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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: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday March 21 2017, @01:52PM
You mean like those pesky German immigrants who insisted on continuing to make their own ethnic foods and speaking German in their neighborhoods and amongst themselves. Or the dirty Italians. Or the silly Poles? Lithuanians? Chinese? Norwegians? Continuing to make and consume the abomination that is lutefisk is not integration, my friend.
All those other groups still cluster together in neighborhoods. They have their own religious institutions and festivals and customs. Some of them have been here for generations and they still don't speak English and even print newspapers in their own languages. My father-in-law has been here for 40 years and only speaks enough English to run a dry-cleaning store.
As for punishing their own members who try to integrate, that's nothing new or exceptional either. In college my filipino buddy fell in love with a Lithuanian girl. Her family has been in America since they fled the Soviet invasion at the beginning of WWII. They found out about her dating my friend, and refused to speak to her or have anything to do with her because she A) was dating a non-Lithuanian and B) was dating somebody who is not white. My friend and the girl thought they were in the clear because they're both Catholic, but no.
But, hey, it's always possible the rest of us have it wrong, and you have it right. Look, we let the Italians stay and what do they do? Start up the Cosa Nostra and bring rampant criminality to our fair land. Let's chuck them all out. Let them go back to Italy and choke on their pasta. And the Irish, fuck. Think how much better Boston would be without those people and their crime and alcoholism and fighting. Let them go back to Cork and eat potatoes. Much the same with the Russians--come in and start violent mafia criminal gangs. Send 'em back!
Finns can stay. They mostly keep to themselves in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and play hockey. Canadians, too. Mostly harmless.
Washington DC delenda est.