“There has been more of a transition where parents are supporting their adult children for longer,” she said. “The data do show that more young adult men live with their parents than women. The wealth transfer from older generations to younger generations is part of that story.”
And then there are the partners. “Almost everybody you talk to will have a story” about supporting an unemployed man, Ullrich said, adding that what’s changed isn’t the dynamic itself, but the fact that it no longer carries the stigma it once did. The stay-at-home boyfriend, once a punchline, is now a statistically significant labor market phenomenon.
A landmark paper published in the Journal of Political Economy, first circulated through the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that roughly 70% of the hours young men aren’t working are being spent on video games and recreational computer use. The economists calculated that improvements in gaming technology since 2004 alone can explain nearly half the increase in young men’s leisure hours.
“I think that’s part of the story — the basement story,” Ullrich said, in reference to a trope of young men playing video games in their parent’s basement.
The opioid epidemic compounded it, hitting non-college-educated men especially hard. And critically, men, compared to women, largely don’t qualify for government assistance programs like SNAP or TANF without a disability, meaning when they exit the workforce, the financial burden falls on whoever is closest to them.
It’s hard to take anything more than the raw numbers seriously with the amount of opinionated ooze slopping off this article. It goes out of its way to villify the men for spending time on leisure activities while barely giving a sentence to the extreme economic conditions that caused this in the first place. The tone of the article slants this like overgrown man babies are too busy playing videogames and apparently doing opioids??? to get a job while handwaving the bigger issue - an increasingly expensive and hostile economy without safety nets.
Reading the whole article would show that’s not true. It goes on at length about how male dominated roles are being adversely impacted by AI, the lack of social safety nets, and how there isn’t any push to get men into growing, more stable careers.