Young Men Give Up Work for Video Games? Be Skeptical

In our debate about unemployment last September, my Bloomberg View colleague Tyler Cowen put forward the hypothesis that many young American men are staying out of the workforce in order to indulge in electronic media. Tyler was probably referring to research by Chicago Booth School of Business economist Erik Hurst. Hurst, along with a number of co-authors, has been promoting the theory that advances in video games have made joblessness more enjoyable, inducing young men to go from workers to couch potatoes.

Now, in a new paper with Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils and Kerwin Kofi Charles, Hurst argues forcefully for this thesis. Using data from the American Time Use Survey, they show that young men are spending more of their time playing video games compared with a decade ago: