their damned lives.
And most of the dipshit CEOs are busy trying to roll out return to office mandates and then are flabbergasted when productivity and worker satisfaction both plummet.
The worst things about being in-office:
- Shitty bosses who think it’s their personal kingdom.
- Shitty co-workers.
The commons got a taste of freedom and decided they liked it.
If companies would work with their employees to better their lives, productivity would follow even more. AI is not why there is a productivity swing. Look at all all the problems and backtracking being done because of AI, even while there is more of a push for it.
I question some of the numbers. “Productivity” is a word thrown around in my workplace too, but it doesn’t mean what the dictionary has for it, it means the numbers are cooked to make things seem great.
How is productivity of an “office worker” measured? I imagine it’s somehow deducted from the value of whatever their company produces and sells, but if that is grossly overvalued, there is no productivity gain.
They are still measuring like the industrial ages. How many teapots did they make. The information age changed things and we stopped making widgets with our hands and started using our brains for creative/innovation/digital services.
Same as a remote worker - work output
