The Free-Time Paradox in America
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
If you view underemployed young people with lots of "free time" as trapped by leisure and cheap entertainment, the paradox goes away - they're not in an enviable position at all.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/this-is-y...
I think that keeping yourself mentally occupied is much easier these days though. Like, you can get pretty serious about just about any hobby with the internet. And like it's crazy what you can sink your time into if you really care about it.
A retired mechanical engineer spends his time making videos of mechanical linkages in CAD. He's was at 1700 a year ago, hard to say how many he's at now, he's still releasing them. This is what technological progress looks like I think, in a couple of years this will be shown in just about any intro class into the subject and it will reduce the learning time by like, i don't even know, 100x? 1000x? Idk how these were described before but boy do they seem hard to describe in anything but animation.
I'm also having a hard time imagining his brain isn't getting exercised just fine.
I'm not a mechanical engineer and I spent like good 15-20 minutes watching them and getting quite a bit out of it.
"And these young men are happy—or, at least, they self-report higher satisfaction than this age group used to"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12524448
It's hard work being a human being.
The brain is good at what you practice it doing. I very much hope that I wouldn't need to be as mentally active as I am right now when I retire.
There is a sense in which being "productive" implies creating value, i.e., producing more value than you consume. If you restrict yourself to the realm of money, then being productive generally involves profit (e.g., producing something that gives net increase in monetary value over consumption costs). But if some person with leisure values things that other people generally don't want to pay money for (e.g., writing poetry), their leisure time can be productive (producing poetry) while they're purely an economic consumer (making no money, but spending money to live).
> There's a reason that retiring early is literally bad for your brain [0] - healthy adults are supposed to be engaged in productive activity. Whether productive activity means punching a clock, volunteering at a $nonprofit or striking out on your own, the point is that our minds and bodies need to be actively living, not just passively consuming
I would also agree that a person having some leisure that is "just passively consuming" is fine, maybe even good. But I'm pretty sure it's bad if _all_ of a person's leisure is "just passively consuming", at least if they have a decent amount of leisure (if you're working 80 hour weeks then it's probably not bad at all to have your leisure time all be passive consumption).
It's not really a hard-and-fast rule, but I suspect in many cases that leisurely-but-productive activities have output that is only nominally productive, like, I don't know, amateur painting, dime novels, learning a couple chords on guitar.
Really economically valuable output usually seems to require concerted work, which (even if fun) most don't think of as leisurely.
On the health issue - most of the studies I've seen cap the health benefits of working at a few hours a week. Volunteering for an hour a day seems to be just as beneficial as spending most of your waking hours on an office job.
I spent just as much unemployed time between jobs both times (about 6 weeks), but the second time around was worlds better. I wasn't working full time, I had plenty of leisure time, but instead of using that time sitting around watching TV and wallowing, I had lunch with friends, I studied in cafes, after volunteering I took walks around the city, I went to bookstores -- it was awesome! I actually miss being unemployed. Having a "thing" you have to do during the day, instead of a vast blank schedule is an amazing psychological boost.
The problem is that people don't know how to use their free time, and so it ends up spent getting high and watching TV. Maybe people would be better at exploiting the time they have if they were allowed free time earlier in life. Kids are pretty good at taking advantage of the time they have, maybe if they were allowed to keep more freedom through to adulthood they'd keep the skill. Maybe if our non-free time weren't so stressful we wouldn't feel the need to use our free time just to unwind. Or maybe its that entertainment has gotten too compelling. I'd rather not believe that people have an innate need to be forced to do whatever they do.
I think our 19th-century-style schools are the problem: we drum information and behaviours into kids until they forget how to be independent. All this time wasted sitting at a desk in a classroom means they might miss out on the chance to develop a passion for something, something that they would fill their free time with later in life. And then we're surprised that people just want to watch netflix.
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_cre...
No amount of time spent with friends is "really unproductive", it literally keeps us alive. I didn't see a note about it in this article, but I suspect that the no-income people that are happier with their lives are doing low cost entertainment activities with friends.
