Young men gaming more. Are they working less?

During the first decade and a half of this century, young American men devoted a growing amount of time to computer and video games and a shrinking amount to work. In a 2017 paper that received tons of attention, four economists proposed that better games (“improved leisure technology”) were luring young men away from the workplace. In a response that received less attention but that I found more convincing, economist Gray Kimbrough argued that the interaction between weak labor demand and “a shift in social norms (that) rendered playing video games more acceptable at later ages” explained the data better.

It may be time for some new hypotheses. Statistics released last month
by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics from the annual American Time Use Survey show that the time young men spent “playing games” — the survey doesn’t differentiate between electronic and non-electronic games, but most researchers assume it’s chiefly the former — rose by nearly three-quarters of an hour from 2019 to 2022, more than it had increased over the previous 16 years.

I don’t think there’s been a sudden acceleration in video-game quality improvement over the past three years, and labor demand was quite strong in 2021 and 2022. There was, however, a pandemic that brought big layoffs in early 2020 and an extended experiment in remote schooling and work that continued long after that. Amid all that disruption, young men turned to their computers and gaming consoles. So did young women, but from a much lower starting point.

What are young men doing less to free up time for all that gaming? That’s hard to say with too much confidence: All these estimates are derived from a survey of about 26,400 households that is subject to sampling and other errors, and while the increases in gaming time are so big we can be confident that they represent a real phenomenon, some of the other changes could be mostly noise. Still, it does appear that, since the pandemic, most of the additional gaming time has come from work and sports/exercise/recreation.

Before the pandemic, there was a big decline in the estimated time young men spent socialising and communicating, and smaller drops in the time spent participating in organisational and religious activities and watching TV — with the latter activity, at 2.14 hours a week in 2022, probably destined to be surpassed by gaming soon. Notably, given the academic debate discussed at the beginning of this column, there wasn’t any decline in hours worked. That’s partly because young men’s average working hours rose after the periods examined in the papers discussed above, which seems to lend support to Kimbrough’s argument, but also possibly because both papers examined trends among men ages 21 through 30 while the statistics in all the charts here are for ages 15 through 24, which is how the BLS reports them.

The share of men ages 15 to 24 who spent at least some time playing games on an average day topped 50 percent for the first time in 2022, at 52.4 percent. Before the electronic era, playing games was often a social activity (bridge, anyone?), and it’s possible that part of what’s been transpiring is that the social aspect of gaming has made a comeback, with a big boost from
pandemic lockdowns during which multiplayer online games provided a socially distanced way to spend time with friends.

Then there’s the question of games versus work. The 20-to-24 age group has lagged both teenagers and prime-age (25 to 54) workers in the job market recovery of the past three years, with labor-force participation still down 2.1 percentage points since February 2020 among the men, as of May, and 1.3 points among the women. I don’t think games are really the cause of this, but the big increase in time spent on them could be a symptom of the disruption the pandemic caused for a subset of young adults who had just joined or were on the cusp of joining the labor market, and it’s possible that heavy video game use is making it harder for some to get their lives back on track. Among men ages 15 to 24 who spent at least some time playing games on an average day in 2022, the average time spent was 3.82 hours, which is a pretty significant chunk of the day, and 8 percent of those in the age group played for six or more hours a day. I think that might be too much!

Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to conclude this column by yelling at the youngsters to stop spending so much time playing video games. How could I, given that young men and their gaming consoles still don’t hold a candle to old men and their televisions? American men 65 and older spent an average of just more than five hours a day watching TV in 2022, up from just more than four in 2003.

I don’t think this trend has significant labor-market implications, but the fact that those 65 and older make up a larger share of the US population than ever and are watching more TV than ever probably explains a lot about our strange political era, and also just seems kind of sad. The slight decline in TV time since 2019 is within the margin of error, but the fact that it didn’t grow during the pandemic is at least slightly encouraging. Seriously, my soon-to-be-fellow elderly Americans (I’m 59): stop watching so much TV!

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.

Credit: Bloomberg