“My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it.”*…
Over the past few decades, labor force participation has sharply dropped for men ages 20-34. Theories about the root cause range from indolence, to a lack of skills and training, to offshoring, to (perhaps most interestingly) the increasing attractiveness and availability of leisure and media entertainment. In this essay, we propose that the drop in labor participation rate of young men is a result of a combination of factors: (i) a decrease in cost of access to media entertainment leisure, (ii) increases in both the availability and (iii) quality media entertainment leisure, and (iv) a decrease in the marginal signalling utility of (conspicuous) consumption goods for all but the highest earners.
At the macro level, this results in sub-optimal production, as firms are unable to satisfy their demand for labor via the usual mechanism of increasing wages. If you believe that economic productivity and growth are good, this presents a challenge when attempting to design stimulus policy, because subsidies or increases to the minimum wage would yield the same non-result as firms increasing wages. We discuss the potential efficacy of the somewhat radical idea of a tax on human attention or time spent consuming entertainment media as a way to stimulate productivity…
Somewhat radical, indeed… Economics for the Leisure State: Andrew Kortina (co-founder of Venmo and fin.com; @kortina) and Namrata Patel (Product at Airbnb and former VP, Product + Design at Minted; @namratalpatel) on “Kinky Labor Supply and the Attention Tax.”
* Abraham Lincoln
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As we sample soma, we might send inclusively-calculated birthday greetings to Barbara Bergmann; she was born on this date in 1927. An economist, she was a trailblazer in the development of feminist economics, contributing important work on topics that ranged from childcare and gender issues to poverty and Social Security. She was co-founder and President of the International Association for Feminist Economics and a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security.
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