Many want it to be the case that remote work is more productive, but I chalk this up mostly to wishful thinking (though this is not to say that some people will not thrive in work-from-home situations, or that some jobs are not more conducive to working from home than others). Interestingly, the NBER study showed those workers who preferred working from home were actually even more unproductive than the average worker when working from home.

In any case, it appears the advantages of team production in physical space are still beyond the realm of being completely replaced. It’s possible that with technological changes, we may move to a place where remote work is common or universal, but the moral of the story is there is no guarantee. The extent to which it makes sense for people to do remote work varies depending on all sorts of technological, cultural, temporal, and job-specific factors. There is no clear end of history for the question of office vs. remote work.

[I’ve been doing it for sixteen years and pretty successfully, but this is a specialized industry, too. In my previous career, it would never have worked except in the briefest of uses. — Ed]