What Will America Be Like in 2050?
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
What do you think America will be like in 2050?
Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.
Conversations of Note
The coronavirus pandemic led to a dramatic increase in the number of people who work from home, followed by more recent attempts by many firms to get their employees back into the office.
What does the future hold?
The economist Alex Tabarrok argues that work-from-home appears to be a permanent and beneficial change in how work is structured, and that it won’t reduce productivity in the long run:
It took firms decades to adjust to electricity by redesigning factories, products, and workflows to take full advantage of the new possibilities. Similarly, the benefits of work from home start to come most profoundly when expensive offices can be shrunk, employers can draw from a much larger pool of workers and workers can adjust when and where they work, including the location of their homes. It’s not surprising, therefore, that with little time for either the workers or the firms to adjust and with few options to choose how much to work. But, with more time to plan and more options for hybrid but extensive work from home (e.g. work from home Mondays and Fridays), work from home has large benefits.