The implication of the statement "Humans absolutely need jobs in order to lead happy, beneficial lives" is that humans are, by their very nature, to stupid to figure out how to do it by themselves.
I very strongly believe it's a cultural problem, not a human problem.
Today, society built many layers on top of nature. Big business bureaucracy guarantees food if you work for 8 hours. But at the edges of society, it is still very rough.
My business isn't going to grow just because I worked 8 hours. It only grows if I solve my customers' problems, regardless of how many hours it takes. I think this applies to the common "rich people" positions as well.
You get the feeling that in years past, the ZMP would have been given some measure of slack, and allowed to work their way into a more productive status. But that's what's changed. I think there's been a cultural shift - look at the relatively unpleasant reports on how peoples jobs are now. Plus, unemployment ( especially if you're of an age to live with parents in their McMansion or even your old bedroom in a more modest home ) is a lot more comfortable than it used to be.
There's been a long-term trend towards advancing the age at which people join the workforce. People had moral reservations about the abolition of child labor - after all, it had worked out okay for them. It's only when unemployment began to be a more palpable problem that the mores concerning child labor shifted. Even then, my own father was pressed into service as farm labor as recently as the 1940s. This was standard.
As production has become less and less labor intensive, the workplace becomes more and more about social signalling. And as the population of firms becomes increasingly about maintaining old guard products and services and less about actually advancing the footprint of the firm from within ( with low cost financing enabling M&A activity instead ) firms are rapidly shedding workers. You don't even need offshoring or Chinese production to explain this. All you need is the Jack Welch "neutron bomb" effect.
We see increasingly ambitious tech efforts, not the sort of thing a half dozen people can do in a year or two, to sell for a few million.
But mainly, as the workplace becomes overtly inhospitable and the cost of slacking goes down, the equilibrium shifts.
I would study philosophy if I could afford it. Travel a lot. Go swimming more so my back would not be such a mess and so on.
I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be bad for my brain.
and this is your explicit assumption and also needs justification. a better source than a fluff piece in a daily newspaper would be helpful too.
"productive" is a really loaded and problematic word to use here. why is "production" the moral underpinnings of the good life? surely a healthy person might find fulfillment in any number of different activities regardless of their impact on GDP.
1) Once you become rich you also have a fair bit of say in what it is that you do. If you are an hourly worker stocking shelves at Walmart your autonomy is limited and the chance that boredom sets in is much higher than it might be for most white collar employees. Where white collar employee's is a proxy for rich.
2) An hourly worker can only grow their income linearly with the number of hours that they work. The rich often have huge leverage with the time they put in vs the amount of money they get out. Sales is one example of this, a hedge fund employee might be another case. This tends to favour the "you eat what you kill" type of compensation.
3) The people I know who become rich often do so not by diversification but typically from concentrating on one endeavor, typically a company. In this case the company tends to become a very large part of their life. They aren't always at their desk but they are always thinking about their company. Maybe this is just an offshoot of point 2).
If rich people have more say in what they do, why are they working instead of things that might be more "fun"? If rich people have far more leverage in their hourly earnings, why not work far fewer hours?
I'm not sure the article really solved it, either. It's a curiosity to me as someone who has determined the quality of life I desire and want to "work" the bare minimum to achieve that.
There's probably a correlation between being rich and being more inclined to spend time on activities which return money.
In that, ceteris paribus, having less of that inclination will reduce your probability of becoming rich.
Many successful people are less happey in retirement because that don't get a social circle playing up the importance of what they are doing. Sitting on a beach is simply less rewarding than landing a major contract. Thus, these people are not checking email on vacation because of dedication they are chasing a reward cycle.
a poor or lower middle class person would probably disagree if they saw my income and business bank accounts, but hey, everything is relative.
anyway. here are some reasons that may or may not apply to myself and my group of peers (all business owners end up hanging out with a bunch of other business owners or sales-type people, it just happens).
