It isn’t hard to find a white collar CEO bemoaning the flexible work era, insisting that workers located anywhere but the office are less focused, less productive, and generally the reason for any sub-par financial results. Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon has long insisted that any gesture towards flexibility is an “aberration.” JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon insists remote workers can simply work elsewhere, and Amazon’s Andy Jassy cautioned anti-office workers that things “probably won’t work out for you” if they don’t change their tune. Plus, Jassy added, almost all large company CEOs agree with him.
Some of the top economists in academia and even Wall Street are saying that actually, maybe that’s too harsh. Thomas Philippon, an economist at New York University, argued in a widely read 2022 paper that the modern workforce has been dragging its feet, so to speak, on a slow but continuous basis since the Industrial Revolution. It comes down to a concept called “total factor productivity,” which describes the growth a company or nation can attain without adding to their labor force or capital. In other words, working smarter, not harder.
