The hardest punch to dodge...

...is the one you don't see coming.

The paper attributes one-third to one-fifth of the decline in work hours by less-educated young men to the rising use of technology for entertainment — mainly video games. The new study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and the researchers say they are continuing to refine the precise figures. But other prominent economists who reviewed it for this story said it raises important questions about why so many young men have abandoned the workforce.
 
Alan Krueger, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said the research presents “strong evidence that the increase in the number of less-educated young men who are not working is not entirely a result of weak demand for their services.” He added, “They find evidence that a portion ... of the decrease in work time of less-educated young men can be a result of the appeal of video games.”
 
A few decades ago, an unemployed person might be stuck on the couch watching TV, isolated and depressed. Today, cheap or free services such as Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube and Netflix provide seemingly endless entertainment options and an easy connection to the outside world. Video games, in particular, provide a strong community and a sense of achievement that, for some, real-world jobs lack.
 

Excerpt from Wonkblog. Not a recent piece, but I thought of this thesis today during a conversation about declines in ratings for a variety of things from televised sports to movies and so on. It's much easier to assess a threat when it comes at you head on, in your exact industry. It's much harder to spot a threat that comes from an oblique angle, or in the case of business, from adjacent industries you know nothing about.

The marketplace for a person's time has gotten so crowded that competitors may not be aware who is stealing their market share. Who would've thought video games might cause some non-trivial percentage of young male unemployment?

Humans may be most attuned to this. We've never been so aware, at every moment now, of how charismatic and engaging we are as compared to another person's cell phone.