11 ms·

Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men [pdf]

84 points by gwern 9y ago

OliverJones 9y ago
Uh-oh. This is the kind of thing the popular fakenuz press reads, misunderstands, and turns into bogus headlines like "All millenials are slackers."
- brad0 9y ago
  I don’t think that it’s that they misunderstand. I think that it’s because they make more money by making it divisive and emotion driven.
georgeecollins 9y ago
This is pointing out that young men are spending more time on the computer, particularly playing games. Obviously because online games have gotten much better in the last 15 years. If people choose to spend more time doing a thing because it is more compelling that is not bad.
- croshan 9y ago
  I wouldn't assume that was the only cause. It could be that online games are more addicting (they are), or maybe that they're using it as a tool to cope with depression (I definitely know people that do). Just because people choose to spend more time drinking, doesn't mean it's not bad. They could just be turning into alcoholics.
  - dweekly 9y ago
    The narrative of coping with depression by playing video games seems reasonable but the data in the paper seem to show that there was an uptick in self-reported happiness in the segment playing the most games. That seemed to read to me as, crudely, "games make you happy and lazy" (namely they lower workforce participation). Happy to hear of a better way to read the data.
- always_good 9y ago
  "Obviously because online games have gotten much better in the last 15 years." I don't see how that's self-evident at all. I'd suspect it has more to do with social desolation.
dropit_sphere 9y ago
Interesting. What effects might result from young men spending less time working?
- guskel 9y ago
  Less taxes collected.
- MollyR 9y ago
  Its seems like they are dropping out of society for some reason. We probably need to go back and look at why people decide to work in the first place. What the incentives were and how they changed. Most people aren't working because work is fun, they work because they want the money for some goals like food, housing, families.
- eric_b 9y ago
  They have less income to spend. This has mostly negative consequences. Lower economic stimulation is the most obvious. Of course, less income means other things too. Young men are living at home with their parents for longer, or in flophouse conditions. At least in the US, this is not a desirable quality to most females, meaning they are getting married later if at all. This means less children, which could mean a demographic crisis depending on which camp you believe. Also these people could be an eventual drain on society as they get older or retire.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Then again, depending on whether men worked too much or too little before, it could mean better work life balance. Unless you believe the proper amount of time to work is "all the time", there will be a point where people work a bit less and it is not end of world.
brad0 9y ago
I’ve been noticing a number of similar articles on HN recently. Exploring why men aren’t interested in working seems to be in vogue.
- BadMathBook3 9y ago
  Personally, I fit into this group to a degree (I'm almost 40 -- not the same age group really). That said, I'm all about working. I just hate office life anymore. "Jobs" are passe, IMO. I'm burned out on it after 25 years, countless lines of code, and hours of effort having been expropriated from me. I'm tired of how hard it is to change specialties; not because I'm not smart enough, but because I don't have the time because I'm expected to fucking work all the time. I've had a few payouts from tech, but nothing to retire on for life. There's a serious inequity in working at an office when I've doing 40+ wks for years, struggled to get by a lot it, but the guy one level up the org char rolls in with his new Vette. Women seem to find it novel, since they haven't historically had access. So let em at it. Do we NEED this many people "working" on whatever the "free market" demands (which is usually just code for "within the highly moderated financial system"). I doubt it. IMO, the only economic output that society as a whole should be concerned with is education, healthcare, and the infra that enables those efforts. The rest is a farce. Consumption driven avarice.
- hi-im-mi-ih 9y ago
  I'll venture a guess: We've been talking about rights for so long, as a nation, that we forgot to discuss responsibility. The major media and political narratives are focusing on the rights of women, the rights of trans folks, the rights of minorities, and the rights of immigrants. They are all well and good, but we should equally talk about the responsibility of our well-represented young white males to bear up under some responsibility and push themselves to improve their country. Responsibility to provide and protect is a very masculine idea, and if we fed ourselves an equal diet of responsibility as we do rights & freedoms, the young men of today might be a lot more energetic and engaged. I also venture that it has something to do with the sharp rise in atheism. Christianity espouses responsibility. Carry your cross and accept suffering without malice. Atheism says that the world is meaningless, we were created from entropy. One of those belief systems might work better for getting young guys out of the house!
and0 9y ago
Someone linked me to this roughly a year ago, and it seemed like the most obvious example of correlation != causation. I'm not sure how it got published, really.
- watwut 9y ago
  This article is from July 2017. It did not existed a year ago.
  - glitch 9y ago
    Here's an older version dated September 15, 2016 (which is 1 year, 5 months ago): https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~nwilliam/Econ702_files/abch.pdf https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~nwilliam/Econ702_files/abch.pdf
kyle-newman 9y ago
We increasingly don't need those men in the workforce. service industry jobs will always hire a woman over a man due to sexism.
- TFortunato 9y ago
  That's a pretty bold assertion - what are you basing that on? It seems that while there are certainly fields where different genders dominate, how you define "service industry" is going to really skew your views on this. And to state that any differences must be due to sexism alone seems unfounded. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18.htm
