Are Video Games Weakening the Workforce? | Hacker News Reader

Are Video Games Weakening the Workforce?

washingtonpost.com

15 pointsDonzo25 comments

First of all I think this article is completely delusional. I've yet to meet that many people who don't want a good job with good pay. The actual catastrophe that's happened is the massive loss of manufacturing. Vaclav Smil has said "In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots and you get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks."

And that's exactly what's happening. For all his faults (including mass manipulation and being a possibly-tyrannical demagogue) Trump is right about one thing - free trade is not always great and the loss of manufacturing was not "value added" for everyone in the US. But of course discussing this means opening up the whole argument about how economics is broken and you can't do that, as it would threaten stability too much. But anyone who looks into it can see it if they wish. Look into Jonathan Goldsmith's appearance on Charlie Rose when GATT (precursor to the WTO) was announced. He predicted the whole thing and what was going to happen. And he tried to warn us.

Link to video - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI

See 1 minuet or 3 minute mark

Some of us don't think humans are less deserving on account of which side of a border they were born. Agreeing that free trade did somewhat hurt the American worker, America's loss helped lift hundreds of millions of people elsewhere (especially China) out of poverty.

It's hard to say they should have remained abjectly poor just so some Americans wouldn't experience a (fairly small) drop in living standard. A drop which could be alleviated by more socialist government policy anyway. From a global perspective, free trade is the best thing for improving the welfare of humans going.

It's creating social pressures that might unravel democracy though. It's happened before and it's happening again.

And you say "everyone is deserving of a good life" but Americans do not elect their representatives to lift hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. They elect them to help improve their lives, and they are waking up the fact that they're not doing that, so they are choosing a radical alternative in a desperate attempt to move things in the other direction.

This is the problem with democracy: the people making the decisions often aren't those who are affected by them the most. It's how you define the demos. It's unjust for Americans to vote on policies that make the difference between life and death for large numbers of much poorer people, without giving them any say.

If democratic decision-making goes against vast improvements to the lives of billions of people, then democracy is simply wrong and should be abandoned.

Maybe you're right but I haven't heard of any sensible alternatives.

this article amounts to a form of cultural warfare. it's singling out an "out-group" (young male gamer nerds in this case) to ridicule for one of their cultural preferences and conflating that cultural preference with a huge complex of other underlying structural problems that make it difficult for _some_ of them to get started in a long term career path right away.

honestly this kind of thing sickens me. washington post should be ashamed.

This is some pretty terrible journalism. They start out with a personal story in the lede that I assume is not related to the study and whose subject was probably not informed that he'd be called "less educated" without any sort of qualification. The conclusion the writer wanted to make (that the US economy is in danger because of a declining workforce) is not reflected in the study nor common sense and the writer had to resort to finding a random economist unaffiliated with the study to parrot their conclusion. This does not belong on HN

> has found little satisfaction in a series of part-time, low-wage jobs he’s held since graduating from high school.

Ha! Surprised? People are supposed to be "satisfied" with low-wage entry level jobs? Forget the video games, that's just funny right there.

Consumer entertainment, and especially games, are getting really really good. Somehow not surprising that games are more fun than crappy jobs. I guess it's too bad that games and gaming systems are a big fat piece of the economy now.

This article has multiple triggers for me. I was thinking bullshit several times at the statements full of assumption, but by the time I finished it, I think it convinced me there's some amount of actual cause for concern, maybe just not the inflated sky-is-falling amount it claims.

If happiness is going up, the first question is why is that a bad thing? It's a stated assumption in the article that we believe happiness will go down later, but this part doesn't have evidence, the evidence we have is that people working less and playing more are happier. What is the point of life if not happiness? There are some legitimate answers to that, but it's still a legitimate question, not to mention part of our belief system of inalienable rights in the US. Nobody was thinking shitty low paying entry level jobs when they were coming up with the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

It also seems presumptuous to state as fact that this is a slippery slope that will hurt the economy. Historically, the economy has depended on high unemployment at times. Businesses and the rich complain when unemployment is too low. Moreover, the economy keeps crashing, often during times of high employment, for reasons surrounding the actions of a very few people.

On the bright side, if all the young men are succumbing to video games, maybe this is a good chance for women to take over the workforce.

I've been saying for years that we need mandatory career counseling for the young people. At least once a year.

