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The left out the porn.
"When I watch porn, I know if I have a few minutes I will be rewarded," he said. "With a girl, it's always been up in the air with the amount of work I put in and the reward."
How do they support themselves? Parents basement?
yes that was the point of the article(that you obviously didn't read), young men aren't going out and doing the low level jobs that would lead to career advancement. they're doing them but at later ages, leading them to miss the cutoff for advancement and being stuck in lower level roles
"That's a big chunk of labor that could be used for something, and we're not using it," said Greg Kaplan, an economist at the University of Chicago who was not involved with the new research.
I'm also an economist and this guy is not smart. Others will rush in the fill the void. Marginally there will be almost no difference. This guy is forgetting that directly below this group of men who now play video games is a nearly equal capable group who now has better job opportunities. This logic continues to ratchet all the way down....
This isn't rocket science. Only if there was never a poorer group could this be true
I think he's referring to "cognitive surplus", not opportunity cost as you seem to imply. So for example, if these guys were paid to play games which solved problems for other people, or were given jobs that used similar skills they have been cultivating while playing these games. Think perhaps a form of Mechanical Turk or SETI@home.
I don't see how your statement contradicts his. The fact that other people will rush in to fill the void doesn't change the fact that tons of people will still be sitting at home playing video games. Hence his statement about a big chunk of labor remaining unused is still true.
Also, there's absolutely no guarantee that job opportunities will become more attractive at a rate that matches the attractiveness of video games. It's not hard to imagine a world 20 years from now in which millions of people spend 12+ hours a day in what essentially amounts to the Matrix, slaying dragons, shooting bad guys, and saving princesses. You might say to them, "Go out and get a job! There's no competition! You could make great money!" To which they could very logically reply, "Why would I need lots of money for? I'm perfectly happy right now."
Ready Player One comes to mind.
But are they really a chunk of labour?
Like if people that chose to not work and play video games are a chunk of unused labour than so are unemployed alcoholics.
It's kind of a self-selecting thing, do you really want the people that don't want to work?
If the economists in the article are to be believed, these aren't simply "people that don't want to work." They're people who ordinary have always worked, but are now being actively persuaded not to by this new force known as video games. So it's not analogous to alcoholics being alcoholics. It's better compared to the introduction of a wholly new drug into society, which has subsequently altered the behavior of a heretofore normal, hard-working, non-addicted segment.
Secondly, while it may seem appropriate to deride these people as useless and lazy ne'er-do-wells, that characterization isn't apt. It's not as if they're living lives of misery, unable to overcome some base desire to pull themselves out of it. Quite the contrary: they're happier than the rest of us. They're looking at the options that society has presented them with, and making a perfectly logical choice to spend their days engaged in meaningful, rewarding, social, challenging, and fulfilling activity -- in a fantasy world. Why would they go to work at dead end jobs if they have the option not to?
Oh you're an economist, huh? And Greg Kaplan isn't smart? Doubt it.
No matter if the "void" is filled with other people, there will always be a big chunk of labour that could be used for something NOT being utilised.
Stimulant of the masses
This article is a pile of just-so bullshit designed to appeal to baby boomers so they can convince themselves that voting against unemployment benefits isn't going to directly screw over a whole bunch parents and children from all over the social strata.
Facts are not BS.
Data is also not the plural of anecdote.
Stitching together a bunch of statistics with anecdotes is not research, which is what the article does whereas the actual source is as yet still unpublished.
Of course the article is somewhat worse then that: the anecdotes pretty clearly paint a picture of a poor job market with few low-skill opportunities for advancement. But speculates wildly that it must just be video games.
In order to qualify for unemployment benefits, one needs to have been employed.
What jobs? All the ones I know of are for people with "experience" with XYZ. Pardon if out of the bazillion candidates in this world, biz's can't find that oxymoron of a candidate: the perfect, outgoing socialite whose as good at brown-nosing as he is on the PC. You could roll the dice to go to school and end up stuck in debt over your head (btw, loan defaults are ever on the rise).
