Are video games making us lazy?

Some facts on long-term benefit dependence

Look, the title is a lie - I’m not saying anything about video games in this post. However, I am riffing on this US based time use work a little bit to get us to talk about benefit dependence.

I have seen discussions in both Australia and New Zealand on the increasing length of time individuals are spending in receipt of the unemployment benefit. Both countries have similar policies, people, and experienced similar benefit reforms through the 2010s - but I only have Australian data.

So in an e61 Micro Note released today, my brilliant colleague Pelin Akyol and I investigate whether the number of people receiving the benefit long-term has been rising.

tl;dr: It looks like the number of people receiving the benefit long-term has surged in the last twenty years. But it hasn’t. Sike.

No, I want to read more: If you go to the note there is a 10 page appendix discussing some additional questions that may come up. Some fun stuff in there, would love to chat about it!

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Why are people saying it has risen?

There is some data that has been placed online that anyone - even my dear mother - could download and visualise on their iPad. And this data gives a pretty stark story regarding the number of individuals receiving the JobSeeker Payment (JSP, or the current unemployment benefit) for over two years (what we’d call “long-term”).

Not using that data - but instead jumping into the related microdata so we can look back to 2006 shows the same story.

Such an increase in long-term benefit receipt points to a real policy issue - depending on your politics you may see it as more individuals facing a lack of good employment opportunities, or an increasing culture of laziness and really enjoyable computer games.

But before diving into these explanations it is worth asking if the data is telling us that long-term receipt has risen of not.

Line has gone up - this means it has risen … right

Ok, we’re not being contrarian to be cool - well that isn’t the sole reason. Instead we just wanted to dig into the microdata ourselves and try to understand why the number of people on the JSP long-term - and the proportion of JSP recipients that are on long-term - has surged.

There are three potential ways this can happen:

1. Policy change: Benefits get renamed.

2. Population change: The characteristics of the population change - i.e. population aging.

3. Long-term dependence change: The same type of people stay on the benefit for longer.

People interpret the rising data as the third point - but we wanted to see how much could be explained by the first point.

And it turns out it is a lot.

Now you can’t see Appendix 2 here, so lets think about what those other benefits are. They are a mix of benefits that have been shunted into the JSP (sickness benefit, widows pension) and benefits whose scope has been adjusted in ways that lead to people no longer being able to access them and needing to pick up the JSP instead (Disability Support Payment, Parenting Payments).

Sticking all of this together we find:

Or in other words, the number of people on the JSP + Parenting Payments + Disability Support has fallen 22% as a percent of the population (for those aged 22-60) over the past 17 years.

Our main takeaway from this is that the sweeping narratives of increasing benefit reliance - and the importance of this as a policy issue - are overplayed. Instead they are a consequence of policy decisions that have changed who receives the varying benefits.

It is good for us to recognise this before making policy choices based on a mistaken belief that people are transitioning onto the benefit long-term … to enjoy some high quality, affordable, computer games.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t ask my individuals need to rely on government support long-term, and it also doesn’t mean there are things we could be doing better. But there is no fundamental crisis coming for a surge in long-term reliance on the unemployment benefit - and misdiagnosing this could lead to policy that does more harm than good.