Why some men don’t work: video games have gotten really good
If innovations in housework helped free women to enter the labour force in the 1960s and 1970s, could innovations in leisure — like League of Legends — be taking men out of the labour force today?
That’s the logic behind a new working paper released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The paper — by economists Erik Hurst, Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils and Kerwin Charles — argues that video games help explain why younger men are working fewer hours.
That claim got a lot of attention last year when the University of Chicago published a graduation speech given by Hurst where he discussed some of his preliminary findings.
By 2015, American men 31 to 55 were working about 163 fewer hours a year than that same age group did in 2000. Men 21 to 30 were working 203 fewer hours a year. One puzzle is why the working hours for young men fell so much more than those of their older counterparts. The gap between the two groups grew by about 40 hours a year, or a full workweek on average.
Other experts have pointed to a host of reasons — globalization, technological change, the shift to service work — that employers may not be hiring young men. Instead of looking at why employers don’t want young men, this group of economists considered a different question: Why don’t young men want to work?
Hurst and his colleagues estimate that, since 2004, video games have been responsible for reducing the amount of work that young men do by 15 to 30 hours over the course of a year.
Using the recession as a natural experiment, the authors studied how people who suddenly found themselves with extra time spent their leisure hours, then estimated how increases in video game time affected work. Between 2004 and 2015, young men’s leisure time grew by 2.3 hours a week. A majority of that increase — 60 per cent — was spent playing video games, according to government time use surveys.
In contrast, young women’s leisure time grew by 1.4 hours a week. A negligible amount of that extra time was spent on video games. Likewise for older men and older women: Neither group reported having spent any meaningful extra free time playing video games. The analysis excluded full-time students, and showed that the amount of time young men spent on household chores or child care was not going up.
In some ways, the increase in video game time for men makes sense. The quality of video games has grown significantly. In the 1990s, games like “Mario Bros.” were little more than virtual toys. Today, you can go on quests in games like “World of Warcraft” that can last for days.
Experts say that the social aspect is particularly important.
“Games provide a sense of waking in the morning with one goal: I’m trying to improve this skill, teammates are counting on me, and my online community is relying on me,” said Jane McGonigal, a video game scholar and game designer. “There is a routine and daily progress that does a good job at replacing traditional work.”
Adam Alter, a professor of marketing and psychology at New York University, highlighted the fact that, unlike TV shows or concerts, today’s video games don’t end. Most forms of entertainment have signals that remind you a certain act or episode is ending, like a commercial or a timer. “Many video games don’t have them,” Alter said. “They’re built to be endless or have longrange goals that we don’t like to abandon.”
Some economists are skeptical of the paper’s conclusions, pointing out that the labour force participation rates for young men in other countries where video games are popular, like Japan, have not fallen in similar fashion.