Scott Wallsten

Who they are

Wallsten is an economist whose work sits in technology and communications policy, and the paper that brings him into this territory is an exercise in measurement rather than advocacy. He built American Time Use Survey diaries for 2003 to 2011 into a person-level dataset of about 124,000 observations and asked a question the displacement argument has always assumed an answer to: when somebody spends an extra minute online, what does the diary show them not doing?

The design is the reason the paper matters. A time-use diary records what a person actually did on a specified day, minute by minute. It does not ask them to estimate their own habits, which is the instrument almost everything else in this field runs on, and which Douglas Parry and colleagues showed in 2021 barely tracks logged device use. Wallsten's estimates are therefore about behaviour as recorded rather than behaviour as recalled.

His headline result is uncomfortable for both sides of the screens argument, which is a good sign in a finding. There is real displacement, which the sceptics tend not to concede. Its largest single component is another screen, which the critics tend not to mention. Television and film account for 0.12 of the 0.29 minutes lost from other leisure. Offline socialising loses about 0.054 minutes per minute online, relaxing and thinking about 0.037. Outside leisure, each minute online sits with 0.27 fewer minutes working, 0.12 fewer sleeping, 0.10 fewer travelling, 0.07 fewer on household activities and 0.06 fewer on education. Hobbies gain 0.0036, which he notes is less trivial than it looks because Americans average about two minutes a day on hobbies.

He is also careful in a way that makes him quotable rather than merely citable. His abstract and introduction state that the paper does not evaluate which online activities substitute for or complement offline ones, and that what it estimates is the opportunity cost of online leisure time. He flags the scale problem himself: these are marginal rates, and online leisure ran at around thirteen minutes of a roughly five-hour leisure day at the end of his window. His framing device is Robert Fogel on railroads, the argument that the true net benefit of an innovation is what it adds beyond the value of whatever it displaced, which is exactly the accounting the screens debate has never done.

One gap in the paper deserves stating, because it is routinely filled in by people quoting it. Reading for personal interest is coded separately and discussed in his measurement section, but it does not appear among his subcategory results, so the paper supports no claim about reading in either direction.

Key papers

Wallsten is an economist and policy analyst rather than a trade author, and this publication has verified no book of his. His contribution here runs through a working paper, which is a different kind of document from a peer-reviewed article and is labelled as one throughout.

Wallsten, S. (2013). "What Are We Not Doing When We're Online?" NBER Working Paper No. 19549, October 2013. JEL codes J22, L86, L96. The substitution estimates, from American Time Use Survey diaries for 2003 to 2011. Later published as a chapter in an NBER volume on the digital economy; the figures this publication cites are the working paper's, which is the document that was read.

Key ideas

Each minute of online leisure is correlated with 0.29 fewer minutes of all other leisure, and about half of that comes from television and video. The largest single thing a screen displaces is another screen.

Face-to-face socialising is displaced, at roughly a twentieth of a minute per minute. That is a real figure in the direction the displacement thesis predicts, and it is a small one.

These are correlations and marginal rates. The paper estimates opportunity cost and does not identify what substitutes for what, and scaling the coefficients to a modern screen-time total would produce a number the research does not contain.

The Fogel test: the net benefit of a new technology is what it adds beyond the value of what it replaced, which requires knowing what it replaced.

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