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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 VLM on Monday March 20 2017, @12:39PM
I agree with the logic behind shadowstats but over the years he's gone weak and just keeps pushing the official stats plus 4 points. Seriously dude? 4.00000 points into eternity unchanging? For the last decade?
For hard real data I like data.bls.gov and =fred.stlouisfed.org. Ignore the political percentages and look at "Labor force status: Employment-population ratio Type of data: Percent or rate Age: 16 years and over" and stuff like that. It ends up being the same verbal argument as shadowstats just more believable.
The USA seems to generate about 3 million jobs per year in between recessions. Now if you import 1 million illegal aliens per year that is good economic times for all 300+ million of us. If you import 5 million illegal aliens per year that is not so good economic times for all 300+ million of us.