January 19, 2024

Statistics Canada has released a report on working from home. It misses the point entirely by simply measuring the number of people working from home and the number of people who want to work from home instead of the economic impacts.

That said, some interesting stats:

• 20% of workers now work from home. Up from 7% pre-pandemic, down from 25-30% as of 2022.
• In 2019, 40% of Canadian jobs could be done from home.
• Being in a jobs that has the ability to work from home increases the chances that you now work from home. Seems obvious, but it means that there is a tight correlation between not wanting to go into the office and not going to the office across most firms and most workers.
• Workers are as productive working from home.
• Most workers want to work more from home.
• Managers are getting their way by forcing "hybrid" work environments (they have the power to do so and so do so because they want to keep their—mostly irrelevant—jobs).
• Working from home is better for the environment.
• Some of the general productivity increases from telework have been captured by workers (through reduced transit times).

What's the take-away? Remote work is not going anywhere and trying to force workers back into the office is both ridiculous and a bad business decision. Most managers will push for people to return to the office because most managers are bad managers and put their own ideas ahead of reality, data, and the firm they work for.

Basically, the argument over work from home is over except in the minds of bad managers who do not understand that this is a productivity enhancement and you cannot undo productivity enhancements in capitalism and survive.

• Natural resources include oil and oil by-products, mining, wood and wood products, and water (and hunting, but that is small).
• About 12% of Canada's GDP is from natural resources.
• Canada's economy is said to be a service economy, but it is actually a resource extraction economy and you can see that in how related the GDP of Canada is to the resource sector:

Annual Real GDP in the natural resources sector rose 3.1% from 2021 to 2022, with increases in all subsectors. By comparison, the economy-wide real GDP rose 3.8% in 2022.

However, there has been a structural decline in jobs in natural resource sectors, so the impact on GDP is not tied to employment as strongly as it was:

In 2022:

• energy: +11,000 jobs
• minerals and mining: -5,500 jobs
• forestry: -2,500 jobs

These changes continue the role of investment in automation and declining (and negative 2022) rate of growth in industrial investment in forestry and mining.

Natural gas and home construction are the winners this year for a growth driver in natural resources.

The decline in the energy subsector (GDP) was attributable to petrochemicals (-5.7%) and refined petroleum products (-5.5%), reflecting lower production of motor gasoline, aviation fuel and petrochemical feedstocks. These declines were partially offset by increases in natural gas (+2.2%) and crude oil (+1.1%)

Compared to 2019, employment in "energy" and forestry is down, and mining has barely moved up.

With all the talk of critical minerals and securing supply of those products, private capital is not noticeably expanding its investment. All that really happened was that capacity utilization increased and increased in a big way as mining saw almost a doubling of output compared to 2019 with the same investment and workers.

With such a large impact on the economy from these sectors, it is important for the federal government to be more involved as we face growing tension in supply chains.

I will leave you with this:

The winner of the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious book award, said about 5% of her winning entry was written with ChatGPT.