Related: ALSO: I spent a while trying to find the original article, "Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men", but it's been removed from the only two sites that have hosted a PDF, and Google's cache isn't helping either. But I did find the abstract: and a sentence from the conclusion: Cynic-veen would say that it looks like advanced curve-fitting. Anyone else have some perspective on this? “We explore the declining market hours of men in the last fifteen years, with a particular focus on less-educated young men (LEYM), who experienced a relatively large decline in work hours. The paper documents the decline in hours worked as well as corresponding trends in real wages and consumption, and shows that the large decline in hours is inconsistent with a stable labor supply curve with standard elasticities. We propose a new methodology that exploits detailed micro data on how individuals allocate their time away from work to infer how changes in leisure technology have altered labor supply. In particular, we use estimated “Leisure Engel Curves” to calculate that changes in leisure technology for computer goods broadly, and video games in particular, shift the labor supply curve by an amount between 10 and 25 percent of the observed decline in market work hours for prime age men and between 20 and 45 percent of the decline in market work hours for LEYM.”
“Our calculations suggest that innovations in gaming and computer leisure had a substantial impact on LEYM’s labor supply, explaining perhaps as much as two thirds of their increase in leisure time and 45 percent of their decline in market hours.”
It kind of sounds like typical poor blaming, but with stats. I'm not going to read the original article, because I don't care enough, but in the newspaper piece they sure didn't show causality, even noting that educated, employed men also have increased video game playing a lot in recent years ("but they also work hard"). There is a long journalistic history of trying to prove that poor people love being poor. You'll note that the underlying study was rejected from peer review.