Are video games taking young men from working?

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scotland
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Joined: April 7th, 2015, 7:33 pm

Are video games taking young men from working?

Postby scotland » July 4th, 2017, 1:05 pm

An NY Times article (based on the work of some economists) that may be of interest.

Young men are not working the hours (as a group) as they used to just 15 years ago. While this is partly from to the lack of demand for their labor, the paper looks at if this could this decline be in part from to playing video games? The evidence is in part that when given more leisure time during the Recession, young men spent it playing video games. Other groups - women of any age and older men - spent their new found leisure time in other ways. The economists looked at all the ways that video games have improved and are designed to keep young men coming back for more.

An interesting side note is that young non-college educated men are also happier than there were in years past. Given the choice between maybe unsatisfying work and satisfying video games, they may be choosing gaming.

This is a NY Time article about young men not working - in part - from their playing video games.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/upshot/why-some-men-dont-work-video-games-have-gotten-really-good.html
(based on a very long and quite boring economic paper here)
http://papers.nber.org/tmp/83146-w23552.pdf

DaHeckIzDat
Posts: 1997
Joined: April 9th, 2015, 1:41 pm

Re: Are video games taking young men from working?

Postby DaHeckIzDat » July 4th, 2017, 1:33 pm

I'm going to have to say BS. This sounds like the same people who tried to blame violence on video games. People, especially young people, will always find reasons not to work. And since video games are the most popular scapegoat for literally anything these days... yeah.

lynchie137
Posts: 539
Joined: November 15th, 2016, 6:46 pm

Re: Are video games taking young men from working?

Postby lynchie137 » July 10th, 2017, 8:18 pm

DaHeckIzDat wrote:I'm going to have to say BS. This sounds like the same people who tried to blame violence on video games. People, especially young people, will always find reasons not to work. And since video games are the most popular scapegoat for literally anything these days... yeah.


Exactly!!!! Well said.

Herschie
Posts: 1183
Joined: April 7th, 2015, 11:44 pm

Re: Are video games taking young men from working?

Postby Herschie » July 20th, 2017, 9:58 pm

I work a decent job now, but for the longest time I can say that video games were the main culprit for me not looking for work. It got so bad that I let my brother in law borrow my PS4 since he wanted to try it out, and sure enough, a week later, I had a job.


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