Slashdot Mirror
Young Men Are Working Less. Some Economists Think It's Because They're Home Playing Video Games. (nytimes.com)
Video games are instrumental in understanding why younger men are working fewer hours, according to a paper published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research. From an article: By 2015, American men 31 to 55 were working about 163 fewer hours a year than that same age group did in 2000. Men 21 to 30 were working 203 fewer hours a year. One puzzle is why the working hours for young men fell so much more than those of their older counterparts. The gap between the two groups grew by about 40 hours a year, or a full workweek on average. Other experts have pointed to a host of reasons -- globalization, technological change, the shift to service work -- that employers may not be hiring young men. Instead of looking at why employers don't want young men, this group of economists considered a different question: Why don't young men want to work? Economists Erik Hurst and his colleagues estimate that, since 2004, video games have been responsible for reducing the amount of work that young men do by 15 to 30 hours over the course of a year (syndicated source). Using the recession as a natural experiment, the authors studied how people who suddenly found themselves with extra time spent their leisure hours, then estimated how increases in video game time affected work. Between 2004 and 2015, young men's leisure time grew by 2.3 hours a week. A majority of that increase -- 60 percent -- was spent playing video games, according to government time use surveys. In contrast, young women's leisure time grew by 1.4 hours a week. A negligible amount of that extra time was spent on video games. Likewise for older men and older women: Neither group reported having spent any meaningful extra free time playing video games.
'Playing video games' - is that whey they call it these days?
I'm sure video games are a part of it, but I've had younger colleagues who seem to feel no shame (or concern for their mental health) when they admit to spending an hour or more a day watching porn. Yikes.
Really IMHO American corporations have themselves to blame for this. They have done a very good job of removing any kind of job security, chased profits for the sake of chasing profits, off-shored, out-sourced, missed en masse why claiming it was "necessary". Yeah I get it.
This exactly. Corporations have been so busy chasing profits that they've forgotten about who makes those profitable products. When you stop caring about your workforce, they stop caring about you.
Just in my ~15 years of career I've started with 15 days/year of holiday (10 federal + 5 discretionary) with 401k (with up to 8% matching) AND pension plans. Now its 10 days/year of holidays and 401k with 4% matching, if you're lucky. No pensions, less matching of 401k, less vacation (overall), an arguably a higher expectation of hours put in.
Pay hasn't increased substantially, my starting salary post-B.S. was ~$50k, and it's now somewhere around $53k some 12 years later. When I first started, I knew who the CEO was and they knew who I was (or at least who my boss was). Even more, I had shaken their hand and had a chance to talk to them in person. Now? They're just some guy in that has an aide or intern send an email out every few months telling us how awesome he is.
We see a lot of these articles lately.
The most discouraging part is that the majority of the pieces aren't worrying about the lack of upward mobility, stagnant and negative wage growth, increase in male suicide and mental issues, lack of roles in current society for 50% or so of guys, etc.
No. The true calamity is, instead, the dearth of marriageable men for the many educated and 30+ women who now cannot find a good man to marry. Of course, what this really means is that women, now making just as much as men (if not more when single) refuse to marry men with lower incomes and / or educations than themselves.
As for myself in my late 30's, I don't have a problem with finding a good and somewhat stable job and income. My problem is that, after seeing numerous older relatives and now friends torn apart by the family court system during a divorce, I have little interest in marrying a 35-40 year old women who just realized, 15 or so years of having fun and finding herself, that she does, in fact, want the kids and family package she was promised. Unfortunately, most of these women are only looking for a guy with enough cash to pay for it all - something increasingly overpriced (houses, weddings, diamonds, kids) in most areas of the US these days.
So it turns out, I don't really need to spend very much money as a single guy. Without the kids and mortgage and all the rest, it turns out most guys don't really need much money (women spend approximately 80% of discretionary income - that's why advertisements are targeted to them and not single guys). So no need to continue slaving away at the office for the promise of mgmt. or any piece of the profits - the Boomers are still sucking off all the meat, and will be 'till they're last breath. And for me, that means when I'm in my 50s or so, and won't care anyway.
