Unemployed Americans playing Xbox

by philg

Over the years I have written a few posts with the assumption that Americans whom the government pays to not work would be avid videogamers. “The Free-Time Paradox in America” (Atlantic, September 13, 2016) confirms this casual assumption:

Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, was delivering a speech at the Booth School of Business this June about the rise in leisure among young men who didn’t go to college. He told students that one “staggering” statistic stood above the rest. “In 2015, 22 percent of lower-skilled men [those without a college degree] aged 21 to 30 had not worked at all during the prior twelve months,” he said.

“Think about that for a second,” he went on. Twentysomething male high-school grads used to be the most dependable working cohort in America. Today one in five are now essentially idle. The employment rate of this group has fallen 10 percentage points just this century, and it has triggered a cultural, economic, and social decline. “These younger, lower-skilled men are now less likely to work, less likely to marry, and more likely to live with parents or close relatives,” he said.

So, what are are these young, non-working men doing with their time? Three quarters of their additional leisure time is spent with video games, Hurst’s research has shown. And these young men are happy—or, at least, they self-report higher satisfaction than this age group used to, even when its employment rate was 10 percentage points higher.

[Note that the decision of a young man to refrain from marriage, at least in Professor Hurst’s hometown of Chicago, could be a rational one given the winner-take-all character of Illinois divorce law (Census 2014 data show that 94 percent of the Illinois winners (obtaining custody and collecting child support) happen to be female).]

And what about those of us who aren’t living with relatives and/or in government-provided housing?

Elite men in the U.S. are the world’s chief workaholics. They work longer hours than poorer men in the U.S. and rich men in other advanced countries. In the last generation, they have reduced their leisure time by more than any other demographic. As the economist Robert Frank wrote, “building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”

[Elite women don’t work as hard? Is that because they get paid 23 percent less? (See “Should the SEC make it illegal for public companies to employ men?“) Or do they get paid less because they work less? (see this article on Claudia Goldin’s work about how companies pay more per hour to employees who work more hours)]

Here’s the most depressing part of the article:

Rich, ambitious Americans are already spending more time on what makes them fulfilled, but that thing turned out to be work. Work, in this construction, is a compound noun, composed of the job itself, the psychic benefits of accumulating money, the pursuit of status, and the ability to afford the many expensive enrichments of an upper-class lifestyle.

Credit: Mark Hurst (no relation to the economist cited above) of Creative Good told me about the Atlantic piece.

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6 thoughts on “Unemployed Americans playing Xbox”

  1. And once these twenty-something men get married, they are certainly more likely to get divorced. I personally know three professional, attractive woman (in the prime of their child bearing years) who got divorced due to being “gamer widows.” Their husbands played video/computer games to the detriment of the relationships, never maturing out of high school/college mindsets.

    Several of our neighbors in an upscale Midwest suburb have twenty-something sons living in the house, mostly playing video games and sometimes having unskilled part time jobs. The parents in this neighborhood are mostly doctors/lawyers/engineers etc.

    When I talk with my neighbors about their sons, the response is usually a simple eye roll and grin (or is it a grimace?). Not one acknowledges their role as an enabler.

  3. @Steven – even better article.

    “As of last year, 22 percent of men between the ages of 21 and 30 with less than a bachelor’s degree reported not working at all in the previous year — up from only 9.5 percent in 2000.”

    I say wait until the sexbots arrive, then the number of working young men will plummet.

    “One reason young men are drawn to games is their extremely low cost, after the initial outlay for a computer or gaming system.”

    Replace ‘games’ with ‘sexbot’ . No kids, child support, divorce. Heck, not even the cost of food and shoes. Extremely low cost female – now that’s a revolution!

    Everybody thinks these men will be depressed but ” the percentage of [young unemployed] men saying they are very or pretty happy rising from 81 percent to 88 percent. “

  5. “In 2015, 22 percent of lower-skilled men [those without a college degree] aged 21 to 30 had not worked at all during the prior twelve months”

    Forty years of uncontrolled legal and illegal immigration has swollen the labor supply and crushed wages for the lower, working, and middle classes!

  6. Smartest Woman, it looks like the immigrants do accept to work at those depressed wages, rather than find a couch and play games. So maybe the issue is not immigration, it is having parents to sponge off.

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