Is it bad if new entertainment technology allows us to spend more time at home?

See ‘Listen In’ Review: Around the Family Wireless by Steven Poole. He reviewed the book Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home by Beaty Rubens. Excerpt:  

"We learn that radio grew in popularity especially during hard economic times—when “the appeal of not having to wash or get dressed to listen in became stronger”—which may remind us of the surge in online pastimes during the Covid-19 pandemic."

We often say in economics that people want to maximize utility. And wanting to go out and socialize at live music venues might just be one item or argument in a person's utility function. How does a person maximize utility (if they spend all of their income)? They buy a quantity of good A and a quantity of good B to make this equation true:

MU_A/P_A = MU_B/P_B

MU is marginal utility or how much satisfaction you got from the last unit consumed of a good.

Suppose a person wants to go out (good A) and listen to music (good B). If the price of B falls (with radio the price of listening to music has fallen), and nothing else changes, then  

MU_A/P_A < MU_B/P_B

which means that the person is getting more satisfaction (or utils, a unit of satisfaction) from the last dollar spent on good B than good A. So they will want to consume more of B. But then they have to spend less on good A (maybe it terms of time or resources devoted to it). And you get a person who goes out less than they used to.

This could also be a case of listening to music at home being a substitute for going out to hear music. If the price of listening at home falls then the demand for going out also falls. 

I first thought of this when reading about how alot of young men are staying at home playing video games instead of going to school, getting a job, getting married, etc. Some are saying that this is a social problem. But if it is a case of one item falling in price (entertainment through video games) then it just like the price of B falling in the above example. So they do more of it (it might have been pretty expensive once to play high quality video games-you probably had to go out to an arcade and pay for each play). Now with very high quality video games at home, the price (not just the monetary price but the time cost) is lower, so you do more of it. This seems similar to what happened with radio in the 1930s.

Related post:

Adam Smith said that people want not only to be loved, but to be lovely (but how much does it cost to achieve that?) (2025)