Young men are working less than they used to. For all levels of education, men ages 21-30 worked 203 fewer hours in 2015 than they did in 2000. For men with less than a college degree, the decline was an even larger 242 hours, from 1,801 in 2000 to 1,559 in 2015. Determining what has been behind this trend and whether it will persist or deteriorate further has important ramifications for the labor market and the long-term trajectories for the young men involved.
Since 2004, young men (ages 21 to 30) exhibited a larger decline in work hours over the last fifteen years than older men or women. In a recent NBER working paper, Princeton University professor Mark Aguiar, University of Rochester professor Mark Bils and University of Chicago professors Kerwin Kofi Charles and Erik Hurst suggest that improvements in leisure technology, especially video games, are a driving force in the decline in work hours for this group over this period.
The researchers focus on analyzing data on the cohort of young men from the American Time Use Survey. From 2004 to 2015, young men spent 1.4 more average hours per week playing video games, and an overall increase in total leisure activities of 2.3 hours. While average weekly leisure hours for this group increased over the period, hours of market work fell by 2.5 hours, and there were smaller reductions in home production and child care.
Their calculations suggest that innovations in gaming technology explain on the order of half the increase in leisure for younger men. The increase in leisure time dedicated to video games predicts a 1.5 to 3 percent decline in market hours. Other groups saw much smaller declines in work hours over the period, and the authors suggest developments in video games can explain between 38 to 79 percent of the difference in decline with older men.
The authors further decompose time use into young men with and without jobs. Young non-employed men are indeed increasing the average time they spend playing video games, by 2.5 hours per week. However, this group also increased average hours spent on job search and education by 4.7 hours, and reduced time spent on all leisure activities by 4.8 hours. The primary shift for this group has been the substitution of other forms of leisure for video games, along with an increase in studying and searching for work.
Change in Leisure Activities for Young Men (2004-2007 vs. 2012-2015), by Employment Status
Source: Aguiar et al., “Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men.”
On the margin, video games play some role in decisions about labor supply and work hours. It does not appear that video games are uniquely able to explain the recent trends in work hours. As former Treasury Department economist Ernie Tedeschi wrote in an article at Quartz, average weekly hours worked by young U.S. men ages 21-30 have recovered to some extent in recent years. In January 2004 the average was 33 hours. In the wake of the recession this fell to a low point of 29 in January 2010, and have since risen back to 33 in May 2017.
Note: Y-axis is average hourly weeks worked for young men ages 21-30.
Source: Ernie Tedeschi, via Quartz.
If developments in video games were largely responsible for causing young men to reduce their working hours, to some degree a similar dynamic should be playing out in other developed countries where young men have access to, and play, these same video games.
Unless video games have gotten substantially worse in the past year, the trends in working hours for young men seem to belie video games being the main explanatory factor for changes in work hours. Looking at the four countries with the highest video game revenues per capita (Japan, United States, United Kingdom, and Republic of Korea), there is not a broad trend in the divergence in the trends in employment rates for young men compared to older men. The main argument in the Aguiar et al. paper is about hours worked, rather than employment rate, but they also examine employment rates. While Korea has seen a substantial divergence, this began in the early 1990s, long before the inflection point identified in the paper. The United Kingdom and Japan have not seen the same recent trend, as the difference in employment rates for young men (25-29) vs. older men (35-44) is about the same that it was in 2000.
Note: Y-axis is difference between employment rate for the two age groups, with that difference normalized to 0 for the year 2000. Older age group is different in this calculation than comparison age group in Aguiar et al.
Source: OECD, “LFS by sex and age – indicators.”
As a group, young men are playing more video games than they use to and working fewer hours. The lack of a similar uniform effect among other high video game revenue countries, and the recent recovery in hours worked for young men, suggest that video games are not uniquely able to explain a significant share of recent trends for young men in the United States. A strengthening labor market would help their average hours worked continue to recover, even if video games get even better.
Charles Hughes is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute and author of the new report The Energy Bottleneck: Why America Needs More Pipelines. Follow him on twitter @CharlesHHughes.
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