Time discounting as a root cause

From Labor Force Participation and Video Games by Alex Tabarrok.

Is unemployment among young males driving them to play more video games or does playing more video games make them less employable. I agree with Tabarrok's conclusion.

Overall, the video game worry is a bit too reminiscent of the Dungeons and Dragons panic, or the earlier panics that books and radio were ruining children’s minds, for me to jump on board.

Tabarrok has another observation which fits with a line of my thinking that is relevant to other issues as well: Future discounting.

Perhaps the issue is that video games like slot machines are so enticing that young people discount the future too heavily or don’t recognize the future cost of not being in the workforce. Maybe. Perhaps what we really need is a 3D, virtual reality, total sensory simulation, awesome video game that is so expensive that it encourages people to work.

I have wondered for some time whether many of our issues, sociological and economic, might be tied to increasingly high discounting of the future. If you are uncertain about the future, it depresses long term planning, family formation, fertility, structured risk taking, etc. Absent these things, you lose economic progress, innovation, and a slew of other desirable outcomes.

Socialism (high degrees of regulatory control and redistribution) has this effect. I have wondered whether an increasing secularization of culture might also have the same impact. This line of thinking says that it is the discounting that is the real issue. Video games, lack of religion, reduced freedom are simply things which increase time discounting.