Who Really Benefits From Remote Work?

The prevailing narrative of remote work has often been boiled down to: Workers love it, and bosses hate it. But according to Natalia Emanuel, a labor economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, it may not be that simple.

Emanuel co-authored a study looking at software engineers at an unnamed Fortune 500 company where half of the workers were functionally remote. What she found was that each scenario—working remotely or working in the office—had varying trade-offs, depending on an employee’s age, experience, gender, and more.

So was the Great Remote-Work Experiment a success? That’s what the first episode of The Atlantic’s Good on Paper podcast—hosted by Jerusalem Demsas—dives into.

This week, Radio Atlantic is showcasing that episode, with an introduction by me.

Listen to the conversation here:

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And today, I have in the studio with me Jerusalem Demsas, who is the new host of a new Atlantic show called Good on Paper. Jerusalem, welcome to the show.

Jerusalem Demsas: Hi. Thanks for having me again. I’m so excited.

Rosin: Sure. Okay, Jerusalem. I have a very Jerusalem question for you: Have you, in your personal life, ever had a good-on-paper moment? Like, a thing you thought was good on paper that, when you actually executed it or told your friends about it, it just was not.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, when being asked this question, I’m realizing how hard of a question it can be to answer.

Rosin: Yeah.

Demsas: The thing that comes to my mind is—I was very young. I must have been 11 or something, or 12 years old, and I was really into rollerblading. I feel like, anyone who was a kid anytime in either the ’90s or the early aughts—there were roller-skating-rink parties all the time. Roller rinks were just common.

And so I loved doing that. And then, I was watching that TV show Rocket Power, which is really popular. And I got a skateboard. And in my head—because I was young—I didn’t think about, like, this is an entirely different sport. I was just like, These are the same things. This is the same family of sport activity. I’m amazing at this one, so I’m going to be fantastic at this other; no problem.

And my mom was—I remember vividly—she’s just like, Start slow. Don’t do anything weird. And in my little kid brain, I was just like, She doesn’t get it. I’m a star.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Demsas: There’s no problems here. The first thing I do—it’s probably a relatively small hill now as an adult, but at the time, it felt like a big hill. And I just take my skateboard, stand on it, and I just go down the hill, and immediately break my wrist.

Rosin: Oh.

Demsas: I immediately break my wrist. (Laughs.) I remember it was so funny; I have this vivid memory of being in the backseat of the car. I’m crying. My head must have been in my sister’s lap, because my mom was driving. And I’m just in shock. I’m like, How could that have happened? I’m a rollerblader.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Demsas: How did I break my wrist here? And yeah, I never set foot on a skateboard ever again. So low resilience, low resilience.

Rosin: That’s amazing because all of the good-on-paper concepts are in that story.

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Truly. Because you didn’t do anything wrong. You had really good intentions. You had some amount of expertise and knowledge. You weren’t a total idiot. You kind of knew what you were talking about. You made a leap of faith, which seems understandable. You’re like, Okay, I can do this one thing, so I’m going to be able to do the other thing. And yet the whole thing is a disaster.

Demsas: Oh, yeah. Yeah. It’s very funny because I have not actually broken a bone outside of this one moment. And I always thought of myself as someone who liked to take risks. But after that, I was like, No, you’re not. You don’t take risks. You take very, very calculated steps that may not be the steps other people would take, but you’re not getting on a skateboard again.

Rosin: Well, your show, Good on Paper—I feel like, in other hands, it could be arrogant. It could be like, You idiots who don’t know what you’re talking about. But, as we see from this story, it actually is okay, because you know when you did that too.

Demsas: Yeah.

Rosin: So it’s not just pointing fingers at other people. You’re like, We all do this.

Demsas: Totally.

Rosin: We all have these ideas we think are amazing. And then they’re not. It happens.

Demsas: I also think, in many ways, too—part of what the show is trying to do is—Why is it that we thought this was good in the first place? is a huge part of the show. Because it tells you something both about how people or scientists or politicians think about a problem and also, it helps you revise in the future, because everything that we’ve tried—well, some things have been bad on paper, but most things people try are good on paper for a reason. And so you’re going to make this mistake again.

Even times in the show where we’re like, Okay, well, now we feel like we know the answer because of this research or that research, in 20 years, there could be some other Atlantic journalist continuing in the 20th iteration of this show, going, Actually, that was also something that was good on paper at the time. So I agree. I think a lot of it has to do with how to develop an intellectual humility without losing the ability to make arguments, right?

Rosin: Well, listeners, Jerusalem has an amazing new show called Good on Paper, and I’m going to let her introduce it to you.

[Music]

Rosin: So that was the first episode of The Atlantic’s Good on Paper podcast, hosted by Jerusalem Demsas.

Links to subscribe are in the show notes for this episode, or you can just search your podcast app for Good on Paper. There are already several other great episodes in the feed—about whether young men are really becoming more sexist; about who really protests and why; and more to come.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West, edited by Claudine Ebeid, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.