America’s leading economist of urban life says a return to the workplace is crucial, especially for the young
Tunku Varadarajan of The WSJ interviews Harvard’s Edward Glaeser. Excerpts:
"That explains why young people are drawn to cities—and why, in Mr. Glaeser’s view, in-person work is vital in the early stages of a career. Cities—and face-to-face contact at work—have “this essential learning component that is valuable and crucial for workers who are young,” he says. The acquisition of experience and improvement in productivity, “month by month, year by year,” ensures that individual earnings are higher in cities than elsewhere.
Mr. Glaeser commends a “superb paper,” published in the Review of Economic Studies in 2017, that documents how people learn by working in big cities. The authors show that workers in Madrid earn 55% more than those in rural Spain. “These wage benefits don’t appear magically when workers come to Madrid or Barcelona,” Mr. Glaeser says. “Instead, a new worker in the big city earns only about 10% more than a worker in a mid-sized city.” After 10 years, that earnings gap grows to 35%.
“The sort of young people who don’t want to come back to the office,” he says, “don’t really know what they’ve missed.”"
"remote workers face “a 50% reduction in their probability of being promoted.”"
"an article in Nature that examines the impact on more than 61,000 Microsoft employees of working remotely over the first six months of 2020. “Firm-wide remote work,” the study found, “caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts.” Employees found it much harder to acquire and share information. Mr. Glaeser would counsel employers to ask themselves whether they were “causing long-term problems for the company by not bringing people together into the office.”"
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