Now, this is fascinating.  No, I’m being earnest here.  I’ve always thought virtual words and games, like Second Life, to name a famous example, are not very noteworthy in and of themselves, but for the purposes of economics, wonderful.  Implenting crazy economic theories in real life, is, of course, somewhat dubious, ethically (has anyone told Milton Friedman or Vladimir Lenin this), but online, you can study the cause and effect of changes to a macro-economic system.  It turns economics into a far more testable subject. This may also be the case for other social sciences, especially political science, although I haven’t seen that pursued so far.

Anyway, the point of this is that in the massive world of Eve Online, a banker has vanished with 86 billion, causing a run on the banks.

Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution