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posted by Fnord666 on Monday March 20 2017, @10:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the rent-is-due dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @11:32AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @11:32AM (#481446)

    Before video games, people whose real life didn't go well spent their time in the alternate realities provided by TV shows, movies, books, (non-digital) role-playing games, watching sports, …

    In other words, if your real life doesn't go well, you're going to find a substitute. And now video games offer yet another substitute in addition of the ones mentioned above. I guess it's better for you if you waste your time playing video games (where you might even improve some skills) than if you waste your time watching "reality" TV (which almost certainly decreases any skills you may have).

    Oh, and there are still countless people who find their "alternate realities" in ruinous gambling, drinking or drug use.

    But the really worrisome alternate realities are those where people confuse them with the real world (be it islamist terrorists or presidents acting on "alternative facts").

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 20 2017, @05:43PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 20 2017, @05:43PM (#481624)

    watching sports

    I believe a lot of the anti-video game stuff comes from the very big financial interests who were into whats now legacy pro sports.

    Your average bubba too young for boomers too old for gen-x was at least as portrayed by hollywood a "sports nerd" knowing everything about nothing important.

    Also if you're really old like me you remember a day when the average pro baseball fan wasn't gray haired. Or TV coverage of European "soccer hooligans" maybe a generation ago before the muslim terror began the main criminal problem in euro-land was soccer fans getting drunk and into fights. Now the euros are too busy being raped, cities burned down, beheaded, shot, run over with trucks, basically a bad Grand Theft Auto video game but IRL. But in the old days euros got drunk and fought about soccer all day.