There's more to this story than just the problems of getting a job. Society has become very digitized, and more and more, I'm seeing children play LESS because of busy schedules, so it gets replaced by the next most convenient addicting thing: video games. Result? - Loss of imagination. When I hear of schools "bringing in technology", I can only cringe at how insert explicative the administration must be to not realize that technology is not a solution, it's only a tool. Kids aren't getting smarter (in fact, I only hear it's getting worse), they are becoming less inspired. Some guys I know got their degrees and only looked for work because they knew they needed it, but they had effectively no passion, no dream at doing much in life, and the fun they had was primarily from gaming. As someone who dreamed of doing big things, I found myself rather lonely in my objectives. (Needless to say, I don't play video games.) Anyone else felt this way?
There's jobs for people who work hard. The vast majority of people don't want to do the hard work required to get a job.
A sense of entitlement for a job won't lead to anything except sitting at home playing video games wondering why no one has recognised the game players genius.
It's easy to overcome lack of experience - at least in the field of software development - by using your time not playing computer games but by programming and writing code for a well-known open source project. People don't want to hear this advice though - they want to know if there is an easier way.
So let's think this tautology through. It's difficult to get a job -> person is not able to get employment -> person becomes unemployed -> only lazy people are unemployed -> lazy people don't want jobs -> therefore everyone is employed
You can make my words say that if you want.
It's an empty statement because as long as anyone is employed, there will still be "enough jobs for people who work hard." It doesn't matter if there's 99.999% unemployment, since working hard by your definition is circularly referenced to already having a job. The word for that is a tautology.
I think people want to know why there's no longer an easier way. It seems people 50 years ago didn't have to dedicate their waking hours from 6 to 18 years old constructing an impressive enough resume to give them the luxury of then dumping a hundred thousand dollars on an employable education.
Software has an obscenely low bar for getting experience, you're right. Software comprises enough job vacancies to employ the country?
The simple fact is that the system is obviously broken, and it should be just as obvious that it wasn't broke by the people who weren't yet born when it fell apart.
I'll tell you, I'm a pretty hard worker. I work nowhere near as hard as the laborers down the street who go day in day out being told this incoherent narrative of "just work harder and it'll pay off!" There's no reason to believe that it will. Why wouldn't they just do bare minimum and go home and play video games?
I only know employment in IT. I have no doubt that people in other sectors, particularly blue collar, have it much harder.
It is normal for blue collar workers to make 2x - 4x more than white collar workers today. This is in my area so things may be different elsewhere.
Kids don't want to go into blue collar work because it is looked down upon as a 'lack of advancement' or similar middle class trope.
Uh it might be normal for some. And by some I mean highly skilled unionized workers.
Let's not forget the millions of blue collar workers who had their jobs disappear overnight in the past 15 years. Many of these people showed loyalty to their employers for spans of several decades. Of course, loyalty plays no role in the calculus of capitalism.
You think a kid should aspire to a blue collar job right after an entire generation of blue collar workers were laid off at the stroke of a pen? Right when every other post on the front page of HN carries foreboding of an automation job-pocalypse just a decade after an outsourcing job-pocalypse?
You're a maniac. Anyone capable of evaluating these options with an ounce of foresight is going to take the gamble on college and make a desperate debt-ridden attempt to scramble to the top of the knowledge economy. The only economy that isn't demonstrably under threat.
Some clarification.
I do blue collar and white collar work myself. Not in America, not a member of a union. I don't think most blue collar workers I know are in unions, maybe some of the electricians but that is probably it. I don't think they need one either, it is a kind of hold-over.
I code (for my projects, some of which spin money as well as independent work) and also do things like cleaning, plastering etc. I make a good deal more money this way in my situation.
For the sake of a comparison, I usually earn at least $30-40 per hour in blue collar activity, often more, but the payments for code tend to be highly variable. I prefer to choose jobs I find personally enjoyable or those with objectives I support, which is a freedom I value a lot. I probably make about the same or less if you averaged out everything, but it is not entirely about economics.