The NEET phenomenon (like they call it in Japan) is due to several reasons. One is that with smaller one-child families it becomes less important to get your own house since there is room to spare. Also houses have become a lot more expensive. Where like 3-4 decades ago in the West someone could buy a house with 3 years work now it takes like 8 years work for the average citizen to get a house. In addition studies take a lot longer so you graduate college at 21 years. Two generations ago someone who was 16 years old typically was in an apprenticeship while at 18 they were employed. If this person then takes a Masters degree they graduate even later and meanwhile they aren't working. Another factor is that it is much harder to find a steady job, or even an entry level job, which pays enough for someone to constitute his own family, especially for those without qualifications, even those with the studies for it are typically required to have prior experience, and even those who are employed typically do not enjoy full employment. Without job security it is hard to be able to pay a loan and get a house. If you only need enough money for clothes and food you only need to work a couple hours per week.
Also typically modern companies to do not pay for overtime and quite a lot of people don't want to get in the rat race because of this.
Computer games has little to nothing to do with it. It's not like you couldn't play football or fish on your spare time like they did a couple generations ago. Back then it was also common for people to drive around to spend their time. This became less common as fuel prices went up. Because of higher fuel prices youngsters and the unemployed started holing up indoors, stopped buying cars, and online gaming became more common.
There was a lot more pressure to leave your parents house with large families with several people in each bedroom and this was a lot easier to do back when houses were cheaper. I have as much room for myself on my parents house today as my parents did when were married. I got a whole floor for myself. So why should I get my own house and lose the advantages of shared living? Even those who don't want to live with their parents today sometimes live in youngster communities once they leave college because of this.
I got my own car, which I bought brand new and paid for it with cash, I own a plot of land that's over twice the area of my parents house, I can use as much floor space in their house as they did when they got married, and I have like 3 years savings in the bank. Why should I slave away in a thankless job? Fuck em. If the job is interesting I do it, if it's not I don't.
There are different unemployment measurements. Look up the U-6 unemployment rate. It includes people that could be employed, but have given up and also people that are under employed(part-time), but want more.
What's daft is the gaming talk when it's an average *two hours* a week out of 60 hours of leisure time. Watching TV rates at 17 hours on the same chart. The charts don't show hours worked so it's like either assumptions on gaming taking away from working hours or they didn't bother to present the information they're working from.
I wonder if lower marriage rates has anything to do with this. Not being married, having a kid, etc. means less pressure to work and earn as much money as you can. And if people aren't getting married, then there's a chance that this would affect the mood of these men and they would need a vice to fill the void. Video games are easy to access, don't really have any downsides and are completely legal. (I'd wonder if this was just because of the relationship landscape overall, but I don't know if people coupling up is less than it used to be.) The fact that more women than ever are probably working also means there might be less pressure on men to work themselves to death. Two pay checks and gender equality means less necessity for men to be the breadwinner. That said, I'd also put my money on video games being the drug of choice for men to spend their spare time with as opposed to men finding ways to increase their spare time to facilitate their gaming habits. (Not that I wouldn't take a day off from work for a new game now and then.)
also the assumption that you should want to work. If your work is boring and gaming isn't why wouldn't you minimize the prior and maximize the later? That is the problem with econ IMO: they assume that the only thing that matters is money. Maybe gamers can get by on less money because they only need a few hundred a month to buy games vs a $40 smokes and booze habit of yesteryear. If you are happy who cares? Stop working when you have enough.
What did you expect them to do?
Back when global trade began to pick up speed corporations (not just American ones, everywhere) were completely happy using and selling slave labor. It should be pretty clear to people everywhere at this point that corporations as entities are not moral or immoral, they're amoral, driven by profit alone. They've never had any other purpose or goal. They don't even care about breaking laws if the costs incurred by the penalties or settlements are smaller than the profit to be made by doing so. I mean that's what happened in the '08 crisis. The major players settled, a lot of the costs were shifted to the tax-payers in the form of bailouts and many of the banks still made a profit. Why would you expect them to suddenly start acting differently?