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't post flamebait on divisive topics. If you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the site rules to heart when commenting here, we'd appreciate it.
trs80 9y ago
This paper is interesting but I don't think it really gets at the core of the issue. It associates the decline of young men in the workforce with so-called "leisure luxuries" such as video games. The paper even admits that, "For other groups - younger women, older men and older women - recreational computer is not a leisure luxury." I would like to submit a complimentary hypothesis. While it may be true that young males are more interested in video games, video games are not necessarily the cause of the decline of younger males in the workforce. Perhaps games are simply a tool of escapism, utilized by a demoralized section of the population (young males). This could explain why young females are not influenced as drastically by the same leisure luxury. As with anything, the underlying reason behind young male decline in the work force could be a variety of things (e.g. males have more interest in games compared to young females or are more addiction prone to game than young females), but I believe that the case for escapism in young males in a society which is increasingly anti-male is a strong one to explain them seeking refuge in video games.
- majormajor 9y ago
  As always when people make these claims, you have a lot of far-from-proven assumption embedded in here, so the claim that society is "anti-male" rather than "less aggressively pro-male than it used to be" is unsupported. A more subtle point would be that, to a marginal young male, it may be hard to tell the difference. Resentment is likely to be high to start with in someone struggling but consistently failing. This I find much easier to believe, and less wildly in contradiction to the evidence of my (male) eyes and the experience of people who grew up around me. But it's a hugely significant difference in what it implies about who should do what. That's without getting into proving a correlation, let alone causation. The timelines don't seem to line up for your claim, IMO.
  - trs80 9y ago
    > demonstrate that society is "anti-male" rather than "less aggressively pro-male than it used to be." Call it whatever you'd like... it can still be a contributing factor. Also, I never claimed society was anti-male, only increasingly so.
conwy 9y ago
If only everyone had the luxury of time. Universal basic income FTW.
- eric_b 9y ago
  Someone still has to plant, grow and harvest the crops to make the food you eat. Someone still has to ensure the sewers work, the garbage is picked up etc. Most necessary jobs will not be done by robots for decades if ever. And they certainly wouldn't be done by humans for "funzies" until then. In a fantasy world of perfect human virtue perhaps basic income will work, or maybe once Skynet becomes self aware. But it's a pipe dream on any kind of meaningful scale.
  - Frondo 9y ago
    We could still pay people to do those jobs. We just might have to pay more for less desirable jobs, instead of what we seem to have now--the worst jobs are also the worst paid.
- jeffreyrogers 9y ago
  I don't think most people would know what to do without work. It'd probably be worse for their mental health than working a bad job.
- simonsarris 9y ago
  UBI could make such social problems better, but I think it will probably make them worse: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-income-the-flood-217db9889c07 https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-incom...
zitterbewegung 9y ago
I think that younger men are going into video games because computers have made us so productive that we don’t need as much as a labor supply anymore. We have seen a drop of labor participation for men since the 60s which is invariant under any economic conditions . People forget that to disrupt an industry someone loses and it appears we can see some of this in the male labor participation rate . Since women have unfortunately had restrictions on their ability to be employed that information could have been lost.
- ficustree 9y ago
  That is very much addressed in the content of this paper. from the introduction > An obvious candidate for this decline in younger men’s hours is a decline in demand for their labor, resulting in a corresponding reduction in their real wages. There is evidence that declining demand for manufacturing and routine employment has contributed to a secular decline in wages and employment rates for less educated workers.2 However, we show in the next section that real wages of younger men have closely tracked those of their older counterparts since 2000. This suggests that the greater decline in younger men’s hours is not readily explained by a differential decline in labor demand for younger versus older men.
40acres 9y ago
A propensity for video games is more a symptom than a cause imo. If you look at the state of the modern American man, analyze trends and extrapolate forwards things are not looking good. The ratio of men:women in colleges is nearing 60/40. We are moving to a more service based economy which favors women. Lot's of folks are simply dropping out of the economy and are trending towards being strains on society.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  I believe you must mean 40/60.
- watwut 9y ago
  I suspect that ratio of men vs women in college does have something to do with ratio of men vs women reading and playing videogames. I knew people who did had worst result in school they could have, because they played a lot. Video game industry traditionally targets women much less - and consequently it might cause women to play less and thus read more and do more homework.
walshemj 9y ago
Not sure I buy a xbone one as a leisure luxury playing polo, skiing or a season ticket to Man U id agree.
MollyR 9y ago
When I volunteered at a suicide prevention center, I dealt with a ton of college grads who couldn't find jobs, and were depressed, suicidal and deep in debt. They said they felt alone, and their parents just thought they were lazy. Maybe videogames are their only way to eke out some self-proclaimed happiness being a hero in some fake reality. But that happiness will quickly fade as they age, and they are forced to face reality in terms of resources needed for survival. I think this also explains the rise of the extremist youth groups antifa and the alt-right. Both are dominated by young men looking for purpose and value. edit: maybe also explains the rise of that jordan peterson guy.
