It’s a little exhausting to be a longtime remote worker whose way of life has suddenly become an object of perpetual public controversy. When I was 30 and had a business fold up from under me, I had to become a freelance reporter/feature writer, or change professions. The thought that working from home would ever acquire some sort of ideological valence, or that it would become a choice requiring a defence, would have seemed ludicrous.
Then COVID hit, and telework was force-fed into our economic arrangements in an uncomfortable way, and we had little choice but to discuss whether this was a bad thing or a good thing. In a million subtle ways, business managers and policymakers do have to decide which way they’re going to wriggle — whether they’re going to be prejudiced in favour of working from home (WFH) or against.
What annoys me, I guess, is that electronic remote-work capability is fundamentally a new and valuable power our species has acquired — something that any person in the year 1800 would have seen as incredible, exciting and transformative. As with the smartphone, or even fossil fuels, those of us living through the change have become preoccupied by the second- and third- and fourth-order effects. There’s a fine line between this and stupidity. “Needless physical commuting” should surely be condemned with the same vigour, and for the same reasons, that the “needless drudgery” of household work was once lamented before automatic washing machines and dishwashers were thunk up.
We’re relieving some of humanity from one more of its eternal burdens, and reaping unquestionable environmental and social gains in the bargain — even the people who do still have to commute don’t want more cars on the road at rush hour — but maybe the “some” part is the real reason it’s contentious.
With all that said, the effects of WFH on labour productivity, and on the viability of any particular line of trade, are brute empirical questions. Workers from home should accept that they may not be able to collect all of the economic surplus created by the elimination of their commute: in exchange, bosses who would prefer to have everybody in the office seven days a week might avoid suggesting that they are somehow being stolen from just because negotiating work arrangements employee-by-employee is a hassle. (A socialist would probably pause to observe: “Oh, look! The bosses like collective bargaining when it suits them!”) Labour and capital are afflicted by mutual suspicion — another old feature of the human condition — and the result is that some right-wingers, adherents to the party of capital, see telecommuting as a creeping evil to be extirpated.
Which is what’s interesting about a new article by Patrick T. Brown for Commonplace, a online opinion journal of pro-family, pro-natalist conservatism. The political right on this continent is splitting visibly into an economic-growth faction and a family-formation faction as demographic questions loom over us, and Commonplace is consciously a voice of the family camp.
And Brown has noticed, like others of his political tendency, that the natural experiment of COVID revealed the possibility that working from home is good for fertility — i.e., that some people might be more willing to have kids if it were easier to augment household earnings without spending absolutely all of a household’s second income on daycare.
The numbers aren’t really much to write home about, as even Brown confesses. But all fertility parameters are in decline everywhere, and pay-people-to-have-kids strategies don’t show much sign of working anywhere. So it deserves notice when there’s a smidgen of a baby boom anyplace, as there was amongst American women beginning in 2021. Brown plunges into the U.S. Census Bureau’s “American Community Survey” and finds indications that the fertility increase was concentrated amongst females practising trades friendly to remote work.
Now, remember, I’m personally an anti-pro-natalist: I think there’s at least as good a case that Canada ought to have five million people in the year 2100 as there is for it to have 100 million. (This would create actuarial problems with pensions, but Eastern Canada heaved rocks and garbage at the prime minister who tried to raise the pension-eligibility age just a tad.) Despite my conflicting prejudices, I notice that the Brown hypothesis isn’t bulletproof.
The global fertility problem, for example, is said to be almost entirely one of later pair-bonding by young people, who are as fertile as ever once they find a spouse. This means that if working from home delays the mating age, which it might, then any effects on within-marriage fertility might be cancelled out or worse.
The important thing is to consider the bare possibility that WFH might be a partial remedy for anti-fertility forces in modern civilization. Again, it’s a new power, a source of adaptational choices not available before. And whatever your views on macroscopic demographics, having children is a fundamental component of human flourishing, and people ought to be able to have any many kids as they will eventually want to have had. (I’m not pro-natalist, but they can borrow that slogan if they like.)
National Post