Homework: the future of the office

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Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow. 135 gigabytes of network busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. Hello, and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Shashank Joshi, filling in for Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. COVID 19 may be everywhere, but as the southern hemisphere emerges from its winter season, the humble flu seems to have vanished. That might explain why some countries have not had as many deaths during the pandemic as might be expected. And Comrade Duch, who died earlier this month, was the first high ranking Khmer Rouge official to go on trial for his role in Pol Pot's massacres in Cambodia. Trained as a mathematician, he built a pyramid scheme of cruelty, with each tortured prisoner expected to incriminate eight others. But first. For decades, self styled visionaries and people fond of their pyjamas have made the case that a lot of work done in large shared offices could better be carried out at home. With COVID 19, that debate was put to the test in a huge and sudden experiment. Now, in most places, lockdowns are easing, and while governments and companies are trying to lure people back to the office, many are resisting. They argue they're happier and more productive right where they are. Hi, Chris.

Hey, Shashank.

How are you? Like millions of others, staff at the Economist have spent the last six months working from home.

Oh, hello.

Sorry, hang on, I've got headphones. Not in.

Give me a second.

Oh, God, they're in a tangle. Hang on. An interview for the Intelligence now involves me and a producer linking up on Zoom before looping in our guests. Hi, is that Callum?

Yeah, it's Callum here. Hello.

Hi, Callum. Hello.

Is James around? I'm just here.

I'm just here. Oh, hi, James.

Hello.

Callum Williams is a senior economics writer, and James Fransham, a data journalist, both with the Economist. They've been investigating whether the office is indeed the right place to work, or if the experience of the past six months points to something new. Callum, the working from home phenomenon has been described as a big experiment. Do we know how the experiment's going?

Well, we have some idea. We have kind of two different bits of information, I suppose. One is of asking people how they think it's gone and asking companies how they think it's gone over the past six months. And the other, which is in a sense more robust, is to look really at other evidence from past experiences of working from home from before the pandemic, and seeing how that's gone, broadly speaking, I think it's fair to say the giant working from home experiment has actually gone surprisingly well.

So can we judge yet whether workers are beavering away or slacking off? Are they more or less productive?

People tend to say they're more productive. Now, there are a number of difficulties with measuring productivity. Not least, asking someone, how productive are you? Is not really the best way of actually judging productivity. But as yet, economists haven't been able to find more rigorous measures of productivity during this pandemic. What does seem clearer from analyzing people's, say, online behavior and email use and that kind of thing is that people are working a little bit longer, they're sending more emails, as you would expect, and they're also attending more meetings, also, as you would expect. But broadly speaking, people basically seem to think it's at least marginally better than being in the office.

So if I can chip in too, I would say that also what the pandemic has done is exposed the kind of revealed preferences both of firms and of individuals. So if you ask people post pandemic or in the future what their relationship with the office is, they say that they want to work from home more frequently than they did pre pandemic. And similarly at the firm level, a lot of firms are embracing this. That seems to demonstrate to me that productivity is at least as high working from home than in the office.

Callum, there's an assumption, I think, that offices are crucial for creativity, having people brainstorm together in one place. Is that correct?

Well, I think it can be correct. I think the assumption, though, is that they're always necessary for new ideas. And there's this idea that you've got to be in, you know, in the same physical space as someone for these water cooler moments which supposedly come up with all these wonderful ideas. Actually, the evidence on this is less clear cut than you'd think. And people who study proximity and innovation are quite divided on the question of whether it allows people to collaborate or whether it just proves to be a distraction. And there's this amazing study from a team largely at mit, which looks at basically innovation in the MIT Campus itself and looks at different buildings in mit and the results are kind of a bit unclear. Some of their results suggest that being near to people is good for innovation and some of their results suggest it's not. So I guess it's fair to say that nobody really knows for sure.

So workers may be fine at home. How do the companies feel about all of this? Do they want them to stay there or do they want them back in at their desks?

Yeah, it's a bit varied, to be honest. As I was saying earlier about the revealed preferences. Some companies, Twitter, for example, have said you can work from home forever if you like. Facebook and Google said it's going to go on until the summer. And Facebook expect that this will effectively mean that over the long run, perhaps a half of their workforce will be remote. And then other firms, Netflix, for example, have said, actually we think this is problematic in the long run and will kind of lead to a kind of ossification of the workforce.

Callum, what does this all mean for the long term? What's going to happen after the pandemic? Is this a permanent shift in how much we're working from home or is it going to sort of just go back to how it was?

