Young Men Don’t Work Because Video Games Are Too Good, Cruel Study Says

Video games have already been (often wrongly) blamed for violence, laziness, and educational failures. Now, thanks to a new paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Monday, gamers are enduring yet another personal attack. This time, economists are arguing that innovations in video games could be affecting the amount of men in the workforce, the New York Times reports.

Authors of the paper "Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men" asked the following question: How much have innovations to leisure technology reduced the labour supply of younger men? Specifically, how has the evolution of video games and other recreational computer activities affected this?

What the authors estimate is that video games have been responsible for reducing the amount young men work in a year by 15 to 30 hours since 2004.

Data from American time use surveys shows that between 2004 and 2015, leisure time of young men (ages 21-30) went up by 2.3 hours a week. When it comes to video gaming in particular, young American spent 60 percent of their extra leisure time playing video games. (Note: This analysis excludes full-time students.)

Leisure time of women of the same age group grew by 1.4 hours during that timespan—however, a negligible amount of this leisure time was spent on video games. For older men and women, video games also accounted for a negligible amount of leisure time.

By 2015, men 21 to 30 were working less per year than the same age group was working at the turn of the century: 203 fewer hours. The change in hours worked per year for younger men stands at odds with men ages 31 to 50, who only worked 163 hours fewer. (And as it happens, video games evolved quite significantly in the same time period; World of Warcraft was first released in 2004, for example.)

Though the paper makes the connection of the evolution of gaming technology in relation to the number of young men in the workforce, there is undoubtedly an array of complex issues (such as labour demand and wages) that have contributed in the US.

Before anyone comes at me over being a woman writing this, I'd like to point out that I have no room to talk as someone who has spent entirely too much of my life playing World of Warcraft.

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