- verylittlemeat 9y ago
  Does anyone else see huge similarities between what this paper is describing and the freeter/hikikomori/herbivore men trends going on in Japan since the late 1980s? I don't have the time or inclination to look into it more deeply but it almost seems like the West is just living through a social reality that has been going on for decades in Japan. Maybe there are some interesting social and economic insights that can be gleaned from that change to predict the future in the west.
  - toyg 9y ago
    I was saying this in the late ‘90s. I would get out the relevant posts but they are in Italian anyway; I believe in Italy we saw the phenomenon a bit earlier because of a number of factors (the economy braked earlier than elsewhere, it’s a more traditionalist country than average, etc etc). On the other hand, media and academia are always out to sensationalise. It’s entirely possible that a certain degree of social disaffection has always been there (see “young Werther”, Leopardi and so on), but the overall population growth was such that a small but constant percentage of a community is now a big number in absolute terms.
- roymurdock 9y ago
  As a 25 YO male this is an issue near and dear to me. IMO it all comes back to slow TFP [1] (total factor productivity) growth. New technology is not (on aggregate) making us more productive, or growing the economy to the point where we need young, college educated men and women to learn productive new skills to sustain and grow our communities and the collective state and country level economy. I went into the embedded industry to learn more about the people and companies that make all the things we take for granted or never think about as kids - cars, planes, industrial PLCs, oil rigs, pacemakers, insulin pumps, ATMs. Modern chip production, and what people have built from tiny MCUs and DSPs all the way up to the crazy beefy CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs is as close to magic as I've found in the real world. But the industry of "global infrastructure" - transportation of people and goods, war, healthcare, manufacturing, resource extraction, retail - as a whole is stagnant. Especially when compared to the golden century we are just coming out of, when our standard of living in developed nations jumped up exponentially due to distributed electricity, indoor plumbing, modern appliances, transistors, data transmission technology, internal combustion engines, and advances in chemical and medical technology (much of this accelerated by research into war technology). Economist Robert Gordon has studied this in detail here [2]. Video games are definitely a way to feel productive, achieve well-defined goals, and get a sense of accomplishment or progression that is often lacking in the workplace. But IMO in many cases they are a symptom of a larger issue, not a cause. There are many forms of escapism, video games are just one that my generation is more accustomed to having grown up and made friends through social interactions over video games alongside traditional things like sports, clubs, parties, etc. The growing need for escapism is IMO the larger issue. [1] In economics TFP is a variable that attempts to capture the effect of technology and infrastructure on the production function. Since these effects are much too complex and indirect to calculate explicitly (how many more widgets can a factory produce because of the roads that allow their workers to drive into work from the suburbs?) it is imputed as a residual. http://www.karlwhelan.com/Macro2/Notes9.pdf http://www.karlwhelan.com/Macro2/Notes9.pdf [2] https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/dp/0691147728/ref=as_li_tf_tl?tag=teco06-20&ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0520271440&linkCode=as2 https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/d...
stillsut 9y ago
There's this huge class of video games that feature: skill-building, leveling-up, acquisition, and when networked, involve team dynamics, assessing other's skill, leadership, earned respect, and a social hierarchy that's based on a meritocracy. Have these type of games become incredibly good over the last ten years? Yes. Have jobs / "the world" gotten less good at providing these rewarding type of experiences? I'm not sure.
- dropit_sphere 9y ago
  The world doesn't have to have gotten worse. It can simply not optimize for it. I doubt whoever tracks "young male labor engagement" is taken as seriously in their sphere as some game company's engagement czar. And it's for reasons that should be very familiar to HN users: in games, they're the customer, in the rest of the world, they're the product.
- ArlenBales 9y ago
  A good example of this is the recently released game Monster Hunter: World. It features everything you mentioned. Some players have spent an undeniably unhealthy amount of time in that game in just a few weeks. They boast "I'm High Rank 100 after only 200+ hours!" as if playing a video game for 15+ hours a day was something to be accomplished and proud of. I feel sad for these individuals when they realize all that time was meaningless.
  - nradov 9y ago
    Someone would literally have to pay me to get me to play a game like that. It's literally like work. Except for some volunteer activities I don't work for free.
- samhain 9y ago
  "Skill building" and "Leveling up" are nothing more than operant conditioning on a reward schedule. It's nothing more than a skinner box that has two rooms that you walk between with "level up" being the doorway you'd like to go through. No real work is being done, but the facade of work is enough to trick your brain into thinking it's accomplished something. That real effort could have been expended to do something that could actually benefit the organism, but no, it's wasted on an illusion.
calebsurfs 9y ago
My observation is that teens are taking jobs that were previously done by undocumented immigrants who have left due to the current political climate. I expect immigration policy could be more closely correlated with young men's labor than video games.
- adventured 9y ago
