It might sound like a stereotype, but spending more time at home helps families. Even to expand. A recent scientific study suggests that working from home is making it easier for couples to become parents, or raise offspring.
At the end of the treatment Adam Ozimek e Lyman Stone looked at data from 3.000 American women and found that remote workers were more likely to have children than in-person workers. I link the study here.
Self-evident
There are several reasons why working from home can influence the size and "structure" of families, also counteracting demographic decline. First, home workers have more flexibility to relocate, since they don't have to live near their workplace. This can help marriages and relationships, solving the so-called "two-body problem", when two partners find work in different cities.
Not to mention, but you know this for sure, that working from home eliminates travel time, which can be dedicated to loved ones and family.
I work from home, yet another sign of a mutation
Il remote work, partially returning to the ranks after Covid but still much more widespread than 2019, is nevertheless changing the economy. It affects the real estate market, transportation, workforce distribution, and of course people's lives.
While it is still too early to draw definitive conclusions about the timing of this transformation, it is interesting to note how working from home has such a significant (and positive) impact on people's lives and their family choices.
Hypothesis on a more flexible world
Imagine large cities that are a little less congested by traffic. With reduced demand for offices, and with more leisure attractions. Imagine larger houses to house offices and home gyms, and imagine small centers revitalized by "new residents", who are no longer forced to clog up metropolises due to the need for in-person work.
Larger families, larger homes, and a more distributed workforce. On the other hand, large cities "forced" to convert part of their economy and (in the short term) contraction of public transport. There are many consequences of working from home.
The media often tends to classify new technologies into distinct categories, as if they were all good or all bad. But technological revolutions, such as the rise of working from home, are more complex than that.
Does a more flexible working-from-home world sound so bad to you? Not me.
