Back in the early nineties, a client of mine told me that he had pulled the plug on the main family TV and had put it on his driveway for garbage pick-up. The reason: kids were spending too much time watching TV and not enough on reading, sports, and helping around the house.
Today, the WSJ reports on academic research by economists into television watching. According to the article, "University of Chicago Graduate School of Business economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro aren't sure that TV has been all that bad for kids. In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics this year, they presented a series of analyses that showed that the advent of television might actually have had a positive effect on children's cognitive ability.
The two are part of a tight-knit group of young economists using statistical techniques to examine how television affects society. The group's research suggests TV enabled an earlier generation of American children in non-English-speaking households to do better in school, helped rural Indian women to become more independent and contributed to lowering Brazil's fertility rate."
My observations:
- A key part of any analysis of this type has to include marginal utility or marginal benefit, and opportunity costs. If a kid has already watched 4 hours of TV, what is the marginal benefit of an extra hour of TV? What is the next best option, and what is the opportunity cost incurred by choosing to watch that additional hour of TV?
- Content matters as much as time, and content relative to the watcher. Content that makes a difference to an adult woman in India may not have much of an impact on women in other countries.
- The Internet has become a compelling alternative to TV, and in fact, the line has blurred between the two. This enables a better matching of content to consumer.
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