  Well let's get right to the facts. Fact: the US is not losing undocumented / illegal immigrants at an abnormally high rate. That's a myth. Trump has hardly moved the needle at all when it comes to illegal immigration. Everything to the contrary is propaganda pushed by the media for pathetic political points / ratings. Obama deported more people in an average year than Trump has in his first year. He was known in immigration circles as the deporter in chief for it. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-numbers/story?id=41715661 http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-num... "Illegal immigration on border surges back to Obama levels" https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/15/illegal-immigration-border-back-obama-levels/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/15/illegal-imm...
  - calebsurfs 9y ago
    Those are relevant facts but they leave out immigrants who are leaving voluntarily. I couldn't find anything within the last 6 months but there was recently a net outflow of undocumented immigrants [0] http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2017/apr/26/ron-kind/yes-experiencing-net-outflow-illegal-undocumented-/ http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2017/apr/26/r...
verylittlemeat 9y ago
Hand wringing about perceived weak virtues of the youth. I expect an article referencing this in the new york times style section within the week.
- merpnderp 9y ago
  Presented with data that youth today are falling behind in traditional markers for success, and you're response is mockery? These are young adults who are not accomplishing anything with their time and will have little to show for their time when older. This is a serious social illness worthy of study.
  - verylittlemeat 9y ago
    It's interesting to note which social science papers hacker news decides to treat with reverence vs skepticism. It's not a coincidence that a website which treats economic success as the apex cultural trait would cling to a study that validates their own feelings. The startup narrative is a nasty one. If you don't see the economic results you expected it's easy to look outward and try to rationalize why video game playing losers seem to be content or indifferent while you struggle to solve the Big Problems only to be met with mediocre success. The lack of introspection and wholesale othering that leads to completely subjective statements such as: people who play video games are "not accomplishing anything with their time" and they "will have little to show for their time when their older" - are worse than depressing, they're the seeds of resentment, anger and aggression. Ironically it's this irrational hatred that's a social illness worthy of study.
    - merpnderp 9y ago
      I think you missed your mark by some ways. There's a mountain of options in between toiling away 80 hours a week on a startup and living in your parent's basement playing video games. Economic success is the measure of how people are able to provide for themselves and those they care about. Families cost money, houses cost money, living costs money. Someone has to provide the things people consume to live, and they don't want to be slaves to a basement dwelling slacker. If they want to do anything with their lives, and we all do if we want to have good mental health, they'll find a career, be it in startups or working their way up at the local supermarket.
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
In a time where millenials are deeply, structurally pushed down economically [1] Video games make a lot of economic sense to play as they're an incredibly inexpensive form of entertainment on a dollars per hour of entertainment basis. 1 - http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/ http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenni...
- dnomad 9y ago
  It goes deeper than this but yes this is the right track. The US is a wildly inequal society. Each year it becomes more and more inequal and the latest tax cuts are going to dramatically accelerate the rising inequality. Such widespread inequality has powerful knock-on effects and these effects are converging on these young (likely rural) males. Everything from suppressed wages to supressed business formation to extraordinary economic rents (housing, healthcare) all come together to produce more losers and less (but richer) winners.
rubidium 9y ago
Woah woah woah. I mean video games are a drop in the bucket of the conversation here. WHO actually has 60 hours a week of leisure between the ages of 31-55?! How is that the average? 6am: wake. shower sometimes. 6:15am-7:45: take care of kids, eat breakfast, get dressed. 7:45-5:45: commute and work. 6-7: eat dinner 7-7:30: kids to bed. 7:30-8: cleanup house 8-10: maybe leisure, often home production. 10: bed. Weekends have _at most_ 6 hours of leisure per day. That works out to 22 hours, best case scenario. I asked around the office. No one else is getting 60 hours.
- hnaccy 9y ago
  >Weekends have _at most_ 6 hours of leisure per day. Why?
  - adventured 9y ago
    Mow the lawn, do laundry, clean the house, maybe maintenance on a vehicle with a trip to the dealership or self-work, rake leaves, take the kids to sports practice, run errands, pay bills, do taxes, deal with family problems, deal with being sick or having a child that is sick, fix a broken sink, pick your husband up at the airport an hour drive each way, fix the garage door motor that has been acting up, help your son improve at math by working with him for hours on it over the weekend, and approximately 807 other things that need to get done at some point with weekends being ideal. Simplify life? Oh, sure.
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  > I asked around the office. No one else is getting 60 hours. Sounds like significant sampling bias right there. US prime age employment rate (25-54 years old) is 78% (which counts part time employees). I'd guess that the 22% you didn't interview, and the part time employees (who likely don't work in an office) are far less busy.
- mesozoic 9y ago
  no kids, work less, eat fast food, be sloppy Not saying its a great lifestyle but easily get to 60 hours.
irrational 9y ago
> "We calculate that innovations to gaming/recreational computing since 2004 explain on the order of half the increase in leisure for younger men." And the other half is explained by the ready availability of free porn.

