Anita Hill was attacked for warning us about Clarence Thomas. Hillary Clinton was attacked for warning us about Samuel Alito. Christine Blasey Ford was attacked for warning us about Brett Kavanaugh. E Jean Carroll was attacked for warning us about Trump.
Someone actually ran the experiment behind the "remote work is fraud" claim. A Stanford economist took 1,612 office workers and split them at random: one group worked from home two days a week, the other came in all five. Six months later, their performance reviews came out the same.
The groups were split by birthday so nobody could rig it, and these weren't call center scripts. They were software engineers, marketers, and finance staff at Trip dot com, one of the biggest travel companies on earth. The work-from-home group was just as likely to get promoted, and quitting dropped by a third. It ran as a controlled trial, the same method drug companies use to test a new pill, and it was published in the journal Nature in 2024.
The same company tried an earlier, rougher version ten years before, and the fear they set out to test was literally called "shirking from home." Call center staff worked four days a week from home for nine months. Output went up 13 percent with no drop in call quality. Most of that came from more minutes worked per shift, fewer breaks and sick days, plus a bit from the quieter room. Quitting got cut in half. The clearest cost showed up in promotions, where the at-home staff lost out, probably because the boss never saw them.
One thing both setups had that the tweet leaves out: a place to work. The earlier study only took people who had a private room at home. Neither one tested getting any work done with a three-year-old and a five-year-old in the house. Trying to write code or do the accounting while solo-parenting two small kids is a fantasy, and nobody is pretending otherwise. The hold-up there is childcare. The studies measured something narrower, whether the same person gets less done from home, and the answer kept coming back no. Bloom's wider data fits this: going fully remote with no office at all gives messy results, while the clear win is the mix, some days home and some in the office.
When 137 of the largest US companies later ordered staff back to the office, a University of Pittsburgh team checked the numbers. Stock value and profits did not improve. Job satisfaction dropped. The mandates tended to arrive right after a bad stretch for the share price.
The fear has a name in the data. Every time someone ran the controlled test, the shirking never showed up in the output.
North Carolina has one of the best athletic departments in America right now.
Baseball: College World Series Finals
Women’s Basketball: Sweet 16
Men’s Basketball: NCAA Tournament
Men’s Golf: Top 10 Finish
Field Hockey: Final Four
Men’s + Women’s Tennis: NCAA Tournament
Softball: NCAA Tournament
Volleyball: NCAA Tournament
Women’s Lacrosse: National Runner-Up
Men’s Lacrosse: NCAA Tournament
Men’s + Women’s Soccer: NCAA Tournament
Men’s + Women’s Gymnastics: Regional
The Tar Heels are competing for championships in just about every sport they play.