Millennial Men Choose Video Games Over Jobs

From FreedomProject Media:

The American workforce may be shrinking, and it is not for a lack of employment opportunities. As a result of lower prices and enhanced technology, video games are simply becoming a better option for how to spend one’s time — specifically young men’s time.

According to research published in the September 2017 issue of National Bureau of Economic Research Digest, between 2000 through 2015, the “average hours of work for men ages 21-30 fell by 203 hours per year.” This equates to a 12 percent decline over the time period. Excluding those who are full-time students, nearly 15 percent of men in their twenties did not work a single week all of 2015. That number is almost double what it was at the turn of the century.

Research by Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils, Kerwin Kofi Charles, and Erik Hurst finds that young, able-bodied men are simply staying home and filling the extra hours with leisure activities, at much greater rates than young women or older men.

“Moreover, we calculate that innovations to gaming/recreational computing since 2004 explain on the order of half the increase in leisure for younger men, and predict a decline in market hours of 1.5 to 3.0 percent, which is 38 and 79 percent of the differential decline relative to older men.”

In layman’s terms, millennial men are gaming, not working.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Photo: Thinkstock