84 points by gwern 9y ago

Uh-oh. This is the kind of thing the popular fakenuz press reads, misunderstands, and turns into bogus headlines like "All millenials are slackers."

brad0 9y ago
I don’t think that it’s that they misunderstand. I think that it’s because they make more money by making it divisive and emotion driven.

georgeecollins 9y ago

This is pointing out that young men are spending more time on the computer, particularly playing games. Obviously because online games have gotten much better in the last 15 years. If people choose to spend more time doing a thing because it is more compelling that is not bad.

croshan 9y ago
I wouldn't assume that was the only cause. It could be that online games are more addicting (they are), or maybe that they're using it as a tool to cope with depression (I definitely know people that do). Just because people choose to spend more time drinking, doesn't mean it's not bad. They could just be turning into alcoholics.
- dweekly 9y ago
  The narrative of coping with depression by playing video games seems reasonable but the data in the paper seem to show that there was an uptick in self-reported happiness in the segment playing the most games. That seemed to read to me as, crudely, "games make you happy and lazy" (namely they lower workforce participation). Happy to hear of a better way to read the data.
always_good 9y ago
"Obviously because online games have gotten much better in the last 15 years." I don't see how that's self-evident at all. I'd suspect it has more to do with social desolation.

dropit_sphere 9y ago

Interesting. What effects might result from young men spending less time working?

guskel 9y ago
Less taxes collected.
MollyR 9y ago
Its seems like they are dropping out of society for some reason. We probably need to go back and look at why people decide to work in the first place. What the incentives were and how they changed. Most people aren't working because work is fun, they work because they want the money for some goals like food, housing, families.
eric_b 9y ago
They have less income to spend. This has mostly negative consequences. Lower economic stimulation is the most obvious. Of course, less income means other things too. Young men are living at home with their parents for longer, or in flophouse conditions. At least in the US, this is not a desirable quality to most females, meaning they are getting married later if at all. This means less children, which could mean a demographic crisis depending on which camp you believe. Also these people could be an eventual drain on society as they get older or retire.
- watwut 9y ago
  Then again, depending on whether men worked too much or too little before, it could mean better work life balance. Unless you believe the proper amount of time to work is "all the time", there will be a point where people work a bit less and it is not end of world.

brad0 9y ago

I’ve been noticing a number of similar articles on HN recently. Exploring why men aren’t interested in working seems to be in vogue.

BadMathBook3 9y ago
Personally, I fit into this group to a degree (I'm almost 40 -- not the same age group really). That said, I'm all about working. I just hate office life anymore. "Jobs" are passe, IMO. I'm burned out on it after 25 years, countless lines of code, and hours of effort having been expropriated from me. I'm tired of how hard it is to change specialties; not because I'm not smart enough, but because I don't have the time because I'm expected to fucking work all the time. I've had a few payouts from tech, but nothing to retire on for life. There's a serious inequity in working at an office when I've doing 40+ wks for years, struggled to get by a lot it, but the guy one level up the org char rolls in with his new Vette. Women seem to find it novel, since they haven't historically had access. So let em at it. Do we NEED this many people "working" on whatever the "free market" demands (which is usually just code for "within the highly moderated financial system"). I doubt it. IMO, the only economic output that society as a whole should be concerned with is education, healthcare, and the infra that enables those efforts. The rest is a farce. Consumption driven avarice.
hi-im-mi-ih 9y ago
I'll venture a guess: We've been talking about rights for so long, as a nation, that we forgot to discuss responsibility. The major media and political narratives are focusing on the rights of women, the rights of trans folks, the rights of minorities, and the rights of immigrants. They are all well and good, but we should equally talk about the responsibility of our well-represented young white males to bear up under some responsibility and push themselves to improve their country. Responsibility to provide and protect is a very masculine idea, and if we fed ourselves an equal diet of responsibility as we do rights & freedoms, the young men of today might be a lot more energetic and engaged. I also venture that it has something to do with the sharp rise in atheism. Christianity espouses responsibility. Carry your cross and accept suffering without malice. Atheism says that the world is meaningless, we were created from entropy. One of those belief systems might work better for getting young guys out of the house!

and0 9y ago

Someone linked me to this roughly a year ago, and it seemed like the most obvious example of correlation != causation. I'm not sure how it got published, really.

watwut 9y ago
This article is from July 2017. It did not existed a year ago.
- glitch 9y ago
  Here's an older version dated September 15, 2016 (which is 1 year, 5 months ago): https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~nwilliam/Econ702_files/abch.pdf https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~nwilliam/Econ702_files/abch.pdf

kyle-newman 9y ago

We increasingly don't need those men in the workforce. service industry jobs will always hire a woman over a man due to sexism.

