Remote work persisting

Workers in unexpected jobs are clocking more time from home than before the pandemic in America. It isn’t just white-collar workers logging in from bedrooms instead of boardrooms. Lower-income, less-educated, and service-industry workers spent more time working from home, on average, last year than before the pandemic. The broad-based gains suggest that while much of American life has reverted to pre-pandemic norms, remote work persists and is subtly reshaping many professions. Americans who worked any time from home spent an average of 5 hours and 25 minutes a day working from their residences in 2022. That is about two hours more than in 2019, the year before Covid-19 sent millions of workers scrambling to set up home offices, and down just 12 minutes from 2021, according to the Labor Department’s American Time Use Survey. About 8.4pc of job postings on Indeed.com advertised remote or hybrid work at the end of May, up threefold from the same period in 2019.

(Adapted from “Remote Work Sticks for All Kinds of Jobs,” by Sarah Chaney Cambon and Andrew Mollica, published on July 4, 2023, by The Wall Street Journal)

Comparing beyond GDP

It’s not that GDP doesn’t matter, but is it really the only yardstick by which countries should jealously compare their progress against one another? Good Morning America ran a piece about a woman who had leave donated by her colleagues so she could have a whole 12 weeks with her baby before returning to her job, a story that would make Europeans spit out their tea in horror. People have argued for decades that GDP is an insufficient measure of national prosperity or living standards, but attempts to come up with something better tend to end up rather mushy. The trouble is, once you start to think about which factors are important, it’s hard to know when to stop. The OECD’s Better Life index has 11 different indicators. Not to be outdone, the UK’s Office for National Statistics has 44 indicators of ‘national wellbeing’, from participation in sports to levels of trust in government. Policymakers do care about life expectancy already, but what might the world look like if politicians compared these statistics as obsessively and anxiously as they do their GDP trends?

(Adapted from “There is more to life and death than GDP,” by Sarah O’ Connor, published on July 2, 2023, by The Financial Times)

TikTok vs Amazon

Inside a shophouse in Northeast Jakarta, dozens of salespeople take turns peddling cosmetics, contact lenses and hair accessories. This is no raucous flea market. It’s a live-streamed marketplace within TikTok and a gold rush for entrepreneurs seeking fortunes on the world’s most popular short-video app. Its success in the region is crucial for TikTok as it faces a possible ban in the US on national security concerns. It also provides the company a template to take on Amazon in a way that no social media company has attempted before, provided it’s allowed to keep operating in the US. Indonesia was the first market for TikTok Shop and is still its biggest, helped by a young, mobile-savvy population that’s embraced the combination of short videos and in-app shopping since its 2021 launch. TikTok Shop is expected to hit $20bn in gross merchandise value by the end of this year, quadrupling from a year earlier.

(Adapted from “TikTok Emerges as Threat to Amazon With $20 Billion Shopping Pilot,” published on July 5, 2023, by Bloomberg)

Elbow room in Disney

Visitors to Disney theme parks this summer are encountering something they haven’t seen in a while: elbow room. Travel analysts and advisers say traffic to Disney’s US parks, and some rival parks, has slowed this summer. Data from a travel company that tracks line-waiting time at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, shows that the Independence Day weekend was one of the slowest in nearly a decade. Disney executives have said they have expected weaker earnings from their US parks this year. The Orlando-area resort is even offering hotel discounts around Christmas, typically a peak period. Travel advisers and industry analysts say the slowdown is the latest sign that Disney’s recent price hikes and changes to park operations have soured some families from visiting the Most Magical Place on Earth.

(Adapted from “Disney World Hasn’t Felt This Empty in Years,” by Jacob Passy, published on July 10, 2023, by The Wall Street Journal)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, July 17th, 2023