“No one knows why”: No, lots of people know why, but many of them refuse to acknowledge it because it contradicts the orthodoxy.
The first sentence lists cause and effect (though it makes the same mistake of fact that leads to the mystification here): “As workers slowly return to offices after the pandemic, productivity has been dropping in the U.S. economy.”
It is not “after the pandemic”, it just after everyone has decided to quit acknowledging the pandemic. But COVID doesn’t give a rats ass about whether people acknowledge it, so when you stop control measures (by having “workers return to offices”) and stop accommodation measures (like additional paid sick leave) you get more people catching COVID at work, and more working hours where workers are impacted by the effects of acute or long COVID.
There are lots of people out of the labor force due to long COVID (which is part of the reason for the tight labor market), but there are also even more people in the labor force, and working, with long COVID; see, e.g., https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-data-shows-long-covid...
The first sentence lists cause and effect (though it makes the same mistake of fact that leads to the mystification here): “As workers slowly return to offices after the pandemic, productivity has been dropping in the U.S. economy.”
It is not “after the pandemic”, it just after everyone has decided to quit acknowledging the pandemic. But COVID doesn’t give a rats ass about whether people acknowledge it, so when you stop control measures (by having “workers return to offices”) and stop accommodation measures (like additional paid sick leave) you get more people catching COVID at work, and more working hours where workers are impacted by the effects of acute or long COVID.
There are lots of people out of the labor force due to long COVID (which is part of the reason for the tight labor market), but there are also even more people in the labor force, and working, with long COVID; see, e.g., https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-data-shows-long-covid...