TFortunato 9y ago
That's a pretty bold assertion - what are you basing that on? It seems that while there are certainly fields where different genders dominate, how you define "service industry" is going to really skew your views on this. And to state that any differences must be due to sexism alone seems unfounded. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18.htm
dang 9y ago
Please don't post flamebait on divisive topics. If you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the site rules to heart when commenting here, we'd appreciate it.

trs80 9y ago

This paper is interesting but I don't think it really gets at the core of the issue. It associates the decline of young men in the workforce with so-called "leisure luxuries" such as video games. The paper even admits that, "For other groups - younger women, older men and older women - recreational computer is not a leisure luxury." I would like to submit a complimentary hypothesis. While it may be true that young males are more interested in video games, video games are not necessarily the cause of the decline of younger males in the workforce. Perhaps games are simply a tool of escapism, utilized by a demoralized section of the population (young males). This could explain why young females are not influenced as drastically by the same leisure luxury. As with anything, the underlying reason behind young male decline in the work force could be a variety of things (e.g. males have more interest in games compared to young females or are more addiction prone to game than young females), but I believe that the case for escapism in young males in a society which is increasingly anti-male is a strong one to explain them seeking refuge in video games.

majormajor 9y ago
As always when people make these claims, you have a lot of far-from-proven assumption embedded in here, so the claim that society is "anti-male" rather than "less aggressively pro-male than it used to be" is unsupported. A more subtle point would be that, to a marginal young male, it may be hard to tell the difference. Resentment is likely to be high to start with in someone struggling but consistently failing. This I find much easier to believe, and less wildly in contradiction to the evidence of my (male) eyes and the experience of people who grew up around me. But it's a hugely significant difference in what it implies about who should do what. That's without getting into proving a correlation, let alone causation. The timelines don't seem to line up for your claim, IMO.
- trs80 9y ago
  > demonstrate that society is "anti-male" rather than "less aggressively pro-male than it used to be." Call it whatever you'd like... it can still be a contributing factor. Also, I never claimed society was anti-male, only increasingly so.

conwy 9y ago

If only everyone had the luxury of time. Universal basic income FTW.

eric_b 9y ago
Someone still has to plant, grow and harvest the crops to make the food you eat. Someone still has to ensure the sewers work, the garbage is picked up etc. Most necessary jobs will not be done by robots for decades if ever. And they certainly wouldn't be done by humans for "funzies" until then. In a fantasy world of perfect human virtue perhaps basic income will work, or maybe once Skynet becomes self aware. But it's a pipe dream on any kind of meaningful scale.
- Frondo 9y ago
  We could still pay people to do those jobs. We just might have to pay more for less desirable jobs, instead of what we seem to have now--the worst jobs are also the worst paid.
jeffreyrogers 9y ago
I don't think most people would know what to do without work. It'd probably be worse for their mental health than working a bad job.
simonsarris 9y ago
UBI could make such social problems better, but I think it will probably make them worse: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-income-the-flood-217db9889c07 https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/after-universal-basic-incom...

zitterbewegung 9y ago

I think that younger men are going into video games because computers have made us so productive that we don’t need as much as a labor supply anymore. We have seen a drop of labor participation for men since the 60s which is invariant under any economic conditions . People forget that to disrupt an industry someone loses and it appears we can see some of this in the male labor participation rate . Since women have unfortunately had restrictions on their ability to be employed that information could have been lost.

ficustree 9y ago
That is very much addressed in the content of this paper. from the introduction > An obvious candidate for this decline in younger men’s hours is a decline in demand for their labor, resulting in a corresponding reduction in their real wages. There is evidence that declining demand for manufacturing and routine employment has contributed to a secular decline in wages and employment rates for less educated workers.2 However, we show in the next section that real wages of younger men have closely tracked those of their older counterparts since 2000. This suggests that the greater decline in younger men’s hours is not readily explained by a differential decline in labor demand for younger versus older men.

40acres 9y ago

A propensity for video games is more a symptom than a cause imo. If you look at the state of the modern American man, analyze trends and extrapolate forwards things are not looking good. The ratio of men:women in colleges is nearing 60/40. We are moving to a more service based economy which favors women. Lot's of folks are simply dropping out of the economy and are trending towards being strains on society.

hkmurakami 9y ago
I believe you must mean 40/60.
watwut 9y ago
I suspect that ratio of men vs women in college does have something to do with ratio of men vs women reading and playing videogames. I knew people who did had worst result in school they could have, because they played a lot. Video game industry traditionally targets women much less - and consequently it might cause women to play less and thus read more and do more homework.

walshemj 9y ago

Not sure I buy a xbone one as a leisure luxury playing polo, skiing or a season ticket to Man U id agree.

