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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @04:30PM (3 children)
Why is it Democrats and certain others are waxing hysterical about Trump's wall when they have said nada about Israel's mega-wall for the last decade? They are an order of magnitude more awful to people who want to cross their borders than America is. If what Trump wants to do is facism, then what does that make Israel which is already there? If it's racist for Trump to subject muslims and others to extreme vetting, then what is it when Israel does far worse?
Why does Israel get the free pass to do exactly what Trump wants to do?
Me, I think both Israel and Trump are wrong on these matters. Building walls on borders is ineffective and contrary to freedom and democracy and the open societies those require. America has absorbed great numbers of immigrants before without any real long-term harm. Give them their own official holiday on the calendar like we gave the Irish St. Patrick's Day and they can happily take their place next to the rest of us as cat's paws for Wall Street bankers, K Street lobbyists, and other such worthless scum.
Uhh... what? Who have you been listening to and where have you been getting your news.
Liberals have been complaining about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians for ages, comparing it to things like East and West Germany. There have been numerous humanitarian complaints about how the people in the occupied lands are effectively being blockaded, due their only neutral real port of entry for trade being a sometimes-open-sometimes-closed border with Egypt. In fact, if you look in Europe, there are numerous anti-Israel (note: one can be anti-Israel while being pro-Jewish) sentiments, especially among the leftist groups.
Typically it is the political right who is pro-Israel, as the "only functional democracy in the middle east" and numerous other things. Democrats are much less full-throated in support of the middle east.
Of course, it is far more complicated and nuanced than this; if my neighbors regularly shot missiles at me I'm sure I'd be more heavy-handed in response as well. However, it's not like the Democrats are being at all hypocritical, unlike a certain "the election is riggged... wait, you mean I won, I'm sure it was a landslide in a completely honest election" President.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday March 21 2017, @01:57PM (2 children)
Not in this country (US). Sure, maybe in the Socialist Worker, but not in any major media outlet. In English-speaking media there is an unwritten commandment that everyone knows and no one will even utter, "Thou Shalt Not Criticize Israel." If you do, you're an anti-Semite and insta-Nazi. Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by WillR on Wednesday March 22 2017, @07:18PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 23 2017, @03:40AM
Vanishingly few of them say so among themselves, either. I've been active in the progressive grassroots in NYC for 20 years and in all that time have known exactly one guy who objects to Israel's treatment of Palestinians. And before that in the Green Party in Chicago I knew no one who did. The only ones I have read who do are socialists, but there are extremely few of them in the US, even less than there are Greens.
But like I said, maybe people in other countries have latitude to criticize Israel but in America it's social and politically fraught because of the thought police.
Washington DC delenda est.