The worlds newest profession


Hey get a load of those sims. a snippet "on eBay. The high-end rate for Sims "prostitutes," about 500,000 simoleans, fetches about $15." Note this is for cyber sex.

Even more alarmingly, "Everquest, the most popular of the games among Americans, has 430,000 subscribers who spend an average of 20 hours a week in a vast medieval kingdom. (Its addictive quality has earned it the nickname Evercrack.) ".

Now I have 3 points to make as an economist.

1) I have never been in Sim city or Everquest. I control my habit by a simple rule. I never pay anything for any web event. To date, the total spending on my web addiction was when someone else [name supressed to protect the overgenerous] paid to buy out adds on this site.

2) How the hell can US productivity be growing so fast if people are doing things like spending 20 hours a week in Everquest ? My guess is that some of that time si spent by people in cubicles who should be working. My explanation is that it doesn't really matter how much office work office workers do (the dramatic effects of downsizing and de layering on productivity also suggest this).

3) Haven't various smart people been wondering why college educated men are dropping out of the labor force like flies ?

The only guess that made sense to me is some kind of wealth effect. Their wages have gotten very high and many got out of stock before the bubble burst, so now they can afford a year long unpaid vacation or early retirement on savings. This was hard to reconcile with heavy consumer indebtedness.

Now I have a new theory. The American overeducated male work force is being decimated by cybercrack. The guys are so busy playing on the web that they just don't have time to look for work. And this is just the beginning. Scary thought no ?

So I figure we need a new role playing game. Cyberholics anonymous.

Hi I'm Robert W. and I'm a cyberholic.