MollyR 9y ago

When I volunteered at a suicide prevention center, I dealt with a ton of college grads who couldn't find jobs, and were depressed, suicidal and deep in debt. They said they felt alone, and their parents just thought they were lazy. Maybe videogames are their only way to eke out some self-proclaimed happiness being a hero in some fake reality. But that happiness will quickly fade as they age, and they are forced to face reality in terms of resources needed for survival. I think this also explains the rise of the extremist youth groups antifa and the alt-right. Both are dominated by young men looking for purpose and value. edit: maybe also explains the rise of that jordan peterson guy.

verylittlemeat 9y ago
Does anyone else see huge similarities between what this paper is describing and the freeter/hikikomori/herbivore men trends going on in Japan since the late 1980s? I don't have the time or inclination to look into it more deeply but it almost seems like the West is just living through a social reality that has been going on for decades in Japan. Maybe there are some interesting social and economic insights that can be gleaned from that change to predict the future in the west.
- toyg 9y ago
  I was saying this in the late ‘90s. I would get out the relevant posts but they are in Italian anyway; I believe in Italy we saw the phenomenon a bit earlier because of a number of factors (the economy braked earlier than elsewhere, it’s a more traditionalist country than average, etc etc). On the other hand, media and academia are always out to sensationalise. It’s entirely possible that a certain degree of social disaffection has always been there (see “young Werther”, Leopardi and so on), but the overall population growth was such that a small but constant percentage of a community is now a big number in absolute terms.
roymurdock 9y ago
As a 25 YO male this is an issue near and dear to me. IMO it all comes back to slow TFP [1] (total factor productivity) growth. New technology is not (on aggregate) making us more productive, or growing the economy to the point where we need young, college educated men and women to learn productive new skills to sustain and grow our communities and the collective state and country level economy. I went into the embedded industry to learn more about the people and companies that make all the things we take for granted or never think about as kids - cars, planes, industrial PLCs, oil rigs, pacemakers, insulin pumps, ATMs. Modern chip production, and what people have built from tiny MCUs and DSPs all the way up to the crazy beefy CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs is as close to magic as I've found in the real world. But the industry of "global infrastructure" - transportation of people and goods, war, healthcare, manufacturing, resource extraction, retail - as a whole is stagnant. Especially when compared to the golden century we are just coming out of, when our standard of living in developed nations jumped up exponentially due to distributed electricity, indoor plumbing, modern appliances, transistors, data transmission technology, internal combustion engines, and advances in chemical and medical technology (much of this accelerated by research into war technology). Economist Robert Gordon has studied this in detail here [2]. Video games are definitely a way to feel productive, achieve well-defined goals, and get a sense of accomplishment or progression that is often lacking in the workplace. But IMO in many cases they are a symptom of a larger issue, not a cause. There are many forms of escapism, video games are just one that my generation is more accustomed to having grown up and made friends through social interactions over video games alongside traditional things like sports, clubs, parties, etc. The growing need for escapism is IMO the larger issue. [1] In economics TFP is a variable that attempts to capture the effect of technology and infrastructure on the production function. Since these effects are much too complex and indirect to calculate explicitly (how many more widgets can a factory produce because of the roads that allow their workers to drive into work from the suburbs?) it is imputed as a residual. http://www.karlwhelan.com/Macro2/Notes9.pdf http://www.karlwhelan.com/Macro2/Notes9.pdf [2] https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/dp/0691147728/ref=as_li_tf_tl?tag=teco06-20&ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0520271440&linkCode=as2 https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/d...

stillsut 9y ago

There's this huge class of video games that feature: skill-building, leveling-up, acquisition, and when networked, involve team dynamics, assessing other's skill, leadership, earned respect, and a social hierarchy that's based on a meritocracy. Have these type of games become incredibly good over the last ten years? Yes. Have jobs / "the world" gotten less good at providing these rewarding type of experiences? I'm not sure.

dropit_sphere 9y ago
The world doesn't have to have gotten worse. It can simply not optimize for it. I doubt whoever tracks "young male labor engagement" is taken as seriously in their sphere as some game company's engagement czar. And it's for reasons that should be very familiar to HN users: in games, they're the customer, in the rest of the world, they're the product.
ArlenBales 9y ago
A good example of this is the recently released game Monster Hunter: World. It features everything you mentioned. Some players have spent an undeniably unhealthy amount of time in that game in just a few weeks. They boast "I'm High Rank 100 after only 200+ hours!" as if playing a video game for 15+ hours a day was something to be accomplished and proud of. I feel sad for these individuals when they realize all that time was meaningless.
- nradov 9y ago
  Someone would literally have to pay me to get me to play a game like that. It's literally like work. Except for some volunteer activities I don't work for free.
samhain 9y ago
"Skill building" and "Leveling up" are nothing more than operant conditioning on a reward schedule. It's nothing more than a skinner box that has two rooms that you walk between with "level up" being the doorway you'd like to go through. No real work is being done, but the facade of work is enough to trick your brain into thinking it's accomplished something. That real effort could have been expended to do something that could actually benefit the organism, but no, it's wasted on an illusion.

calebsurfs 9y ago

My observation is that teens are taking jobs that were previously done by undocumented immigrants who have left due to the current political climate. I expect immigration policy could be more closely correlated with young men's labor than video games.

