Elon Musk said working from home during the pandemic 'tricked' people into thinking they don't need to work hard. He's dead wrong, economists say.

• Musk said that COVID-19 made people think that they don't need to work hard.

• Three economists told Insider that working from home did not make workers less productive.

• When workers needed to look after their children, the only constraint on productivity was.

Musk doesn't like remote work.

Anyone who wishes to do remote work for a minimum of 40 hours per week is welcome, according to a message from Musk that appeared in the early hours of Wednesday.

Although Musk didn't confirm the authenticity of the email, he replied "They should pretend to work somewhere else."

The tweets were not completely out of the blue.

In a May interview with The Financial Times, Musk said that he dislikes American workers because they try to avoid going to work at all.

All the Covid stay-at- home stuff has tricked people into thinking that they don't need to work hard.

Musk, who railed against shelter-in-place orders to send workers back to his California factory in May 2020, might have the wrong idea about remote work. Three economists said that remote work did not damage worker productivity.

Natacha Postel-Vinay, an economic and financial historian at the London School of Economics, told Insider that most of the evidence shows that productivity has increased while people stayed at home.

She said that people spent less time going to work so they could use some of that time to work, and they also got to spend more time with their family and sleeping, which meant they were happier and more productive.

When contacted by Insider outside of normal working hours, Musk did not reply immediately.

In many economies, people worked longer hours when they worked from home, according to data shared with Bloomberg.

A professor of economic history said that cutting out commute was a bonus to worker productivity and that working from home led to fewer hours spent in pointless meetings.

Time spent at the office is not the same as working hard.

A lecturer in economics at King's College London said that surveys of workers in the US and the UK found that they were more productive at home than in the office.

The experts said that people were not shirking and that productivity occasionally dipped in some cases.

People with children at home during the Pandemic often had to split their attention between work and child care, leading to a decrease in productivity.

Gramozi added more productivity, not just for individual employees.

She told Insider that productivity levels depend on support that employers offer, technology adoption, and the type of work that would allow it to be easily conducted remotely.

The original article is on Business Insider.