| Victoria Chamberlin is an audio producer at Vox, where she has been making the Today, Explained podcast since 2021. |
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| Victoria Chamberlin is an audio producer at Vox, where she has been making the Today, Explained podcast since 2021. |
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How Portugal's attempt to lure remote workers worked — and then backfired |
Therese Mascardo was done with the daily grind of life in Los Angeles. As a licensed clinical psychologist, she was seeing around 40 clients a week and spending hours in the car commuting. "There's a pressure that you feel as an American, and in LA, I certainly felt like I needed to work as much as possible, either to make my rent or buy Whole Foods, and so my quality of life really suffered there," Mascardo, 42, said. So Mascardo made a radical change in search of an easier lifestyle. She kept seeing Portugal on lists of great places to live as a "digital nomad," a fairly recent term for a person who can work remotely from various locations rather than a fixed location. Since 2007, the European country offered would-be nomads a visa that allowed them to live there so long as they were earning money while working for a company from a non-EU nation. Mascardo fit the bill. She decided to move to Lisbon in 2018, gave up her car, and eventually pared down her workload to around 25 clients per week, a move she could make because Lisbon is so affordable. And Portugal felt peaceful, too. Mascardo and other digital nomads we spoke with in Portugal cited the prevalence of gun violence in the United States as one factor for leaving. "It's crazy to live in a place where every day I don't wake up and read about a mass shooting," Mascardo said.
The pandemic turned work in America upside down: Lots of companies went fully remote, which meant knowledge workers in particular had more freedom than ever before to choose where to live without changing jobs, just as Mascardo did. Four years later, however, many companies have called workers back into the office at least some of the time, some for the whole workweek. Which means some workers are living the digital nomad dream while others are back to long commutes and $15 desk salads. We wanted to know what these two extremes reveal about how we think about work-life balance, so a team from Vox's Today, Explained podcast went to Portugal. We also visited an American city where the five-day, in-office workweek never went away: Miami. You can listen to the episodes here and here. We'll get to Miami tomorrow, but today, we're exploring how Portugal turned itself into a haven for remote workers and saw mixed results.
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Drawing nomads to breathe life into cities |
Thousands of digital nomads from all over the world have moved to Portugal, many after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Though nomads by their nature are hard to track, some estimates show there are about 16,000 living in Lisbon alone, the bulk from the US. In 2022, a few years after Mascardo arrived, Portugal began offering a new type of visa as an incentive for digital nomads. The D8 visa allows non-EU/EEA citizens with remote jobs to live and work in the country for up to one year, with a path to permanent residency. Even before that, Portugal was an attractive place for digital nomads to hang out. After the Great Recession obliterated economic growth in the country, the government set up a generous tax structure and those relatively easy visa requirements for certain kinds of foreigners (a.k.a. those with money). The idea was to attract not just people with cash to spend but entrepreneurs and knowledge workers to juice a torpid economy. It worked, said Luís Carvalho, a professor of economics at the University of Porto in Porto, Portugal. Just look at his own city. "Twenty years ago, the city was declining very fast. You saw a lot of criminality. Buildings were falling apart," said Carvalho. One of the oldest city centers in Europe, Porto was usually known for Port wine, not laptop warriors. When foreign workers started showing up, so did a new energy. New skills, higher incomes, entrepreneurialism. Tourism, too. It's not surprising that coworking and coliving spaces have popped up in Porto. We accidentally stayed in one, a place called Outsite Muoco that looked like a regular hotel but is a chain of rooms and apartments with locations all over the world catering to longer-term stays and "using the remote work revolution to define a new way of life." In Porto, it had several coworking spaces, sleek Scandinavian design, and even a library to listen to vinyl records. We met 25-year-old Gia Lee in the vinyl library. She never pictured herself jet-setting around the world while working, but Lee graduated from college right into the pandemic and the worst job market since the Great Recession. "There were no jobs at all in 2020. ... We kind of had to adapt and figure out how to do our own thing," Lee said. That meant bouncing right into fully remote work. Lee and two friends founded a marketing agency, and it just made sense to Lee to continue keeping the company fully remote. | Then came the downside to attracting well-off workers |
The pandemic gave lots of laptop workers like Lee tons of time to consider their living situations and jump the pond, but all this self-actualization had some negative effects for the Portuguese. Foreign workers drove up housing costs. Carvalho and a team estimate an 8.5 percent increase in prices due to foreign workers. That's been infuriating to many Portuguese people, who are now facing some of the highest housing costs and the lowest median income in Western Europe. Tourism hasn't helped either. There's now a movement to get short-term rentals banned in Lisbon.
