SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 20 2017, @03:17PM
Complicated, with no real gain. For purposes of determining how many people are employed, we don't care how much they make, or how many hours they work, or much of anything else. Those things help to determine economic health, and worker's relative wealth, but those things are pretty much irrelevant to the employment rate.
If 89.5% of all working age Americans have a paying job, some of what you want to measure will improve, independent of actually measuring them. It's part of that "supply and demand" thing. When 80% or less of working age Americans have a job, then those things you want measured are going to grow worse. The labor market becomes a "buyer's market". We need jobs, we need people working. The more people who are working, the harder it will be to find people willing to work for minimum wage, and prices will increase. Maybe not for fast food restaurant workers, but in general, labor prices will go up.
If and when the economy ever becomes a "seller's market", it will be time to remember those traditional minimum wage jobs, as well as exempted workers. Food service, farm labor, and associated workers should never have been exempted from the minimum wage. But, in today's market, you're simply not going to get any traction for a $15 McDonald's wage.