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As video games get better and job prospects worse, more young men are dropping out of the job market to spend their time in an alternate reality. Ryan Avent suspects this is the beginning of something big
[...] Over the last 15 years there has been a steady and disconcerting leak of young people away from the labour force in America. Between 2000 and 2015, the employment rate for men in their 20s without a college education dropped ten percentage points, from 82% to 72%. In 2015, remarkably, 22% of men in this group – a cohort of people in the most consequential years of their working lives – reported to surveyors that they had not worked at all in the prior 12 months. That was in 2015: when the unemployment rate nationwide fell to 5%, and the American economy added 2.7m new jobs. Back in 2000, less than 10% of such men were in similar circumstances.
What these individuals are not doing is clear enough, says Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, who has been studying the phenomenon. They are not leaving home; in 2015 more than 50% lived with a parent or close relative. Neither are they getting married. What they are doing, Hurst reckons, is playing video games. As the hours young men spent in work dropped in the 2000s, hours spent in leisure activities rose nearly one-for-one. Of the rise in leisure time, 75% was accounted for by video games. It looks as though some small but meaningful share of the young-adult population is delaying employment or cutting back hours in order to spend more time with their video game of choice.
TFA is worth reading in full. Much more deliberative than usual.
Previously on SoylentNews: Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Monday March 20 2017, @11:10AM (9 children)
You're expecting someone called Ethanol_fuelled to live long enough to see retirement? You're deftly daft.
There's too many reasons to fully list why men would rather be teen-men than full men.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @11:18AM
"On the Internet, no one knows I'm actually a dog."
Now we do.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday March 20 2017, @11:22AM (6 children)
Add one more to your list:
* consumerist marketdroids conditioned the millennials to regard fantasy escapism as not only OK but providing a "geeky" status; not only video-games, but also movies (Transformers trash), sitcoms ("Big Bang theory", I'm including you too) and comicons.
A child-like mindset is more inclined to impulse buying, helps the (short-term) bottom-line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @02:19PM (3 children)
How will you impulse buy if your money ain't there? :)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 20 2017, @02:24PM (2 children)
Check the context.
When I said "Add another one to your list" in reply to the comment, I was referring to the list started under:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @11:29PM (1 child)
I know the context, just wondering how are you supposed to impulse buy when you have bad credit rating and banks won't loan you any money.
I guess we could go socialist (oh noes) and get universal basic income to allow hikki-neets to live on indefinitely, looks like warped vision the 50s version of the future where robots do everything.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 20 2017, @11:42PM
The context I added my note makes no relation with income, check the list and you'll see heaps of others that won't make sense in "bad credit rating".
As your question re-frames my point, feel free to draw whatever conclusions you like from the resulted strawman, those conclusions will be all yours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 20 2017, @05:07PM
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday March 20 2017, @11:23PM
Another that should be on the list is demeaning and pushy treatment in the workplace.
So many employers operate as slave driving sweatshops, doing stuff like demanding longer work hours, trampling upon the standard 40 hour week, and hoking up bogus bad performance reviews to pressure employees to work harder (stack ranking, anyone?), trying to turn employees into wage slaves in the belief that makes them more reliable and productive. They take the attitude that if you aren't stressing, you must not be working hard enough. They act like employees could leap tall buildings in a single bound and invent perpetual motion if they threaten them enough. On the rare occasions when a talented employee or team does pull off a heroic and miraculous success, they fail to recognize it, continuing to treat the workers like dirt. They also ram the latest idiotic management claptrap down everyones' throats, stuff that we know does not work and lowers morale, but no one who wants to keep their job dares protest. The beatings shall continue until morale improves. Fewer and fewer are choosing to chance landing in a work environment like that when staying home, keeping expenses extremely low, and playing video games is a viable option.
Video games are very cheap entertainment if done right, far cheaper than cable TV. Can even turn a small profit from them by, for instance, leveling up a WoW character to the max, then selling the account.
Unions used to hold the worst employment practices in check. Employers have been all too successful in breaking unions, so workers need other responses. Critical websites such as fuckedcompany.com had limited success. Seems faceintel.com is still around though a decade out of date. What does that leave, wikileaks? Or this, that work environments are so bad that staying unemployed is healthier.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by WillR on Monday March 20 2017, @07:10PM