And most importantly they've spent enough money lobbying politicians so that any talk of regulating companies is usually met with instant hatred by the defenders of 'the free market' who firmly believe that only by maximizing 'freedom' on the market through deregulation and giving the corporations even more power to act as they please and less responsibilities will everything be fixed.
But there's another side to this as well: it's not just the corporations, it's also the consumers. People want cheaper commodities and cutting out expensive western manufacturing labor is one way of meeting that demand. The majority of the products of off shoring production are sold back to western consumers.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
The Misandry Bubble
Long article, but well worth the read. On this topic, from the section "The Four Horsemen of Male Emancipation", the fourth is "Male Economic Disengagement and Resultant Tax-Base Erosion".
See that "Preview" button?
While the article specifically suggests video games, I'd suggest it's a broader dimension of work-life balance. I think there's been a culture shift that killing yourself for your job isn't worth it
I don't think so. I look at my own kids and their friends, and I see a definite impact of video gaming on their productivity.
Note that in what follows, I'm going to start with an illustrative anecdote, then generalize to some more anecdotes. I'm not claiming this is "data", just that it demonstrates a pattern that may explain how video games could actually reduce work hours and related issues, not because of a focus on work/life balance, but because gaming sucks up available time and energy. Perhaps the best word is "focus". Gaming reduces focus on real life issues.
As my prime example, there's a young man who lives in my house. He's a friend of my sons whose own family life was severely problematic. Not abusive, more inattentive and economically dysfunctional. He ended up abandoning school at age 14 to work full time to support his family because his dad was unable to get a job. At age 18, two years ago, he came to visit us for a month, and stayed. We agreed to let him stay because we had room, felt sorry for the mess he was coming from and wanted to help him. We figured that living with us would give him the time to get his GED, then start getting onto a college career track (he's a bright kid; something of an obnoxious geeky know-it-all, but he has the intelligence to back it up, if only he had the education to use that intelligence).
Two years in, he has a part-time job flipping burgers, no GED and no college plans.
Three months in, he didn't even have the job, though he did have a fancy gaming rig that he brought with him. We had been talking to him regularly about his life trajectory and plans, with no effect. To try to get him to make progress, we helped him find information on getting a GED... and we started charging him rent. Only token rent, actually, $300 per month which includes all of his food (he eats at least $300 per month), utilities, etc., and we weren't too picky about him falling behind. That did motivate him to get a job (at the burger place where he still works)... but he didn't actually pay rent very regularly, instead spending most of his money on gaming.
About a year in, we cracked down on the rent requirement. We gave him a deadline to get caught up on his rent, and said that if he didn't, we'd load his stuff in the truck and take him to his mom's house (500 miles away). Because our three-month deadline was generous, he did nothing until a month before the deadline, then decided it was impossible since what he owed was about 150% of his month's income and he hadn't saved a dime. So, he told his boss that he was giving 30 days' notice, and explained the reason. His boss told him that he didn't want to lose him and would make sure that he had enough hours that month to pay his back rent and get caught up. He did, and has stayed current on his rent.
But... no movement at all on education. The gaming rig, however, has grown to epic proportions.
We sat him down for a formal discussion of his future a few days ago, and the conversation was enlightening. We told him that we were going to set a series of deadlines for taking a GED prep course, taking the GED, taking an ACT prep course, and taking that test. He said okay, and we asked him why he hadn't already made progress on the GED. He said that he just hadn't had time... and after some more discussion it became clear that this wasn't an excuse and it wasn't temporizing, it was really what he thought, that his 28-hour work week left him no time to look up when and where to take the GED.
How could that be? Well, his habit, every day, is to wake up thinking about the games he's going to play, with new ideas about how to approach this boss fight, or optimize that character, or some clever combination of tricks for the other scenario.
And here's where
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.