Young people need to know what choices to make instead of the "follow your dreams" nonsense that works out for 1 out of 1000. Young people need to be aware of how many artists / historians / gender study / english students graduate each year and how bad they end up on average.

We need to show them that if you study X, your expected starting salary is A, and salary after 5 years is B. We need to show them trends and possible future skill demand.

They also need to understand what poverty looks like. Nobody thinks they will end up flipping burgers when they are in school / college. But many of them do, and the only reason is poor career choices.

Quite a good point, why would this be downvoted?

Because HN was wrong about their guidelines preventing the inevitable decline of the community and as more people have gained the ability to downvote they just do it over anything they disagree with. I haven't even been here that long and I've noticed a pretty big increase in the frequency of this type of thing happening in less than a year.

Ouch. I don't think that's quite true. His point was ok, but he took the validity of the initial claim in the article for granted ("young men are playing videogames instead of working hard") and most people here actually don't think that's true. It's a factual disagreement not an reflex like you paint it. The original article is nothing but socially-punitive speculation anyway.

It's off topic in an article discussing non-college educated men. These people aren't even getting to the point of selecting a major.

How about engineering a society that is a bit kinder to everyone rather than inflicting poverty on anyone? It's also unjust for the 'burger flippers' who make your food to live in poverty.

We need creative types. Artists, musicians, historians etc are no less valuable than engineers. If the market thinks otherwise then the market is wrong.

Artists, musicians, historians etc are no less valuable than engineers

On both average and median they definitely are less valuable. Free market basically figured that out.

What you're suggesting is some fantasy land where you ignore all that and pay everyone the same.

We should have social safety nets, sure, but to pay everyone the same is insanity. Because then I would like to be paid for sitting on my ass, playing counterstrike and receiving blowjobs.

Free market also figured out a 400$ per hour prostitute is more valuable than plenty of engineers and musicians so that argument doesn t really stand. Value and money are not always correlated.

Working in higher education, including 5 years of orientation, has led me to somewhat the opposite conclusion: That students need to stop thinking of their major as the most important determining factor in their career.

I watched the job landscape change substantially from the time people were at orientation to the time they walked across the commencement stage. The advice I wish I had imparted was to study something compelling and deeply important to the student (perhaps a mix of things, like liberal arts), but to also be mindful to learn life skills, from cooking to budgeting to time management to HTML.

> students need to stop thinking of their major as the most

But why? It is the most important determining factor in their career. That's a fact.

Here are some examples of things that have a stronger casual dynamic than study major:

* Social structures (ie, whether or not the student even has enough connections to find a good job or jobs)

* Health and well-being (whether or not the student is mentally and physically well enough to meet the challenges of the job market)

* Quality of instruction - if you have the major you want, but you aren't learning from the specific faculty teaching your courses, you are going to be behind. Better to choose a different major with better faculty.

I can go on and on.

Actually, the last thing we need is more mediocre, uninspired STEM graduates who joined these fields simply because their parents made them do it or because they expect to make big bucks.

While "following your dreams" needs to be tempered with a strong dose of reality, it really is important that young people discover their aptitudes and life-path. If that means getting a BA in literature and possibly floundering for a few years then so what? A well-rounded liberal arts education is a perfectly fine preparation for many jobs in the world of business. Do we really need to have college students reading and analyzing the insipid PMBOK instead of the great works of literature?

Why aren't young men content to be a cog in the machine?

The American dream is dead. Blue collar workers can't get a home, a stable marriage or path of advancement in the workplace. Why wouldn't they turn off, tune in and drop out?

The economy is bifurcated. The price of most creature comforts, like video games, music, and other entertainment spirals down to nothing. While the requirements to become productive member of society (degrees, medical insurance, homes) spirals up. A person making fifteen thousand versus thirty thousand isn't going to make much of a difference when it comes to the big purchases.

Diminishing returns have never been higher for unskilled labor. Why wouldn't people direct that towards leisure?

I feel like we are swapping cause and effect here.

Well, at least when they play videogames they are not stealing cars or dealing drugs!

Does the title "Are Video Games Weakening the Workforce?" not sound like click bait to you?

I'm usually in defense of titles, but I do think that a reasonable rule is, "No question-phrased titles unless the article concludes with a convincing answer one way or the other."

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