Nicholas Bloom: evaluation

Transcript context

…If you can do it, why can’t tech companies do the same? Let’s take Ivan and Xiaoji Lin from Ohio State University. I first met them physically. I went to give a seminar at Ohio State University. I sat in Xiaoji’s office for half an hour. We kind of got excited about a research idea. That was the critical meeting point. I’m not sure it would have happened if we’d done it remotely. After talking to him, I thought, “This guy seems great. There’s a really interesting idea.” We continue to communicate by email. My thought is, and it kind of matches roughly what a lot of Silicon Valley types say, is the initial spark or idea is much more effectively generated in person. Often, it’s over lunch or over coffee. This is the sense in which productivity now . . . I’ve been running masses of surveys on working from home to try and get the sense of how people are feeling, and both firms and workers are overwhelmingly positive about working from home. Now, again, to be clear, that’s July, and we’re three to four months into the lockdown. My theory is, if it were full-time working from home five days a week for another six to nine months, there’s going to be much more discontentment. In fact, I saw that in China when we did the Ctrip study. People were working from home for nine months. Towards the end of it, it started to really grind and drag on. That was more about loneliness, but the other issue is in terms of being productive and being creative. For our final section of the conversation, I have a number of questions about your own productivity. This is called the Nick Bloom production function. Are you ready?…

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