1. they like working. they may deny it, but they do. they like making things happen, making things in general, etc.
2. they feel like if they stop working, the money will disappear, or be taken somehow. this may or may not be rational.
3. they are compelled to do it, it is simply an inner drive they can't overcome. i.e. that's how the money was made to begin with.
4. they like having a high level of disposable income to spend on nice things/experiences/influence. this is the polar opposite of how a lot of people on HN think, who seem to constantly trying to humble-brag about their rankings in the frugality olympics.
i definitely fall into #4, the others maybe, maybe not. i like nice shit, so i work hard. if i wanted to not spend money, i'd just be poor and not work much. i did it for 4 years in college, i could do it for the rest of my life if i wanted to. it's not hard to do nothing and spend nothing. it's literally the easiest thing in the world, you just don't do anything, all day long.
sorry for being snarky.
I get paid a lot => I'm an important part of the world => if I stop then the world will fail (in some [tiny] way).
You see a corollary of this in retirees, their occupation defined them. Pre-retirement they say "hi, I'm Joe, I'm a professor" - a professor isn't a professor when they're relaxing and enjoying themselves (the thought process goes) so in order to be a professor I must work long hours at teaching students.
1. Because the mindset of work > leisure is rewarded in the U.S., so wealthier people aren't choosing work because they're wealthier, they're wealthier because they choose work.
2. Because they have more leverage not only in how much they work, but in what work they do. If you draw a stark line between your job and what you enjoy, naturally you'll want to minimize that work and maximize your leisure. But if you actually enjoy your job...
It's not so much doing the work, it's having to do the work, and not having control over my time, that gets under my collar.
I run my own business, and as a result I have a very highly correlated effort-to-earnings relationship. The more I work, the more I make.
I could spend my time doing "leisurely" activities away from work and I'd still make more than enough to live on, but instead I spend the better part of my work days (and oftentimes weekends) grinding away, trying to make this my highest earning September yet.
I don't do this in the pursuit of some end goal. I have fairly modest tastes, and 90% of the money I earn goes into a bank account or brokerage where it sits forever.
All I can say is that earning money gives me the most concrete measure of achievement I've found. When I was a kid I played World of Warcraft relentlessly, and gaining another level in that game gave me the same sense of forward progress. Money feels like the grown-up version of that.
You make money when you generate value for someone. It's OK to tie it to a sense of achievement, but at the end of the day you also have to remember to generate value for yourself.
I'd been brought up with a strong influence from my father who believed the pursuit of wealth for wealthy sake was pointless. It mattered what you did as a person than what you earned. My ideal job would be to become a scientist.
My friend told me that he wanted to earn money, not because he wanted to be rich, but because he liked seeing that number go up. He knew that it was a straight up numeric increment for him.
Now that's a relatively deep insight for a teen, which applies to everything from gaming to work. It's obvious and direct behavioral reinforcement.
Oddly it doesn't explain why he grew up to be a scientist (bio-analytics/genomics) and I ended up wading into finance and business.
Maybe self awareness is the pre requisite to being more comfortable with less than comfortable choices.
The money is part of the feedback loop of motivating you, you get your level ding in WOW, you get a cold beverage after mowing the lawn, you get your paycheck after expressing yourself for two weeks. A CEO isn't going to be a good CEO if he has the same amount of job satisfaction as a germaphobe janitor who has a graduate degree in Literature no matter who much you pay the CEO.
Not making simply money. It's working on something that satisfies you.
I'm salaried, and I had several weeks earlier this year where I struggled to put in more than 5-10 hours a week of actual work because business was slow. I still got paid the same amount, though, and was still "on the clock". So it looks like I have less free time than my hourly friends because I'm still at work while they're at home playing video games.
To be fair, from her point of view your hours playing Civilization might not balance out her having dinner alone.