I also don't like to make a sharp distinction between the different things I do for a living. I think that is a old fashioned way of thinking. I've gotten software work from blue collar jobs and blue collar jobs from software work I've done. I actually think the pay is higher this way.
We should make a distinction between factory labour (which I agree has had serious job reductions over time) and the trades, which have done quite well over time and are relatively prosperous in real terms. I think this is also true in the USA judging from what I've heard.
I have a computer science degree from a red brick university. I think I know about automation and AI. I have read Norvig/Russell's book from cover to cover a couple of times.
It is like this:
If your job is very routine, it was or is being automated by machines with an extreme division of labour.
That is the history of the past few centuries.
If your job is routine and information-centric, then it was or is being automated by computer programmers like myself.
That is the history of the past few decades.
If however your job falls into three categories:
1. Information-centric and novel. e.g. starting your own company with software skills, or even a job in the entertainment industry.
2. People-centric jobs, like being a host, gym trainer or prostitute.
3. Skilled labour. Skilled labour is almost always novel. Tadelakt finishes or custom cabinetry is not about to be automated.
You know why? Because people want authenticity. It is like the economy of the neo-victorians in The Diamond Age.
People who buy furniture from IKEA are not the rich of society.
Machine made = stuff normal people can buy = not elite = not fashionable. Machine production is too orderly, too linear.
This is not theoretical. I've ordered a bunch of jobs done that I could have gotten cheaper if I chose the automated option but I don't want to. This is a phenomenon I see everywhere.
We just don't see the same world.
In fact it is much worse than you think, because I don't even agree our society is becoming more technologically advanced.
It is in computation, and computation related fields. Which is a lot. But it is not everything. Energy prices are exponentially higher than they were in the 1970s.
Silicon Valley is not powerful enough to lift up the entire economy. Not even close!
Ex-computation, there has been very little technological growth for the last few decades. There's a few bright spots, like fracking and solar but huge parts of the economy have not seen technological or economic progress for half a lifetime.
You can think I'm a manic if you want, but Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Summers and Larry Page all agree with me on this.
An Edit: Just to be clear. We probably agree wages are stuck for the average person (look at my other posts), and that opportunities are dimming. The difference is that you believe automation to be the cause, but I am saying the exact opposite, that it is actually a lack of general development that is causing joblessness and wage stagnation. One of us has to be wrong!
The knowledge economy? At one point in the past, this used to be accounting, law and medicine. Maybe engineering. Accounting has been largely automated. Law is under siege. Digital discovery has laid waste to huge swaths of paralegal demand. And the assault on the medical practitioner ("don't you know how long I went to school? I don't need a computer to tell me what I already know") is coming soon (modulo manual procedures and the people-centric bits)
If you mean we computer programmers - by and large, from what I can tell, we're the new factory worker. Some of us even rise up to start our own factory. And usually (by the numbers) we fail.
I spent years doing semiconductor in Japan and then a couple of decades doing software in (mostly) the US. My Japanese wife wants our kids to be lawyers or doctors or engineers. I'm not sure that becoming welders or air-conditioner techs wouldn't be a safer (and less globalize-able) choice.
"It seems people 50 years ago didn't have to dedicate their waking hours from 6 to 18 years old constructing an impressive enough resume"
People 50 years ago didn't go to University - and they took a menial job at the factory, or did 'what their parents' did, took over the family shop/farm etc..
They earned very little, travelled little, had little in the way of material or aspirational opportunities.
They also had strong gender, family, social roles they were expected to adhere to, including going to Church every Sunday.
They also lived in mostly ethnocentric communities, knew their neighbours.
'We chose' what we have now, and at least in material terms, it's a whole lot better. There's a lot of opportunity out there.
Yes, it means most people will have to 'work' - and do things like accounting, IT, customer support etc. etc. - but frankly, that's not so bad.
Most people have little to complain about.
That is some extraordinary revisionism you've come up with there.
