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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) by VLM on Monday March 20 2017, @05:29PM (3 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 20 2017, @05:29PM (#481608)

    Why in the heck would we need Mexico for lebensraum?

    Ah I think you're misinterpreting the use of lebensraum in the PR. See Trump is a republican which according to the nutcases means he's already literally Hitler just by party affiliation, therefore the PR backlash from the democratic party media after the occupation begins can be short circuited because hitlers gotta hitler therefore getting some lebensraum is just something hitlers do. Why leave the 6th army in Stalingrad, well, hitlers gotta hitler, thats just their thing, ya know.

    Unless you're talking about a Final Solution for Mexicans, which, given your posting history might be what you're hinting at.

    Ah no they're not really a problem. Or not a problem that requires that kind of solution, anyway.

    From a nationalist point of view being one big country might have some interesting effects WRT people being able to stay in their homes with their own people if we're all one big (happy?) country. Why move all the Oaxacans to the chicken plant in Oklahoma if you can simply move the chicken plant to Oaxaca, after all.

    It might be a "final solution" for the narco terrorist beheader types. I don't think many people will miss them, on either side of the border.

    Corn production in MX is an interesting graph given the relatively non-meme looking meme that they're here because our NAFTA destroyed their farms. Basically almost everything heard or read about NAFTA is fake news on one level or another. When I pulled the actual production data a minute ago I was surprised. I guess you can't believe everything you see on CNN, which I guess I was an idiot to listen to anyway.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @05:41PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @05:41PM (#481621)

    I suppose you imply that corn production went up in Mexico. OK, but what about the jobs? If we bankrupted the farmers (like USA a century ago) and that caused the creation of large mechanized farms, there is still an unemployment issue.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 21 2017, @12:30PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 21 2017, @12:30PM (#482068)

      That is an interesting way to resolve the meme that NAFTA meant the subsistence farmers all had to move to California while simultaneously factory farming in Mexico has increased overall corn levels. I was reading the meme as being false with the implication that production ceased in MX in favor of Iowa or whatever, which is not the case, but the meme may be true anyway. I suppose I could investigate further, but...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @10:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @10:15PM (#481818)

    Trump is a Republican? Well, since he is the President and he ran under the R-brand, I guess he is by definition . . .