adventured 9y ago
Well let's get right to the facts. Fact: the US is not losing undocumented / illegal immigrants at an abnormally high rate. That's a myth. Trump has hardly moved the needle at all when it comes to illegal immigration. Everything to the contrary is propaganda pushed by the media for pathetic political points / ratings. Obama deported more people in an average year than Trump has in his first year. He was known in immigration circles as the deporter in chief for it. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-numbers/story?id=41715661 http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-num... "Illegal immigration on border surges back to Obama levels" https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/15/illegal-immigration-border-back-obama-levels/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/15/illegal-imm...
- calebsurfs 9y ago
  Those are relevant facts but they leave out immigrants who are leaving voluntarily. I couldn't find anything within the last 6 months but there was recently a net outflow of undocumented immigrants [0] http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2017/apr/26/ron-kind/yes-experiencing-net-outflow-illegal-undocumented-/ http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2017/apr/26/r...

verylittlemeat 9y ago

Hand wringing about perceived weak virtues of the youth. I expect an article referencing this in the new york times style section within the week.

merpnderp 9y ago
Presented with data that youth today are falling behind in traditional markers for success, and you're response is mockery? These are young adults who are not accomplishing anything with their time and will have little to show for their time when older. This is a serious social illness worthy of study.
- verylittlemeat 9y ago
  It's interesting to note which social science papers hacker news decides to treat with reverence vs skepticism. It's not a coincidence that a website which treats economic success as the apex cultural trait would cling to a study that validates their own feelings. The startup narrative is a nasty one. If you don't see the economic results you expected it's easy to look outward and try to rationalize why video game playing losers seem to be content or indifferent while you struggle to solve the Big Problems only to be met with mediocre success. The lack of introspection and wholesale othering that leads to completely subjective statements such as: people who play video games are "not accomplishing anything with their time" and they "will have little to show for their time when their older" - are worse than depressing, they're the seeds of resentment, anger and aggression. Ironically it's this irrational hatred that's a social illness worthy of study.
  - merpnderp 9y ago
    I think you missed your mark by some ways. There's a mountain of options in between toiling away 80 hours a week on a startup and living in your parent's basement playing video games. Economic success is the measure of how people are able to provide for themselves and those they care about. Families cost money, houses cost money, living costs money. Someone has to provide the things people consume to live, and they don't want to be slaves to a basement dwelling slacker. If they want to do anything with their lives, and we all do if we want to have good mental health, they'll find a career, be it in startups or working their way up at the local supermarket.

michaelbuckbee 9y ago

In a time where millenials are deeply, structurally pushed down economically [1] Video games make a lot of economic sense to play as they're an incredibly inexpensive form of entertainment on a dollars per hour of entertainment basis. 1 - http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/ http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenni...

dnomad 9y ago
It goes deeper than this but yes this is the right track. The US is a wildly inequal society. Each year it becomes more and more inequal and the latest tax cuts are going to dramatically accelerate the rising inequality. Such widespread inequality has powerful knock-on effects and these effects are converging on these young (likely rural) males. Everything from suppressed wages to supressed business formation to extraordinary economic rents (housing, healthcare) all come together to produce more losers and less (but richer) winners.

rubidium 9y ago

Woah woah woah. I mean video games are a drop in the bucket of the conversation here. WHO actually has 60 hours a week of leisure between the ages of 31-55?! How is that the average? 6am: wake. shower sometimes. 6:15am-7:45: take care of kids, eat breakfast, get dressed. 7:45-5:45: commute and work. 6-7: eat dinner 7-7:30: kids to bed. 7:30-8: cleanup house 8-10: maybe leisure, often home production. 10: bed. Weekends have _at most_ 6 hours of leisure per day. That works out to 22 hours, best case scenario. I asked around the office. No one else is getting 60 hours.

hnaccy 9y ago
>Weekends have _at most_ 6 hours of leisure per day. Why?
- adventured 9y ago
  Mow the lawn, do laundry, clean the house, maybe maintenance on a vehicle with a trip to the dealership or self-work, rake leaves, take the kids to sports practice, run errands, pay bills, do taxes, deal with family problems, deal with being sick or having a child that is sick, fix a broken sink, pick your husband up at the airport an hour drive each way, fix the garage door motor that has been acting up, help your son improve at math by working with him for hours on it over the weekend, and approximately 807 other things that need to get done at some point with weekends being ideal. Simplify life? Oh, sure.
InitialLastName 9y ago
> I asked around the office. No one else is getting 60 hours. Sounds like significant sampling bias right there. US prime age employment rate (25-54 years old) is 78% (which counts part time employees). I'd guess that the 22% you didn't interview, and the part time employees (who likely don't work in an office) are far less busy.
mesozoic 9y ago
no kids, work less, eat fast food, be sloppy Not saying its a great lifestyle but easily get to 60 hours.

irrational 9y ago

> "We calculate that innovations to gaming/recreational computing since 2004 explain on the order of half the increase in leisure for younger men." And the other half is explained by the ready availability of free porn.