All joking aside, it is certainly a downside to the job I do, but she understands. "Upset" is kind of a hyperbolic word to use, she fully supports the work I do as it affords us a lot of freedoms we might not have otherwise. I can't say how often we've turned a business trip into a vacation just by switching the credit card on file with the hotel to my personal card, or left for vacation in the middle of the work day as long as I bring my phone and take my calls from the passenger seat. Not to mention she doesn't have to work full time, so she can pursue her own dreams and hobbies.
Not that any of that matters to you, I just didn't want anyone thinking I was being selfish or insensitive to my wife's feelings.
The protection of 'on call' (in any type) equated to a type of work. Maybe not paid at full rate, but still compensated for as personal activities must be interrupt-able and other work cannot be sought.
Also the protection of a regular and predictable schedule with long lead times.
If the answer is yes, I politely say "thanks, but no thanks."
Salaried positions are not supposed to be 40 hours minimum. They should be measuring your output, not your hours worked. That's the entire point of not being an hourly worker.
I've mentioned that I'm exempt and still have to track time and most people just respond "you're not exempt, you don't know what it means".
I've never worked a job where I didn't have to track my time, though. Four different companies, employed as full time staff, I've always had to justify where my time went each week.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_...
The richer you get, the more you win.
When you're poor, life is boring, nothing good ever happens to you and your work makes you feel like shit. The only time poor people feel good is when they're playing a computer game which simulates the feeling of 'winning' which they never get in real life.
Games are fun because they put you on a level playing field with other players - Your skills actually have an effect on outcomes.
These are broad generalizations of course that don't capture all of what's really happening, but they're interesting to think about.
I often think that if the effect was so strong in my case (with such a relatively minor win), it must be far stronger for the 'big winners'.
My open source project got popular almost entirely because of luck. I worked really hard on it for many years but if it hadn't been for a single event (which came about because of pure luck - AKA "Good timing"), it wouldn't have gone anywhere.
After my project got some traction; people started treating me better at work, I started getting more (better) job opportunities, founders of various promising SV startups started reaching out to me with job offers.
Also, in the past 2 years, I got in contact with 3 people whose open source projects I liked (back when they only had a few hundred stars or less on GitHub) and now all of them have over 2K stars each on GitHub - One of those people (whom I met in person) raised over $1 million in seed funding for his project (several months after I had met him). It all seems oddly related though I can't quite put my finger on it.
That said, none of it has translated to financial success for me personally (aside from maybe a few really good job offers).
Our economic system is taking away opportunities from poor people and giving them to rich people - Games are like a drug to keep poor people sedated and docile.
What happens in movies, books, sports games, etc. are determined by others. You simply watch. In games however the outcome is tied (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly) to your own actions. That's why they can be addicting, especially for people who otherwise feel like they don't have any agency in "real life."
I read a book by looking at contents, notes, bibliography, and index. Then the intro and conclusion. If the meat is worth reading, that.
This means reading for information rather than pleasure, for the most part, though for me, reading for information is pleasure. Yes, there's some fiction I'll read, but that's different.
There's also note-taking and organising my own thoughts as a consequence of what I'm reading.
Games are like drugs in a sense because they provide the high of achievement easily with much less work than actual work.
Although people do like to partially build things as IKEA shows.
Research has shown that past the subsistence level, increases in income don't correlate with increased happiness.
See, eg, http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/entry/the-truth-about-money....
I make good money which means my employer thinks highly of me and invests in me. And this means that because there's money behind all this, they can afford to send me on business trips which are inherently more interesting (a few times a year) than sitting at my desk during that same time. And because I don't have more responsibilities than I can handle, I can just bail on my home life for a week or two to be away. And because I'm not on a shoestring budget, I can afford to do interesting things while I'm away on business.
I can't help but think if I was working at a subsistence level, I wouldn't be able to afford to leave my wife behind for a few weeks, my employer wouldn't be paying me to do work that could even require travel, and the trips would be out of the question because they'd represent a relatively large % of my compensation. And even if I went, I wouldn't be able to afford to do anything fun, so I'd dread it.