But new would-be digital nomads are showing up in Portugal every day; more than 2,500 visas were already issued this year. Carvalho hopes the Portuguese government can find a way to achieve its own balance. He said that a lot of new skills and technology came to Portugal precisely because of the visa and tax incentives introduced to digital nomads. But policymakers have to consider the impact on Portuguese society before native citizens are priced out of their own housing market. "I think you cannot have a decent city without economic growth and without people coming in with skills and talent. So I see policymakers very much as cooks who are trying to combine different ingredients, but the recipe is not there. So sometimes you have to create the recipe yourself." |
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| The office vs. everyone else |
Amazon is the latest high-profile company to mandate in-person work five days a week. Today, Explained heads to Miami, where many people are back in the office, to see how they feel about it. |
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Boston Globe via Getty Images |
Yellow and goodbye to the school bus: School bus service is dwindling around the country, affecting lower-income parents who might lack the flexible work schedules that would allow them to spend time in the drop-off line. For kids, the issue is contributing to a rise in absenteeism and pollution, and it threatens to undermine some of the educational and justice reasons for busing in America. Here's what we know about the disappearance of the school bus. How much warmer is the Earth going to get? It's not an easy question to answer, but the outcome relies on two main factors: how much more heat-trapping gasses humans will emit, and how the planet will respond as a result. As air pollution is revealed more and more to be driven by an abundance of aerosols, scientists are considering even their best measurements and models. It will not all come out in the wash: A Dutch PhD candidate has sparked debate among "degrowthers" — those who believe in shrinking the economy as a means to a better future. His proposal that society get rid of washing machines to foster community and provide exercise leaves out the history of the women's rights movement and the millions of people who currently lack access to labor-saving technologies. Democrats' new approach to violent crime: In 2020, Democrats focused their message on protecting Americans from police abuse and overhauling the criminal justice system. Now, after a historic spike in gun homicide, Democrats are focusing on public safety in their messaging. The philosophical change reflects a broader shift among Democrats and their nonpartisan allies who work in violence reduction, criminal justice, and police reform.
Rudy Giuliani disbarred in DC: Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has been disbarred in Washington, DC. The news comes just months after he lost his law license in New York over his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. If you need a refresher on the disgraced political figure, here's a video to bring you up to speed.
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A new drug to treat schizophrenia: The Food and Drug Administration has approved a twice-daily antipsychotic pill called Cobenfy to treat schizophrenia. The drug is the first of its kind in over 70 years. [CNBC] Bird flu in Missouri: On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that a possible cluster of bird flu infections in Missouri has grown to include eight people. This could be some of the first cases of person-to-person transmission in the country, indicating that the virus may now be able to infect people more easily than before. [New York Times] |
Ulises Ruiz / AFP via Getty Images |
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On Thursday night, as Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida, weather radar detected a blue blob in the storm's eye. It wasn't clouds or rain but lots and lots of birds, and maybe even insects, too. Scientists explain that during tropical cyclones, seabirds try to escape the extreme winds and end up in the eye, where it's calm. Once inside, they have trouble escaping due to the powerful winds of the eye wall, which essentially forms a bird cage. As the storm lost strength on Friday and into the weekend, the birds likely dissipated and tried to return to sea. While these animals were likely exhausted and disoriented, and some have probably died, it's important to remember that birds have evolved with these storms. Yes, hurricanes are becoming more extreme, but birds are also highly resilient. — Benji Jones, environmental correspondent |
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Today's edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow! |
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