Economist / Future of Work
Adam Ozimek
He read the labor market like a weather map - and forecast a storm called remote work while everyone else was still arguing about it.
He read the labor market like a weather map - and forecast a storm called remote work while everyone else was still arguing about it.
At the Economic Innovation Group in Washington, Adam Ozimek runs the numbers on the questions most economists wave off as too messy: Where will young families live? Which counties get left behind? Should a software engineer in Bangalore be allowed to build the next American startup? His answers tend to land in the New York Times before they land in a journal.
His current obsession is dynamism - the churn of people starting businesses, switching jobs, and moving across the map. In 2025 he co-authored "Exceptional by Design," a blueprint for high-skilled immigration written with EIG colleagues Connor O'Brien and John Lettieri. The pitch is blunt: turning up the dial on skilled immigration moves patenting and entrepreneurship in the years that follow. To Ozimek that isn't ideology. It's a lever, and he can point to the data that says it works.
He arrived at EIG in 2022 as its Chief Economist, the seat where research meets policy and where, by his own account, he can finally do something with the work rather than just publish it. The body of research he leads now ranges across left-behind places, post-pandemic family migration out of big cities, and whether the international graduates America trains actually get to stay.
The thread connecting all of it is geography - the simple, radical idea that where people are allowed to live and work changes what an economy can become. It's the same thread that made him famous.
What separates Ozimek from the run of credentialed economists is less the credentials than the temperament. He is restless about relevance. He says outright that he didn't get into this to produce papers for the seminar room; he got into it to move something in the real world. So the research at EIG isn't filed and forgotten. It's aimed - at legislators, at journalists, at the slow machinery of policy - and he keeps a public scoreboard of whether the aim landed.
Dynamism is an essential ingredient to not just aggregate growth but widespread prosperity as well.
- Adam Ozimek"The Future of Remote Work," posted to SSRN as offices emptied in 2020, made a claim that sounded like a stretch: the pandemic shove toward working from home was not a blip and not even the main event. It was a preview. Ozimek called remote work a general-purpose technology - the kind of thing, like electricity or the internet, that quietly reorganizes everything around it.
The argument leaned on something he'd been doing at Upwork since 2019: surveying actual workers and actual employers, over and over, and watching the answers drift. People kept discovering that remote work worked better than they'd feared. Managers who swore it would never scale found themselves quietly extending the policy another quarter.
His prediction had teeth. Remote-first startups would invent ways of working asynchronously. Economic geography would crack open. Workers would start choosing where to live before they chose where to work - which, conveniently, is exactly what Ozimek himself had done, running research for a San Francisco company from a desk in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
The years that followed kept handing him the receipts. The migration data moved. The maps redrew. And the economist who'd been called too optimistic became one of the most-cited voices on the single biggest workplace shift in a generation.
He never sold it as utopia. The interesting part of the remote-work story, in his telling, was always the second-order consequences - the towns that suddenly competed for residents, the asynchronous habits remote-first companies would have to invent, the way a tight local labor market could loosen the moment a worker's options stretched nationwide. The headline was "work from home." The actual subject was power, and who has more of it when distance stops mattering.
I'm still doing economics, but it is a little bit different.
- On leaving forecasting for UpworkA government and economics class taught by a teacher named Allen Mellinger did the thing good teachers occasionally do - it set the rest of a life in motion. Ozimek graduated Hempfield High in 2001, picked up an economics degree at West Chester University, then a master's and a PhD from Temple.
He cut his teeth at small Philadelphia firms, including a stint as Director of Research at Econsult Solutions, before spending nearly five years at Moody's Analytics owning the unglamorous-but-essential work of forecasting how many Americans there would be and where they'd live. Demographics is destiny, the saying goes; Ozimek was the one putting the destiny in a spreadsheet.
The Moody's years matter more than they sound. Forecasting how many Americans there will be, and where, is the quiet substrate under almost every question he chases now - housing, immigration, left-behind counties, the future of remote work. You can't argue about where people should be allowed to move until you've spent years counting where they actually are. He did the counting first.
Then Upwork called in 2019, EIG in 2022, and the spreadsheets turned into policy. The Upwork seat was an unusual perch for an academic economist: instead of waiting on government data releases, he could field his own surveys of workers and employers and watch sentiment move in close to real time. That instrument - ask the same people the same questions, repeatedly, and trust the drift - is what let him call the remote-work shift early and keep calling it as the evidence rolled in.
Different topics, one operating system. Each of these started as a forecasting problem - count the people, watch the flows - and graduated into an argument about what policy should do next. The "Exceptional by Design" report on high-skilled immigration is the clearest recent example: it doesn't just measure that skilled newcomers raise patenting and entrepreneurship, it lays out how to structure the system so those gains land on American workers, businesses, and communities rather than leaking away. Measurement first, then the design, then the push to make it real.
His view in one line: getting more highly skilled immigrants into the US is "the easiest and most certain lever we have" for productivity and dynamism.
Remote work as a general-purpose technology that frees people to live where they want, not where their job sits - and reshuffles whole regions in the process.
Why some counties stall while others surge, and what policy can actually do about the gap rather than just describe it.
Tracking whether the international graduate students America trains end up building their careers - and companies - inside the country.
With partners Chris Trendler and Jonathan Yeager, he co-founded Joycat Events - the people behind the Lancaster Craft Beerfest.
Their venue "Decades" put arcade games, bowling, and a kitchen under one roof in downtown Lancaster.
He owns a small business and says reading local demographics up close reshaped how he thinks about the whole economy.
@ModeledBehavior began as the name of an economics blog. It became one of the most recognizable bylines on EconTwitter.
He treats public writing - on Substack and beyond - as part of the research, not a press release for it.
He kept his life in Lancaster while working for San Francisco tech - a living demo of the geography shift he predicted.
The goal isn't a clever paper. It's pushing the US off a low-growth trajectory toward real dynamism and full employment - the kind of economy where the gains show up in widespread prosperity, not just a headline number. He has the data. He's still arguing. He intends to win.