Just like when I've worked for poorer companies doing the same job.. sure, the work is roughly the same, but they can't afford to invest in hardware as much, so we don't get to do things "right".
I know it's somewhat tangential but I just feel like the very fact of having a higher-paying job opens up all kinds of opportunities that aren't necessarily so easily represented.
I know a lot of poor people that have interesting jobs, super-cool trips during their 7 weeks of vacation (French here :-) ). I have colleagues at my well-paid software engineering US office that have delayed their "dream" 3 weeks vacation for years now. Who is happier here ?
If they can afford "super-cool trips" (even on a shoestring), they're definitely not poor.
You're right about idleness, it's like a person going rotten from lack of structure. Feeling bad, seeking cheap pleasures, going crazy.
But the alternative is leisure. Being able to spend hours playing music, writing or drawing, having conversations with friends, or watching the clouds. Building something for fun, or gardening. Making videos or youtubes, anything!
What causes someone to be idle while another person enjoys leisure? It's hard to say, probably a combination of their peers, their upbringing, their moral character.
But not working is definitely NOT a universal bad.
This is precisely why I didn't want to work in a factory when I was young. I lived in a town surrounded by the shells of people that used to have life in them, but after 20-40 years of boredom, repetition, and merely being a piece of the machine had severe effects.
Work may not be an evil in itself, but the culture of it really can be and most work out there simply isn't a rewarding experience outside of getting money. I'm not convinced that this sort of idleness is preferable outside of having money.
If the culture should change, it might be different. Encourage outside life, make policies so that folks can have family time and take care of them, discourage overtime: make sure folks have wages and free time enough that they can do something after taking care of things they need. This won't fix the horribleness of some jobs, but it will trap folks a little less.
What a perfect way to describe the constant struggle I have with whittling away evenings drinking beer and playing Overwatch vs investing time in learning new skills or working on side hustles to generate additional income.
I unintentionally became more accustomed to delayed gratification, taught myself how to make micro-optimizations in my life to clear up time, chose to re-invest my time saved investing in new skills, learned (when trying to get a job/promotion) to frame my value in terms of what fulfilling someone else's needs, learned the value of researching both how to do things AND why people recommend those methods over others, and developed a decent sense of risk:reward-informed decision-making.
YMMV.
Not sure if you would put it on your resume, but IMHO if I was a hiring manager and I was hiring for an entry level mgmt position and somebody had "ran a successful wow guild with 50 members for 2 years" it would definitely be something I would see very positively
That free time you have is a luxury if you are working. It can still be very enjoyable to do interesting things after work, but I wouldn't look at them as investing time or learning new skills or hustling (i.e. working). That's a great way to get burnout. Burnout can be horrible if you never have leisure, but you can still make some that off time productive in some way without it feeling like work. For myself I like to put together projects in new tech that seem interesting for an idea that is absurd. It doesn't have to be even a full demo, just some examples where you poked at something and can talk about to coworkers. Arduino / Raspberry Pis are great too - super easy to get in to and you can make stupid fun little trick things. Same with chat bots and cloud infrastructure - slap something together and everybody can have fun.
I'm just wanting to say be careful how you look at your free time. That relaxation with video games and a beer is OK. But if you're wanting more out of it then turn it in to some way to get conversations and cool hacks working with coworkers or friends. Also - try switching up some video games with board games. There are some incredible board games out there these days and it'll be easy to get a group together at work for a quick round of some games.
I used to be fine with that. Now as I get older I see it as a vice which causes major cognitive dissonance since it is my main way to recharge.
Thought we might play together some time.
The same thing happens when I go on vacation now. About 10 days, and I'm itching to get back to work. I have no interest whatsoever in retiring and puttering around doing meaningless tasks. I enjoy working, doing hard things, being in the fray, and most especially doing something productive that matters.
There are plenty of open source projects I'd like to start/work on that would benefit greatly from being able to work on them "full-time", but I wouldn't make any money off of them (at least not without being more creative about how to monetize them than I've been so far).
