Video games hinder work effort
Amazing video games could lead to big problems for young, unemployed men — and the U.S. — as Ana Swanson explains.
Danny Izquierdo, a 22-year-old who lives with his parents in Silver Spring, Md., has found little satisfaction in a series of part-time, lowwage jobs he’s held since graduating from high school.
But the video games he plays, including FIFA 16 and Rocket League on PlayStation and Pokemon Go on his smartphone, are a different story.
“When I play a game, I know if I have a few hours I will be rewarded,” he said.
“With a job, it’s always been up in the air with the amount of work I put in and the reward.”
Izquierdo represents a group of video-game-loving Americans who, according to new research, may help explain one of the most alarming aspects of the nation’s economic recovery: Even as the unemployment rate has fallen to low levels, an unusually large percentage of able-bodied men, particularly the young and less-educated, are either not working or not working full-time.
Most of the blame for the struggle of male, less-educated workers has been attributed to lingering weakness in the economy, particularly in male-dominated industries such as manufacturing.
Yet in the new research, economists from Princeton, the University of Rochester and the University of Chicago say an additional reason many of these young men — who don’t have a college education — are rejecting work is that they have a better alternative: living at home and enjoying video games. The decision may not even be completely conscious, but surveys suggest young men are happier for it.
“Happiness has gone up for this group, despite employment percentages having fallen, and the percentage living with parents going up. And that’s different than for any other group,” says the University of Chicago’s Erik Hurst, an economist at the Booth School of Business who helped lead the research.
While young men might temporarily enjoy a life of leisure, the implications could be troubling for them as well as the economy.
The young men aren’t gaining job experience that will better equip them to work in their 30s and 40s.
That, in turn, could lead to a lifetime of decreased wages, limited opportunities and challenges such as depression and drug use — problems the U.S. is already seeing in areas hit with heavy job losses.
At the same time, if a historically vibrant portion of the population doesn’t feel as much desire to work, this could harm the economy’s future and the ability of government to use policy to create jobs.
Young men without college degrees have replaced 75 per cent of the time they used to spend working with time on the computer, mostly playing video games, according to the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, which is based on the Census Bureau’s time-use surveys.
Before the recession, from 2004 to 2007, young, unemployed men without college degrees were spending 3.4 hours per week playing video games.
By 2011 to 2014, that time had shot up to 8.6 hours per week on average.
More-educated young men have ratcheted up their gaming time, too, but they have an easier time finding good jobs, so their work hours haven’t fallen as much. The trends are different for women, who are much more likely to go back to school after leaving the labour force.
The paper attributes one-third to one-fifth of the decline in work hours by less-educated young men to the rising use of technology for entertainment — mainly video games. The new study has not yet been published, and the researchers say they are continuing to refine the precise figures.
But other prominent economists who reviewed it for this article said it raises important questions about why so many young men have abandoned the workforce. A few decades ago, an unemployed person might be stuck on the couch watching TV, isolated and depressed.
Today, cheap or free services such as Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube and Netflix provide seemingly endless entertainment options and an easy connection to the outside world. Video games in particular provide a strong community and a sense of achievement that, for some, real-world jobs lack.
Young men are also helped out economically by living at home.
In the U.S., nearly two-thirds of nonworking, less-educated young men live with parents or other family members, up from about onethird before the recession.
For the first time since the 1930s, more U.S. men aged 18-34 are living with their parents than with romantic partners, according to the Pew Research Center.
Data from the General Social Survey, a U.S. survey of several thousand people, shows young non-college men report being happier than in the early 2000s, with the percentage of men saying they are very or pretty happy rising from 81 per cent to 88 per cent. In the same period, the reported happiness of other groups remained constant or fell.
For Izquierdo, video games provide a respite from job-market pressures. “As a young, first-generation male, there’s a lot of expectations. So it’s kind of cool to pop on a game ... and you will be rewarded for doing small tasks,” he says. “They just make me happy.”