Well, I think there's a sense forming that there's going to be this hybrid model where people are working from home much more frequently than they used to, but they also go into the office. I think if you were being slightly more ambitious, you could say there could be a sort of different thing, which you already see in some companies, which is, in essence, that they don't necessarily have an office. They are a remote work first organization. But what they try and do is they try and come up with ways of sort of coming up with those, you know, those water cooler moments or bringing people together to ensure that the culture of the firm is maintained. So, you know, some of the companies I spoke to do pretty lavish getaways every year. There was one company I spoke to which had, in January, just before the pandemic, sent everyone for a week to Barbados where they had talked about new ideas and gone swimming and all this kind of stuff. I mean, I think the other thing which we're going to be seeing more of over the next few years is efforts by companies to bring in new forms of technology which allow people to communicate more effectively. I mean, one of the things that we've, I think a lot of people can sympathise with is the idea that sometimes when you work from home, you can feel as though it's A bit hard to get hold of people. You're never quite sure if people are busy or if they're in a meeting because you can't actually see them. And so there's a lot of technologies now that firms are looking at quite closely to try and in a virtual way replicate the benefits of the office.

And so if that sort of half in, half out model is the future, what are the social consequences of that?

It really depends who you ask. And there's many perspectives on this. Some people think it's from an environmental perspective. This is good news because, you know, people will be commuting less and so that means people will be potentially driving less. And so that's going to be good for the environment. Other people would say up until this point, cities had become too dominant and there were other parts of countries which had been sort of left behind. And so this is all else equal, a kind of rebalancing across the economy. My sense also is that this could actually be good in economic terms as well. I'm sympathetic to the argument that before the pandemic, the world was in this sort of what an economist would call a bad equilibrium, where office working was sort of more dominant than it should have been relative to homeworking. And what's really happened is that the pandemic has proven to be this enormous economic shock which has basically disrupted that bad equilibrium and shown people that there's another way of organizing white collar work and showing them that actually it can work quite well. So it's actually a pretty optimistic story, I would say.

Callum and James, thank you both.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Every winter, May to October, tens of thousands of Australians and New Zealanders are asked, how do you feel? And people really do want to know the answer. Weekly government surveys ask about coughs and fevers in the hope of keeping track of the flu. And this year they've had some surprisingly good news.

In Australia and New Zealand. This year, only about 0.4% of people say they have flu like symptoms. That's down by 4/5 from last year. Essentially, these two countries and other countries in the southern hemisphere have skipped the flu season.

Sondra Solstad is a senior data journalist at the Economist.

To give just one example, in Australia, from May to mid August in the last four years, about 86,000 people test positive for flu. This year there's been only 620 infections and only a single death compared to 130 in a normal year. While not as deadly as COVID 19, seasonal flu still kills an estimated 300 to 650,000 people each year. A win against that is worth celebrating.

So that sounds like a significant fall. What's behind that?

The short story is lockdown and all the measures that have been taken to shut down Covid. When all these were implemented at scale, they really worked well against the flu.

So we've all learned a great deal about virus testing recently. Is it possible that this reported drop is just because we're testing so much for Covid? We're not testing that much for flu?

That was a concern I had as well, but it does not look to be the case. So overall, in six countries in the Southern Hemisphere, which good data is available from the World Health Organization, testing in total is down by just 20%. But the share of positive tests is down by much more. Just to give you some sense of the scale of testing that they're doing, in the first two weeks of August, the World Health Organization processed nearly 200,000 tests. Just 46 were positive for influenza. And in a typical year, that number should be closer to 3,500 or 4,000.

So that's fantastic news, if not necessarily completely unexpected.

Indeed it is. It also helps explain a phenomenon that has been a bit of a puzzle, which is that some countries have seen a smaller increase in overall mortality than their COVID deaths, which suggest. So what we here at the Economist have been doing is looking at, historically, how many people have died at a certain time of year and how many people died this year. And looking at the difference as a good way to count how many people have died of COVID 19. In most countries, what we see is that the number of excess deaths is much higher than the reported deaths, suggesting that the governments aren't good at keeping track. But in some countries in the Southern Hemisphere, where they've been getting better at counting people who die of COVID we've actually seen more COVID deaths than we've seen excess deaths, suggesting that there is some sort of shortfall. Now, we think that this could be due to them just skipping the flu season this year.

So what normally happens is the Northern Hemisphere takes flu strains from the Southern hemisphere and uses those to prepare its flu vaccines every year. Is that going to be derailed because of such a low number of cases?