When it comes to leisure, I personally believe there's an art to being good at doing it. What I find is that it takes time to unplug from 'work mode' to truly enjoy 'leisure mode', and that time of unplugging often comes in the form of doing nothing/very little. As you say, that's fine for a while, but soon you want something to do. However, if you think about it, there are tons of things you can do with your leisure time, in some ways the choices are even more vast than those you can find paid employment for. What is required is time for the boredom to subside and imagination to kick in.
For example, if you taught yourself the chemistry behind photosynthesis just because you were interested in it, would it matter to you if you weren't paid for knowing it?
This is every vacation for me. Scheming ways to never come back.
A good number of people work by puttering around doing meaningless tasks. Even smart people at successful companies. Does it matter if you increased conversions for a game by .01%? It matters to The Company, but does it actually matter?
But now I'm in the business world and much higher up the ladder. Work is incredibly engrossing. I love it. And the higher up I go, the more I get to pick and choose the kind of stuff I want to work on. Making more is just a special bonus on top of extreme interest in your field.
So I think the premise is pretty much right. People who love their careers do more of it. People who don't love their careers don't have to do as much of it.
"So, what are are these young, non-working men doing with their time? Three quarters of their additional leisure time is spent with video games, Hurst’s research has shown."
Perhaps 1990 was about the point when computer games got cheap enough and good enough to keep young men out of trouble.
Roe vs Wade had no effect in Europe or Australia.
There are lots of interacting causes and feedback loops around behavior and wealth. But trying to understand a subject while omitting an important arrow of causality can make anything seem like a paradox.
It's weirdly taboo in liberal American journalism to suggest that one's industriousness might be a major cause of one's economic status. Or maybe not so weird: journalists work hard and are terribly underpaid relative to their contribution to society, because the structure of the industry makes it hard to monetize.
In addition, thought, how many children of wealthy families really turn out poor out of laziness? How many of those wealthy families were impoverished in the previous generation? If your explanation were as important as you seem to be saying, maybe those questions shouldn't be easy to answer.
One way to see if industriousness is a major cause of economic status is to look at social mobility. Unfortunately for the argument, the US has lower social mobility than most other countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...
> However, in recent years several large studies have found that vertical intergenerational mobility is lower, not higher, in the US than in comparable countries.
Now it is the case that this might still be true - and there might be factors making different socio-economic classes of people work hard. However, generally speaking, absent those effects, if some people like to work and that makes them rich, that would be seen in a lot more social mobility than appears to be the case.
I run a small technology business and have thought about ways to try and reduce the number of hours I work. One of the principal challenges is that every day I am fending off competition from offshore firms with lower cost structures and VC funded startups with resources to burn. That competition dictates a certain tempo whether I like it or not.
> “building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”
When you put a lot of your effort into something, you become invested in it. It doesn't matter what it is. I'd suggest that past a certain point, the drive for greater material wealth is no longer about survival or comfort, but is instead about wealth as its own end goal. It's like grinding in an RPG, if you grind past a certain point the game itself becomes too easy, so the enjoyment changes to maxing out your stats just because you can.
Only in fairy tales. The conclusion in economic textbooks is always the same: if you're rich the opportunity cost of having a day off are _much_ higher so the more you can create in an hour the _less_ likely it is you'll have a day off. That's why CEOs of larger companies have assistants or, in case of mega corps, helicopters or planes.
Practical conclusion: if you're an independent professional schedule a fixed number in a year of weeks for vacations. If you plan for it you'd be less likely to hesitate than when making the decision on a week-by-week basis. (Said a person who had longer vacations about 5 years ago)
I make it a point to use up all my allotted vacation, which has the side effect of making me more productive, and makes me more respected at work than the guy who is trampled all over because he never takes time off.
