The overwhelming majority of the labor force spent the pandemic working in person. But much of the white-collar class persists in remote or hybrid work more than a year after COVID vaccines were rolled out. At the Atlantic, Derek Thompson astutely likens the implications of urban America avoiding a return to the pre-pandemic workplace to a “cannonball dropped in a lake — an acute phenomenon whose ripples can warp every corner of the labor force.”

Thompson’s predictions seem decent, but they cannot be evaluated without ignoring the elephant in the room: Why haven’t urban workers returned to the office? The pandemic itself has little to do with it.