Just like millennials projecting to have one of the lowest voter turnouts in the presidential election, a rising percentage of millennials (particularly men) aren’t turning up for work, choosing video games and a life of leisure.
New research by economists from Princeton, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester found that it’s not the lingering weakness of the economy that’s to blame for young, less-educated men for not finding steady, gainful employment. Rather, these young men without college degrees are choosing to live at home with their parents and playing video games. And they’re happier for it, well, at least for the moment.
Erik Hurst, an economist with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who helped lead the research, told the Washington Post, “Happiness has gone up for this group, despite employment percentages having fallen, and the percentage living with parents going up. And that’s different than for any other group.”
In 2015, 22 percent of men between the ages of 21 to 30 with less than a bachelor’s degree reported not working at all in the previous year (2014), which is a 9.5 percent increase from 2000. Instead of working, the Census Bureau’s time-use survey reports that young men without a college degree have replaced 75 percent of the time they used to spend working with time spent on the computer, most of whom were playing video games.
“People have switched so much time, more time than we would have predicted, to computers and video games, and our model attributes that to technological progress,” Hurst said, noting that unemployed young men aren’t turning to video games, but are getting lured from the workforce by highly sophisticated games.
So, while Donald Trump proposes bringing back jobs to America and Hillary Clinton promises to raise the minimum wage, perhaps they should start developing better work-training programs for the less educated, if they can’t develop the next Witcher or Grand Theft Auto.