It will be somewhat less accurate than normal. But the researchers I spoke to said that while they use the strains from the south to come up with a vaccine for the north, even in a good year, they only get it right about two thirds of the time. And so this year they will have less data, but they will still have some data, and it shouldn't make it completely inaccurate. It will just make it a bit less likely that it get it exactly.

Right now in the Northern Hemisphere, we are rapidly approaching the winter season. Do you think that these trends are going to continue?

It is hard to say if it will be as dramatic as it has been in the south, where the flu season hasn't started yet and it should be at its peak. But I do think we can expect significantly fewer cases. For one thing, people have learned the rules of social distancing and to reduce spread just by the way they act. And another thing is that there's less spread from the Southern Hemisphere because there's no flu season there this year.

So is it too optimistic to hope that if all of this continues on the current trajectory, we might just eradicate the flu?

Sadly, that won't be possible. And the reason is actually similar to the reason we have this pandemic, which is that flu viruses not only exist in humans, but also in animals. For influenza, this is principally birds. And so at any given point, these flu strains might pass from animals over to humans, something that we very probably should do a better job of monitoring, certainly for coronaviruses, but also for influenza viruses.

Sandra, thank you for talking to us.

It's been a pleasure.

It was once a park where people.

Came on Sunday afternoons to picnic.

Now, like Belsen, it's a memorial to genocide.

It's estimated that between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge soldiers murdered 1.7 million Cambodians, around a fifth of the population.

They say the Khmer Rouge killers buried these people, and now the graves have been opened and the skulls have been stacked so that no one should ever forget Pol Pot and his killing fields.

January 1979 was the date when the Vietnamese army closed in on Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, to liberate it from the Khmer Rouge. At that point, Comrade Duch, who was in charge of the prison in the town, was ordered to kill the surviving prisoners in his charge.

Anne Roe is our obituaries editor.

He'd been commandant of the prison, which was called Tol Sling and Also known as S21, more or less since the beginning of the revolution in 1975, and in that time, at least 15,000 prisoners had passed through the prison and to certain death. He had kept a huge archive of all the people who had entered the prison, their photographs, all with that rather glazed, blank look of people who realized they'd been condemned already. And then a record of their confessions. They were there to admit in writing that they were opponents of the regime and to incriminate other people. He had a system with these confessions and that was that he wanted every prisoner to name and to point the finger at at least eight other people and if each prisoner did that then the other eight people mentioned could be arrested and then they too in turn would incriminate eight people. And so you got an endless geometrical progression of people incriminating other people until the system became huge and perpetual and it could feed into the enormous appetite of the leader who was known as Brother Number One Pol Pot who had declared that Cambodia must be purged of the oppressor bourgeois class that it must be rooted out and the country would become a pure agrarian society with all the bad elements destroyed. The devising of that system was something that was pleasing to him in a way because he was a mathematician that had been his training and he became a maths teacher and he did his work while becoming more and more interested in left wing causes. Eventually he did run away to join the Khmer Rouge. He took a name, his nom de guerre, Comrade Duch whose meaning was the good scholar, the schoolboy who stands up straight. So he was going to be the obedient servant of the revolution. The aptitude he had for teaching came in useful in his prison work too because he very rarely did the torture or the killings himself. He recruited for that numbers of young peasants and they carried out according to his instructions the whippings, the waterboarding, the electrocution. At the end of every confession he wrote what should happen to the prisoner. It was usually destroy or keep for a medical experiment or just smash. And the killings were done at the killing fields as they were known outside Phnom Penh. After the fall of Phnom Penh he had been one of the last of the Cambodian high command to leave the city and he went into hiding. He went up to the northwest to the border with Thailand and there he became a teacher again and he could have continued for the rest of his life probably as a teacher but in 1999 a journalist was suddenly stumbled across him and at that point Comrade Duch seemed to accept that he had been discovered and that he ought to talk. He was not only the first of the Khmer Rouge high command to be put on trial he was also the only one who ever pleaded guilty and admitted responsibility for what he'd. And he did apologize. He apologized to the relatives, he shed tears sometimes. But it seemed fairly clear also that he still carried the marks of the revolution that he still hadn't put it out of his head and that it was still important to him. The name he wanted to go by all the time was Comrad Duch. His birth name had been Kang Geek Eve, and that was the name he could have taken up again when he presented himself as just a maths teacher, but he had no interest in that. He still wanted to be the good schoolboy who stood up straight as soon as his master asked him to and did whatever his master ordered, no matter how reprehensible.

Ann Roe on Comrade Duch, who's died aged 77. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here tomorrow. Sam.