A link between video games and unemployment
economist.com
A link between video games and unemployment
1–10 of 177 posts
Re: A link between video games and unemployment
#2The actual paper is really interesting.
Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men http://economics.sas.upenn.edu/system/files/event_papers/lei...
Re: A link between video games and unemployment
#3The direction of causation (if there is one at all) is rather important as the article states. I have no time for video games at all, no I have no good feel for how likely they would be preferred over work and real financial independence for all but a very few.
Re: A link between video games and unemployment
#4Of course, because the lower salaries, the high prices of the houses and the global crisis during these years has nothing to do with the unemployment in the young population.
Re: A link between video games and unemployment
#5>games will go on getting better
I don't think there's any evidence for this, and the call to panic is based on it.
Re: A link between video games and unemployment
#6After recently becoming unemployed, and in my spare time when not looking for jobs, I finally started working on my gaming backlog from sales (e.g. Witcher 3) and experimented with games that have a time commitment I have been avoiding, such as MMOs and League of Legends (which I ended up stopping because the rumors of a toxic playerbase are not inaccurate)
At the least, I got it out of my system and am now back to personal technical projects/blogging.
Re: A link between video games and unemployment
#7>games will go on getting better I don't think there's any evidence for this, and the call to panic is based on it.
yeah that makes no sense. Games will go on getting visually better but Gameplay, fun, replayability has very little to do with it.
Re: A link between video games and unemployment
#8>games will go on getting better I don't think there's any evidence for this, and the call to panic is based on it.
I think a better way to phrase that might have been "games will become more effective Skinner boxes", as developers discover new and more powerful ways to keep people in the reward loop. Because that's the real concern here.
Re: A link between video games and unemployment
#9Of course, because the lower salaries, the high prices of the houses and the global crisis during these years has nothing to do with the unemployment in the young population.
The article does note this, albeit using "good job" as a proxy for "all the things one might have historically expected to stem from having a good job."
This seems like a forewave of the trends that point towards the basic income argument. Fewer productive jobs being necessary than labor force to fill them results in bifurcation of the labor market: between overpaid specialties (e.g. software dev) and underpaid make-work (e.g. McDonald's and Walmart) there's been a hollowing out "historically normal" jobs that don't take specialized knowledge but are still productive enough to afford a good quality of life.
In the face of this, opting out and escaping into a virtual world seems fairly reasonable. Especially if you're on the losing end of whatever the current hot specializations are.
Re: A link between video games and unemployment
#10If nothing else, at least those economists have found the solution to keep people occupied when AI renders half the world unemployed. Now the premise of the Matrix doesn't seem so far fetched after all.