It is the 1960s, not the 1600s.
Real wage growth stalls half way through the 70s, just five years later.
In the 1960's people did not travel. Commercial air was for the rich. People might have had a family outing, by car, to Disneyland or something. Now people travel worldwide.
"Real wage growth stalls half way through the 70s, just five years later."
This is completely false - and is a function of how we calculate inflation. In fact, it's laughably false. A 'medium wage earner' today has a significantly improved material situation than in the 1960's. Everything is significantly better for the common person on a common wage.
The average person today has multiple TV's, cable, internet, smartphone, 'apps', 500 channels, amazing healthcare, amazing cars (have you ever driven a car from the 1960's), travel possibilities, educational possibilities.
The notion that real wages have been stagnant is one of the most laughable economic fallacies of the modern era. Anyone alive in that time knows exactly the truth. Financial concerns aside (aka debt), a good measure of wealth is 'what you can buy with it'. The average person is significantly wealthier than the average person in the 1960s.
So how about sources then?
I can tell you the answer they typically give.
They, and this is not a joke, put a 'hedonic adjustment' for quality of life into inflation. The criteria is not measurable, it's about feeling, not seeing.
It is the same answer the Fed gives to the government. They definitely do not believe it, but we're talking about people effectively employed to be the Wizard of Oz here.
We didn't do that for the transition from gas lamps to electric or for horse drawn buggy to car. It is bullshit.
When real wages go up people can actually tell. I don't believe in democracy and thereby take polling with sacks of salt, but I do believe in the wisdom of crowds when they have knowledge or experience, and boy are Westerners pessimistic about both the economy and the government since around 2008. Every Gallup poll and Pew survey shows it.
"So how about sources then?"
Are you kidding me?
You must be young :).
Don't you have grandparents? Ask them. Look at their photos.
Are you too young to remember a time without smartphones, internet?
Have you ever driven a car from the 1960s?
Would you dare say that a Nintendo 64 is 'the same as' an XBox one?
You do realize that commercial air has exploded since the 1960's - it was once a 1%-er activity?
You do know that the number of people attending post-high school education is about tripled, right?
Do you remember a time when 'open heart surgery' was extremely rare and probably meant you died? It's common now. They can do hip replacements with a little slit. If you can't get a hard-on - there's a pill for that.
Do you realize that 'there was no TV' in the early 1950's for all intents and purposes?
That a large number of people, on farms and rural areas did not have plumbing (i.e. toilets?). My eldest uncle used an outhouse until he was 16. And they were the 'rich' family in town - with the first colour TV!
Do you realize that this very discussion could not even happen in the 1970's? And that basically nobody envisioned that it could have?
Man - not even long ago - about the late 1990's - 'cell phones' were still a 'rich person' thing. Zero kids had cellphones. There was a meme of 'rich dicks' on their large cellphones talking loudly to brag that they had them.
Life expectancy is way up.
Almost every measure.
You have to be very young if you're asking that question.
Every single facet of material life has improved, except maybe 'time spent in traffic' and 'debt load'. And since 2008 the average home size and cars/person ratio has gone down a little bit.
Oh so all these kids should just go find a farm to work on or factory to work in.
It's not like the vast majority of those jobs are either outsourced or handed to the lowest bidder (who is then systematically abused).
Of course people travelled 50 years ago. They could even afford to own the roofs over their houses!
Doesn't matter if the business wants x y and z, if you only have x you write a letter and apply anyway. As in dating, let the other partner turn you down.
My first thought was "What games?"
This is the demographic that's traditionally fueling crime/war. You can give a positive twist to the story by rephrasing the title "study finds young men are playing video games instead of shooting people."
Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I think men are obsolete. Men are responsible for forcing all the natives out, setting up the government, constructing nearly every piece of infrastructure and creating nearly all technology. Not to minimize the potential of women (patriarchy really, really held them down), just highlighting that these male flavored contributions to society are really not needed anymore.
The most needlessly sexist thing I'll read today.
