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Comment by jorgemf | Hacker News Reader

Of course, because the lower salaries, the high prices of the houses and the global crisis during these years has nothing to do with the unemployment in the young population.

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It's the logic of Late Capitalism: all problems and failings are those of the individual, never of the system.

While that may indeed be the propaganda, blaming addicts for their addictions can be victim-blaming. Some of the rhetoric blames the video game companies more than the consumers…

no, not if the addict's diction is directed ad everyone else's faults but his own. Of course I am bending the definition https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/addico#Latin

There's a pendulum swing - focusing on the problems of the system, and focusing on the problems of the individual.

In truth, there are problems both in the system and with individuals, and failings in each reinforce the other, and effective aspects of each also reinforce each other.

The article does note this, albeit using "good job" as a proxy for "all the things one might have historically expected to stem from having a good job."

This seems like a forewave of the trends that point towards the basic income argument. Fewer productive jobs being necessary than labor force to fill them results in bifurcation of the labor market: between overpaid specialties (e.g. software dev) and underpaid make-work (e.g. McDonald's and Walmart) there's been a hollowing out "historically normal" jobs that don't take specialized knowledge but are still productive enough to afford a good quality of life.

In the face of this, opting out and escaping into a virtual world seems fairly reasonable. Especially if you're on the losing end of whatever the current hot specializations are.

I think this sector is now a embodied in sales/marketing. It's reasonable to expect from some one to become a productive salesperson after a few months. This professional will have many options from online marketing through mall cart sales to selling cloud services to corporations

Anything that can be eaten by software will be eaten by sufficiently advance software eventually.

I can't think of any substantial value-adds from sales/marketing in the future to necessitate adding jobs there. High value (e.g. Apple) is currating a brand and most value is added at the top (average Genius salary looks around $45k [1]). Low value (e.g. Android OEMs) doesn't have the profit margins to support a larger human-sales/marketing team. And commodity (e.g. McDonald's) is high-level strategic branding with essentially no low level value add.

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Mac-Genius-Salaries-E...

You need a particular kind of personality to do well in sales and most people don't have it. Most sales people end up dropping out.

What a nightmare vision that gives me; Automation and lucky people who randomly chose the right skillset work, producing more and more of the core economy, and the rest of the meatbags are left selling stuff to each other?

What happens when many business services are selected from automated markets... I guess we all sell custom hand-made widgets to each other?

Right, but the question I'd be interested in hearing more about is why gaming as a response to that unemployment? I'm recently unemployed (by my own choice), and am playing less games. I'm spending my extra time hiking, swimming, kayaking, etc. I actually deleted the games I used to play from my computer. I certainly have the time now to play more... but I'm in my mid-40s, and I did grow up on games, yet it seems far more enjoyable to me to go outside and unplug. So there is definitely a generational difference going on here.

Now imagine you're in your 20s and were laid off 6 months ago. You have no savings, no partner, and no in-demand skills. You bought a console and some games last year when you still had a job. $10 will pay for a month of online play, bus fare and a day pass at the pool, or enough gas for two trips to the nearest trailhead. You don't really enjoy playing video games all day, but it keeps your mind off your troubles, which is more than you can say for hiking.

I don't think your situation is typical even for people your own age. I suspect the biggest generational difference is TV vs. video games.

The article addresses this: "While games improved since the turn of the century, labour-market options for young people got worse." That paragraph goes into more detail how the market has not been good for young people, and thus they turn to games, not the other way around.

If you read the paper it doesn't say that in the conclusions.

The second to last paragraph suggests it is a possibility though:

"To draw a firm conclusion, however, would take a clearer understanding of the direction of causation. While games improved since the turn of the century, labour-market options for young people got worse. Hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated for young college graduates since the 1990s, while pay for new high-school graduates has declined. The share of young high-school and college graduates not in work or education has risen; in 2014 about 11% of college graduates were apparently idle, compared with 9% in 2004 and 8% in 1994. The share of recent college graduates working in jobs which did not require a college degree rose from just over 30% in the early 2000s to nearly 45% a decade later. And the financial crisis and recession fell harder on young people than on the population as a whole. For people unable to find demanding, full-time work (or any work at all) gaming is often a way to spend some of one’s unwanted downtime, rather than a lure out of work; it is much more a symptom of other economic ills than a cause."

I said the paper, not the article in the economist. It is funny the article it is based on a paper which draws different conclusions.

This is the easy response to the article. It is partially true, but the article is more true than you're giving it credit for.

There are other articles about this (e.g. http://www.vulture.com/2017/02/video-games-are-better-than-r...) all confirming that unemployed people who play video games don't have the same increase in unhappiness that other unemployed people have. Which might be good for their short-term well-being, and is something to keep in mind for the post-scarcity UBI future if that ever happens, but in the medium term worrying, both for the individuals and for the economy generally.

There are currently sectors- like construction- which are having trouble finding labor as the economy picks back up. Are these people going to avoid re-entering the labor force even when they can get a job, and are we ready for the consequences of that? And even if they do, they'll be starting out way behind on building household wealth and work experience.

-if the post-scarcity UBI future ever happens-

I live in a country that throws away half of its prepared food. Like we're not even talking about some chopped up animal corpse that sits out for too long and has to be discarded before it goes rancid - in the US we strait-up assemble food in some factory, wrap it plastic, burn fuel shipping said wrapped and assembled food to a store halfway across the country, unwrap the food, put it in another container, and then at the end of the day just toss the remaining contents of the container into the garbage bin because you've got a few more tons of shipped and prepared food already in storage that needs to be sold. This is the post-scarcity future.

It won't be a problem* unless we make more of us. Political and religious leaders that oppose education and planned parenthood are the long term problem.

Ok, slaughtering is a problem, but I think it will sort itself out eventually.

don't you think it's a much bigger issue that we are normalized to a profoundly wasteful life style? this isn't really a population problem, it's an energy per capita problem.

No. It's primarily a population problem, although that does not mean that we should not manage the resources we have as efficient as possible.

To be fair we're also hurtling toward ecological catastrophe and it's not clear we're gonna be able to do that indefinitely.

I don't think "we should strive to make unemployed people more miserable so they're more motivated to work" is a proposition worthy of serious consideration.

Economy is not helped by people being eternally miserable - miserable people are less likely to find another job, more likely to start drugs or commit crime. Depression does not tend to incite people towards meaningfull action. Staring into wall does not build work experience anymore then game. Nor does hanging around cheap alcohol with other unemployed.

I do not know what the issue with construction is, but it is highly unlikely that the same city have thousands unemployed playing games who could otherwise work there - if only they were a bit more miserable.

I dunno, there's a line. Being a little bit uncomfortable can spur one to action. Most new parents are driven to be attentive partly out of a fear of killing or harming their child, for instance. Being just miserable enough to be motivated towards something healthy is actually good - the trouble is that it's very easy to be tipped over into destructive comfort-seeking.

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