Video games and labor
2018-02-21 16:01:53.570417+00 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
RT Eλf Sternberg @elfsternberg
<blockuote>"Leisure luxuries and the labor supply of young men." https://scholar.princeton.edu/...ure-luxuries-labor-june-2017.pdf Man, if video games dropped labor involvement in men under 30 by 3%, just wait until sexbots hit the market.
The abstract:
Younger men, ages 21 to 30, exhibited a larger decline in work hours over the last fifteen years than older men or women. Since 2004, time-use data show that younger men distinctly shifted their leisure to video gaming and other recreational computer activities. We propose a framework to answer whether improved leisure technology played a role in reducing younger men’s labor supply. The starting point is a leisure demand system that parallels that often estimated for consumption expenditures. We show that total leisure demand is especially sensitive to innovations in leisure luxuries, that is, activities that display a disproportionate response to changes in total leisure time. We estimate that gaming/recreational computer use is distinctly a leisure luxury for younger 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.