Is this sarcasm by any chance?
For a potential solution, see "15 Million Merits", the second episode of Black Mirror. :)
Such a depressing series
Often, getting a job is a stepping stone to impress a woman, get married, and have children.
That takes a long time, and women these days usually work, making your job a lot less attractive to them.
Why not play video games at home? At least then you'd know you'd have some fun.
Marrying an overweight/tatooed/feminist older woman is not much fun!
There are many companies (should be familiar to anyone in tech) and well funded organizations working hard to give more opportunities to women.
Well, they succeeded and this is what success looks like.
Their work hasn't stopped either, so expect even more success in the future.
I had two thoughts as I read this:
- Lots of talk about how the happiness of this group of people was higher, but no numbers on the happiness of their parents. I have three kids. I love them immensely. I don't want them living with me in their 20's. Especially spending all day playing video games while I work to pay the bills.
- I wonder what proponents of Universal Basic Income would say about this. Turns out that when there's less incentive to do things, less gets done. Which seems to run contrary to the narrative of "if only I didn't have to worry about bills, I could do something meaningful." At least for me, I find providing for my wife and children quite meaningful. What job I choose to do that is almost secondary.
Two words. Real wages. They are at historic lows.
Real wages didn't get higher when they got kicked out of the basement. The difference is they had to do something in order to feed themselves.
I think a 20 y/o who lives with their parents so they can play video games is a sloth. I fully intend to teach my kids the same. I expect them to leave and take care of themselves even if the only opportunities available to them are blue collar / manual labor that pay very little.
The decrease in real wages lowers the incentive to work. But so does a society that views playing video games in your parents' basement in lieue of entering the workforce as acceptable.
That probably sounds harsh, but (at least from the article) it seems like these people haven't had difficulties getting jobs when they're in their 30s with equally poor experience. They're just ten years behind the earnings curve.
I don't really disagree. Some of it is attitude. That and what the book the Millionaire Next Door referred to as Economic Outpatient Care.
It is just that in the past the standard of living also was raised, and the market had to bear higher costs to motivate people to work.
If you examine the pay of our grandparents and parents you see they experienced very considerable wage growth in their lifetimes while the standard of living was rising, like by a factor of 10. Roofing contractors were paid a dollar a day in 1900!
That impetus is missing from the labour market today. It is partly that some of the people mentioned in the study feel like they have better things to do, but a lot of it has to do with the trajectory and speed of wage growth.
When you feel like your prospects are 'capped', you're bound to be less motivated.
I've heard employers whining they can't find the right people in the WSJ and NYT for some time now (subtext: at subpar rates of pay) and I think this should be treated with the same reverence given to lazy bones on the coach there. None.
IRL, rewards come slowly, if ever. Setbacks can cost years of loss of 'progression'. We are mostly, by definition, average, without much agency, without much optimism, without much opportunity. Video games provide the shortest path to a rich, rewarding experience for our minds. Platitudes about hard work aside (for they are for the exceptional), we are helpless in our pleasure seeking, pain avoiding minds. The disappointing mundanity of the 'real world' cannot compete.
Where is the link to the actual study? I could not find it in the article. Anyone have the actual journal article?
I took a long drive on Saturday, and on the way home I travelled past my old place. I got hit by a wave of nostalgia as I went past.
When home I found a Reddit post by a guy who overlays the Guild Wars maps on the Guild Wars 2 map[1]. Wave of nostalgia... followed by a realization, I can still play Guild Wars.
I cannot go back to my old house and relive my memories, but I'm a quick download from remembering similar memories made in that same house while playing Guild Wars.
That's powerful. It's the same reason my parent and grandparents made photo albums and home movies.
I can literally play a game to help me relive my memories and it's not just me grasping for moments in my head, but it's literally the same experience.
When I'm old and dying I'll have the chance to start up a video game and get my nostalgia fix with far more satisfaction than if I was telling a story of my childhood to any of my future grand children.
[1] http://guide.thatshaman.com/