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 c0lo on Monday March 20 2017, @12:09PM (6 children)
I think you are trying to define a term that already exists: it's called participation rate [investopedia.com].
Do you have in mind something else?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 20 2017, @12:36PM
That is what I have in mind - but the point is, the currently used figure is meaningless. As pointed out, each administration changes the methodology, counting fewer and fewer people in the workforce.
Welfare recipients, for example, many of them healthy, working age adults, are not counted. They are invisible to the labor department.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 20 2017, @12:50PM (4 children)
disability
You do know that states push long term unemployed off state unemployment and onto federal disability as a policy decision, right? That's why in a supposedly post industrial economy with OSHA and the EPA, disability claims are exploding in number. Most folks on disability are just on long term welfare. Its actually getting to the point where most people on "disability" are actually OK, just unemployed.
retirement
Meaningless in a post-pension post-career world.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 20 2017, @03:02PM (2 children)
I'm not sure what you're saying here. People who are disabled, either short term, or long term, are not eligible for unemployment benefits. There are a number of other benefits which any individual may or may not be eligible for, but he is most certainly not eligible for unemployment benefits. Not in any state that I have ever worked in, at least.
So, if a person does not apply for unemployment because he knows that he is ineligible, he is never counted to start with. If he does apply, only to learn that he is not eligible, he still isn't counted. In order to get his first unemployment check, the disabled person would have to commit perjury multiple times. That bit about "Check here if you are willing and able to work" will trip him up.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 20 2017, @05:09PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 20 2017, @05:35PM
A classic example of what they actually are vs what they're supposed to be.
With a side dish of the disabling lower back pain involves taking your now free medicare to the "pain care specialist clinic" for your weekly giant bottle of oxy which you don't need because you're unemployed not disabled, but when sold for cash comes in quite handy for paying the bills, SSDI not paying all that much compared to a real job.
That's just how real america is now a days. Not how it should be, but how it is.
(Score: 1) by Rich26189 on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:21PM
I remember a "60 Minutes" piece where their reporter went to a rural county in Alabama in which 25%-30% of the people were on disability. The reporter interviewed one of the doctors that had 'certified' these people were disabled. His reasoning was that they were unemployed, the farm jobs were too few to support the population, the manufacturing job had all dried up and they were too poor to move. There was no other 'social' safety net at the county or state level. Being on disability was the only way they would survive. The population was about equal black and white.