From Rob Henderson
In August of 2021, 90 percent of U.S. adults who worked from home because of the pandemic guessed that at least 40 percent of other Americans did the same. In reality, only 13 percent of people worked from home (source). The laptop class has no clue how other people live. There was never a lockdown. There was just upper-middle-class people hiding while working-class people delivered things to them.I recall just after college recognising that when people older than me used the phrase "the real world" they meant different things, and almost always meant "the kind of life I live." If you were a student, that wasn't the real world; if you were in the military people were telling you what to do and that wasn't the real world; if you worked for a government, that wasn't the real world...
People would say it about a woman home with children. EB White wrote about a man in a NYC office moving thousands of sheep around on paper without seeing any actual sheep. Being in the clergy wasn't quite the same as being in the real world somehow. Spending your day reading books, or being in entertainment industries wasn't considered the real world. I used to wonder "Well what is, then?" Whatever you were doing, someone was going to tell you it wasn't the real world, but what they were doing was. It's all very flexible in its definition, apparently.
So while the study referenced in The Atlantic above is revealing about current political attitudes, it's just part of a larger blindness that humans have. Wealthy people think that most people make more than $100K (one definition of middle-class worker is $42-126K) in the country. Tall people think six feet is an average height for a man (5'9"). Our life is real life. There are lots of us. Therefore we should be winning all the elections, and stores should arrange themselves in "ways that work for most people," manufacturers should design more cars that suit average people. Like us.
Even when we think we are eccentric and exceptional, that is usually along narrow areas. We say we had typical childhoods in many ways, and even when pointing out a difference "well, other than that it was a typical childhood." I have watched my Romanian children adjust in a very few months to an American idea of what is normal. We all live in normal aquariums.
I made up a term for this back in the day. “Delusions of mediocrity”:
ReplyDeletehttps://graphpaperdiaries.com/2018/03/07/delusions-of-mediocrity/
Also I clicked on the link and found Hendersons wording a bit confusing here. At the peak of COVID restrictions, 35% of people worked from home. The 13% is those still working from home due to the pandemic 18 months later. When people focused on peak pandemic months, they guessed 50% vs the actual 35%.
ReplyDeleteIt’s also worth noting that the question specifically asked if your work from home was due to the pandemic, so remote workers who were converting forever might be left out. This is probably why they got a lower number than the census bureau, who found 18% of workers are fully remote.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/people-working-from-home.html
I’m also not actually clear if that’s just fully remote. Overall the census bureau found a full third of Americans work from home more often now than pre-pandemic. That includes 13% of those making under $25k, so there were gains made here even in the poorest demographics.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/03/working-from-home-during-the-pandemic.html
It’s definitely more common in the upper salary ranges, but even in the lower salary ranges there was a notable impact.
I'm not a statistician but it seems to me that overestimating something by 40% is not trivial, even if it's not as click-baity as claiming a 3x difference.
ReplyDeleteSurgeons, to take an example, make a lot more money than waiters and waitresses but to a rough approximation neither can do their jobs from home.
Yes, it's still quite a large gap in perception. However, it brings it in to the realm of being explained by regional variation, rather than oblivion. In the metro regions of DC, San Francisco, Boston and a few other spots, the WFH rate in 2021 actually was above or close to 50%:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/09/26/business/massachusetts-has-one-highest-rates-employees-working-home/?event=event12
Survey questions asking for rates of something happening across the country are notoriously not great if there's high regional variability. When most people think of "America" they mean "my region and some other parts I'm aware of". It's really hard to be equally aware of what's going on in say, Texas, Minnesota, Oregon and Kentucky. People absolutely should realize they're not equally aware of all areas, but they just aren't. Given that this survey specifically selected respondents who worked from home, they also very likely over selected regions that had high WFH rates. It was a privately funded survey by the Atlantic so they don't explain their methodology, but I bet you got a lot more respondents from Washington DC (48% WFH) than Alaska (10% WFH), despite similar populations.