Thread by @graykimbrough

You may have heard some incorrect takes about video games this week. Others have debunked the relationship with violence, but let's talk about something that could actually be bad.

While young people have switched TV time to gaming, old people are just watching a lot more TV.

We can visualize this in multiple ways. Here, instead of averages, I show the prevalence of watching at least two hours of TV on a given day. You can also see that this isn't some artifact of the year ranges I chose for the previous figure.

Now, we know that the negative impacts of video games have been wildly overstated, but how could all of this TV time be a bad thing?

First, this may surprise you, but Frey, Benesch and Stutzer (2007) suggest that TV may not make us happier.

Fancourt and Steptoe (2019) and Durante, Pinotti, and Tesei (2019) provide evidence for possible cognitive decline effects, especially among older viewers.

Durante, Pinotti, and Tesei (2019) also provide evidence that entertainment television leads to declines in civic-mindedness and increasing susceptibility to (putting it euphemistically) populist rhetoric.

And of course this analysis from Dunstan et al. (2010) isn't remotely causal, but it probably won't surprise you that TV-watching is associated with increased mortality.

There's a large literature blaming various societal problems on young people's use of technology going back at least as far as Comstock's Traps for the Young in 1883, which had this amazing illustration of the evils of newsstands.

More recently Aguiar, Bils, Charles and Hurst hypothesized that improving video game technology explains decreasing work hours for young adult men.

I have demonstrated in a working paper that what I see in ATUS data does not appear to support the Aguiar et al. hypothesis. gray.kimbrough.info/research/Kimbr…

But other research has focused on young people's screen time while failing to disaggregate older adults' screen time. Like this recent JAMA paper, for example.

With the ATUS, we can disaggregate those older age groups. And while we can't see direct effects of TV-watching, we have a pretty decent body of evidence on negative ramifications from elsewhere.

And that's why I'm writing a paper on the growth in older Americans' TV time.