More babies, more workers, way more AI

Maxim Konankov; Agnès Bun; Thomas Trutschell; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI Work 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 time One 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.