The Economist blames video games for rising unemployment levels

The Economist has just published an article that essentially holds video games responsible for rising unemployment numbers and also blames them for falling marriage rates and declining numbers of school and college graduates.

Full story here;

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/03/economist-explains-24

Good for them, games have always been blamed for something heavily unproven. Next they'll blame books, music, and the arts. . It's a repeated cycle.

All-in-all it's usually spewed by Fatcats to avoid a more serious issue_

I blame the stagnation of minimum wage, had it kept rising like it's supposed to people would have more money to spend and businesses could afford to hire more people

Wage stagnation, and automation are far bigger reasons for unemployment being what it is than gaming. And divorce rates have been a joke for a long time as well.

As a longtime subscriber, I have always said that The Economist reflects my personal beliefs about 70% of the time.

I think this is one of those times that falls into the other 30%.

Ah yes, Cause it has nothing to do with employment and wage decline, high debt among college students and lack of funds to the school system in general.

Idiots will always conflate and confuse symptoms and causes.

Well, I was going to read it, but then I was it was a ".../blog/..." and that would kind of ruin my new year's resolution of not reading things Any Asshole On the Internet Can Write That Any Chump Will Take Seriously

Why would you do that? They're among the funniest parts of the web. What would be the point of the internet if it weren't for all the idiots?

Op, the article does not blame video games for those things, it merely shows correlation. In fact, towards the end of the article, it say economic factors are more the cause the video games. It says people out of work tend to play video games, that's really all this article says.

When why mention video games at all if economic factors are responsible? The idea that the unemployed play video games is hardly breaking news...

^ this.

e.g.

nothing to see here, just a sensationalist headline

Well then surely we should just get rid of video games and all other distractions that cause people to think about anything other than work...

or just accept it's a headline deliberately worded to provoke a reaction and not read too much into it

Nope. I stand by my opinion and my view that this article would not have mentioned video games if they didn't believe they were a contributing factor. Otherwise, it wouldn't be newsworthy. Therefore, its another case of video games being scapegoated.

Because videogames are a massive industry so a study into where all that money is coming from is interesting and helpful?