Don’t be too upset when you see the poor kicked around, and justice and right violated all over the place. Exploitation filters down from one petty official to another. There’s no end to it, and nothing can be done about it. But the good earth doesn’t cheat anyone—even a bad king is honestly served by a field.
The one who loves money is never satisfied with money, Nor the one who loves wealth with big profits. More smoke.
The more loot you get, the more looters show up. And what fun is that—to be robbed in broad daylight?
Hard and honest work earns a good night’s sleep, Whether supper is beans or steak. But a rich man’s belly gives him insomnia.
Here’s a piece of bad luck I’ve seen happen: A man hoards far more wealth than is good for him And then loses it all in a bad business deal. He fathered a child but hasn’t a cent left to give him. He arrived naked from the womb of his mother; He’ll leave in the same condition—with nothing. This is bad luck, for sure—naked he came, naked he went. So what was the point of working for a salary of smoke? All for a miserable life spent in the dark?
-- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+5&...
Me and a bunch of other guys, we don't agree that "nothing can be done about it". We're gonna fight the good fight. Lucky for you, when we fight the good fight and win, that stuff filters out to those of you who gave up, too.
While this might have only been true of a few people, a more mobile job market, more opportunity, more choice of field, more education, and other factors all allow more people to find jobs that they simultaneously love to do and get paid well to do. I'm one of those lucky people I guess. I absolutely love what I do and the more successful I become, the more I want to do it. Work has become almost game-like to me.
I'll see your out of context quote and raise you The Parable of the Talents. If you have a gift for creation or investment, don't be ashamed of it, but nurture it and use it.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A14...
That's quite an interesting thing to say that is super true. Consumption of too much media is now a sign of low class status.
"In 2015, 22 percent of lower-skilled men [those without a college degree] aged 21 to 30 had not worked at all during the prior twelve months,”
"Three quarters of their additional leisure time is spent with video games, Hurst’s research has shown"
Doing some quick maths put 15% of lower skilled men are playing video games all day during their idle time. Is this really happening on the ground?
Honestly though, it's better than watching TV. Atleast you have to interact and think. There's also the fact that multiplayer gaming allows us to meet new people with similar interests. Someday people are going to just put on the VR hat and practically live in another world.
From Wikipedia: " In economics, a backward-bending supply curve of labour, or backward-bending labour supply curve, is a graphical device showing a situation in which as real, or inflation-corrected, wages increase beyond a certain level, people will substitute leisure (non-paid time) for paid worktime and so higher wages lead to an increase in the labour supply and so less labour-time being offered for sale.[1]
The "labour-leisure" tradeoff is the tradeoff faced by wage-earning human beings between the amount of time spent engaged in wage-paying work (assumed to be unpleasant) and satisfaction-generating unpaid time, which allows participation in "leisure" activities and the use of time to do necessary self-maintenance, such as sleep. The key to the tradeoff is a comparison between the wage received from each hour of working and the amount of satisfaction generated by the use of unpaid time.
Such a comparison generally means that a higher wage entices people to spend more time working for pay; the substitution effect implies a positively sloped labour supply curve. However, the backward-bending labour supply curve occurs when an even higher wage actually entices people to work less and consume more leisure or unpaid time "
Check out this Wikipedia page for further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_...
For many people, getting paid is literally society's signal to them that what they do every day is worthwhile and necessary.
Some picture UBI to be this utopia that solves everything. Please evaluate it based on being an improvement (however small) to the current system.
Also, playing videogames all day is an often heard scenario with UBI. But as the article states, this seems to happen now too. The question is: if it would be implemented, and after the dust settles, will so many more people be unproductive (in the narrowest sense possible)?
I personally experienced that, during a "down" period, I took a lot of solace in games (particularly M:TG), getting some accomplishments there (national vice champion) made me feel less worthless.
But it also made me pursue goals that weren't in my own best interests in the long term and neglect more important things.
Overall, I'm glad I quit, since an unhealthy amount of time spent on games eats up on time that can be spent on skills that are valued by society, and I get obsessed very easily.
