More babies, more workers, way more AI

Maxim Konankov; Agnès Bun; Thomas Trutschell; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BIWork from home is dead: You've probably heard some version of this declaration from your boss over the past year. But the numbers show that WFH is actually very much here to stay. The prevalence of working from home has barely budged over the last two years, at around 26% of all American work days.That's a lot less than the 62% we saw in the early months of the pandemic — but a near quadrupling since 2019, when that share was at a miniscule 7%. Had the pandemic never happened, it probably would have taken us 40 years to get to work from home as much as we do today.We've reached a new normal for the corporate workplace — one where remote jobs have become a bigger minority, and it's also become totally normal for white-collar professionals to work from home at least a day or two a week.That shift has brought about all kinds of other changes in American life — some profound, some life-saving, some strange and unexpected. Nobody's reflected on those changes more than Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford who's the world's leading expert on remote work.When I first spoke to him in early 2021, Bloom was right in the midst of helping rewrite corporate America's work policies, presenting his research to managers at companies including Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Apple. He warned that years of intense turmoil would follow as employees and employers fought over the new terms of where we work — and he couldn't have been more right. Now that the dust has largely settled, I caught up with him at his house on one of his WFH days to take stock of the most lasting impacts of America's work-from-home revolution.1. Saved timeOne of the biggest reasons why people love working from home is because it saves them time. The average commute in the US is about 40 minutes each way, and ahead of venturing out into the world, you need to spend a little extra time making yourself presentable to the world by showering and getting dressed. Rolling out of bed and opening your laptop? That takes 30 seconds. By Bloom's estimates, the typical American worker saves an hour and a half for every day they work from home. For those in WFH-friendly sectors like tech and finance, those time savings average about 3 hours a week.What have people done with that extra time? They're getting more sleep and exercise, and they're cooking — and if they have kids, they're spending a lot more time on parenting. One study in the Netherlands found that when parents were allowed to work from home, their kids scored higher on an important standardized test that helps determine their high school track. "It's because you're home," Bloom says. "You know that your kid is up there doing their homework and you can smell it if they're smoking weed."2. More workersIn 2020, 77% of Americans without a disability had a job, compared with only 32% for those with a disability. In a lot of cases, disabled people wanted to work but couldn't in an office-only world. Maybe they couldn't drive because they were blind, or they had knee and back issues that made navigating the stairs at the office too difficult.The boom in remote and hybrid jobs in the pandemic changed that, increasing the ranks of disabled people with full-time roles by more than a quarter million people. Add to that all the women who, thanks to the flexibility of working from home, no longer had to quit working to juggle their childcare responsibilities.That's been great for those workers, and great for the economy as a whole. "It's not impossible that hybrid increases labor participation rates by 1 to 2%, which probably increases GDP by about 1 to 2%," says Bloom. That would amount to an additional $300 billion to $600 billion in economic value. "This is huge."3. More babiesFrom 2023 to 2025, people who worked from home at least one day a week had more babies compared to daily office-goers, Bloom and his cofounders found. They also planned to have more kids in the future. That's likely because of the increased flexibility of remote work that makes having more kids feel feasible — and also some basic biology. "My friend had this great line," Bloom tells me. "He said, 'My wife and I discovered she can't get pregnant by email.'"Bloom estimates that working from home is associated with a roughly 5% increase in fertility in the US and Northern Europe — statistically significant, but not huge. Still, any increase is desperately needed in much of the developed world, which is fighting a declining birth rate. The fertility bump, Bloom notes, has been the most pronounced among women 30 and older, who have college degrees, and already have one kid.4. Saved livesIn the early days of the lockdown, urban dwellers around the world got to enjoy better air quality. Did these improvements continue even once the workplace settled into a new hybrid world? Bloom and his coauthors looked at levels of nitrogen dioxide — which is l

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