Monday, May 16, 2005

Ipods, PC's, Video Games

I was talking with some guys at work today about how our generation and younger (25 yrs and below) will probably play video games for the rest of our lives. I then came home to find that my roommate had modified his x-box so that old super nintendo games could be downloaded and played. My other three roommates are hard to find nowadays, because of a new massively multiplayer online game called Guild Wars.

So I'm thinking: has the marginal utility of leisure increased as technology has made entertainment so much cheaper and better? None of my roommates (including myself) have full time jobs and two of them are no longer students. We could certainly be much more productive, and perhaps a few generations ago we would have entered the work force by now. If technological progress and human capital drive growth, then how do we train engineers to create proper infrastructure if it is much more enjoyable to fight hordes of undead in cyberspace?

I probably sound more worried about this than I really am. I doubt that everyone is as much of a slacker as the lot of us are- somebody has to be winning these achievement scholarships to the Ivy Leagues.

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