Your point about getting paid as a status signal also rings with stuff like NBA stars arguing about getting paid less than X player, even though they're both extremely well paid, since it signals a preference. And lots of studies about fairness and wages.
Outside of work I play video games a lot because, honestly, nothing else seems worth doing. I'm already decent at video games so let's just keep doing that. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of these people avoid board games due to lack of friends and lack friends because being social is super hard when all of your time is spent on video games. It's a negative cycle that's hard to motivate yourself out of.
On the bright side it's a pretty frugally lifestyle (don't really go out, only vacations I take are staycations, no car, etc...) so I'd imagine that it's a decently sustainable lifestyle for those who don't work or rarely work.
1) Those who found companies, or who otherwise become rich through their work (e.g. pro athletes), as opposed to more passive ways to make money, in a way have a viewpoint similar to a feudal lord: The fiefdom called self has to be cultivated, protected and expanded.
2) Modern economics expands the sphere of success more easily than ever, through things such as branding or genre-crossing. E.g. Trump, Kanye, Michael Strahan.
3) The old-school rich indulged in a lot of leisure but also personally patronized a lot of culture. This doesn't seem to happen as much today, or if it does, more of it happens through foundations that probably free up time to generate more income.
I don't know too many top 1 percenters that would say that would love what they do. Very few.
And I do know of many that would say they never really made it -- because independently wealthy -- until they found what they really loved to do: from going into a new field to opening up their own store that grew.
I think loving what you do has a lot to do with wanting to put in the effort to really getting paid back what you put in.
As far as the main theme of the article: having more people idle is something society needs to adapt to. In the extreme of insufficient work, I would like to see a very low minimum income and a policy to promote breaking up jobs so people at least got 15 or so hours a week. Looking forward a decade, I bet there will be much less for people to work on.
For many of us writing code is the use of that free time.
On the other hand I can understand why unproductive people are unable to do much in USA. Most things are automated and minimum wages lock out people from mundane work.
I guess the author has never heard of homelessness. instead of being homeless, or being forced to find work, young people are living with parents longer
> young men
> lower-skilled men
> non-working men
> rudderless middle-aged men
> elite men
> poorer men
> rich men
> young non-college menIt's not that "rich people work so much", it's that "people who work much tend to be rich".
My hunch would be more in line with much of the "rich" that we discuss here have managed to over leverage themselves such that they have to work hard to meet obligations. It takes surprisingly little money to lounge playing video games when you don't have a car/house payments.
so agree with you!
poor people often work even more than rich because their salary is low and they have to take extra hustle just to make the ends meet.
Getting a decent salary, which allows getting out of poverty, may free up quite a lot of time.
> "rich" that we discuss here have managed to over leverage themselves such that they have to work hard to meet obligations
agree again :) I think they just carry take a lot on their shoulders just because they like to (thus they "have managed to over leverage themselves ")
Take 100 rich people and ask them "how hard did you work to get there?", do you think most of them will say "haha i didn't work hard at all! You don't need to work hard to get rich!"
My point was, all other conditions being equal, the people who try hard in their life tend to be more successful that the ones that don't.
Which is why if you take the rich people set and observe how much they work, it is obviously going to be that they work hard.
It sounds classist only if you interpret it that way.
And I'm simply saying, if you take 100 rich people and ask how they got there, majority of them would have gotten there because they worked hard.
Let's save the "poor people have hard time becoming rich and the world is a fucked up place" argument for another day. In fact I even agree with you on that part. I'm just criticizing the logical flaw in the article.
I'm pretty sure, yes, if you asked 100 rich people, they would say that, the question is whether that attribution is accurate.
I'd suspect that it is true in some respect (specifically, if by "working hard" you mean "spending time in activities directed at getting rich"; there is plenty of hard work people do that isn't directed at getting rich) if you compare them to less-rich people with similar starting conditions. I think, though, that starting conditions and factors outside of the individuals' control are pretty big contributors to becoming rich.