Editor's note
Our guest this week on Who Gets What  is former Indiana State Health Commissioner Dr. Richard Feldman who reminds us "the politicalization of medicine is a horrible thing," and, in public health "personal responsibility does not work." Hear this most respected physician’s podcast on Who Gets What at mortonjohn.libsyn.com
A persistent complaint from many readers of this column is the “excessive, over-whelming, suffocating” use of data. Or, as one friend says, “I don’t do numbers.”

I understand, even if I don’t empathize. Numbers allow us to see beyond a picture or a recording. Let’s look at one example. What’s happened to commuting patterns between 2019 (before Covid) and 2022 (with lingering effects of Covid)?

In 2019, 5.7% of workers in the United States worked at home. In 2022, that figure was up to 15.2%. To grab that idea, 5.7% is roughly 1 in 18 workers while 15.2% is about 1 in 7 workers.

Eighteen workers, that’s like the number of players in a baseball game (except we now have designated hitters, so the players actually number 20). And one in seven? That a dinner party for eight and one didn’t show up. Or maybe the gun slingers in The Magnificent Seven movie.

But then we go on to compare Indiana and the nation. In 2019, 4.3% of Hoosiers were working at home compared to 5.7% for the nation. In 2022, our figure was 10.5% vs. the nation’s 15.2%.

Do those numbers help us see that workers nationally were more able to shift to at-home employment than were Hoosier workers? That’s probably because we have a larger percentage than the nation of workers in manufacturing and trucking where you can’t call in the work.

Maybe a combo of numbers and percentages would help. By 2022, nationally, there were 24 million workers working from home. This was an increase of 15 million (173%) from three years earlier. For Indiana, 345,000 worked at home in 2022, an increase of 206,000 (149%). In both instances, the number of people working at home doubled.

As Hoosiers, let’s put those added 206,000 Hoosiers working at home in a basketball context. New Castle’s high school basketball site holds 8,424, the largest of its genre in the state and the nation. You would have to attend 25 sold-out games to see the equivalent of those 206,000 workers.

Numerically, Covid had slightly more impact on women than on men. Nationally, the ratio of men working at home in 2022 compared to 2019 was 2.70; for women it was 2.78. For Indiana the figures were men 2.46 and women 2.49. What this meant in the lives of men and women we’ll leave to social commentators.

For those who did not work at home, travel times nationally were reduced by about one minute on a mean of 28 minutes. But, in Indiana the mean travel time to work remained at 24 minutes.

Will working from home continue at these high levels? Workers learn from and like to be with others. Employers like to see their wages working. I doubt this will change, but then I’m not converting office space to residential uses.
Morton J. Marcus is an economist formerly with the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. His column appears in Indiana newspapers, and his views can be followed his podcast.

© 2024 Morton J. Marcus

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