A few weeks back I wondered how the US economy could survive globalization and a bunch of friends wrote to me, both in comments and email, with helpful explanations and pointers toward various resources. Well, I at least learned that other, smarter people feel confident that everything will be just fine, dear.

But now things are starting to snap into focus. So what if we can't make pop culture, goods or services better than the developing world? We don't need comparative advantage for salvation -- we just need to start offering tax incentives to the magic bean industry.

Slashdot's got a story up today about gold farming in massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (delightfully abbreviated as MMORPGS). For a three-panel primer on gold farming, see this Penny Arcade comic strip. Or just listen to me.

See, MMORPGS are serious time commitments. Over the course of months or years you play a single character amongst a world of other human players, each dilligently guiding their avatar through successive levels of virtual proficiency. Frequently the tasks that must be performed to level up are pretty rote and boring -- find the same kind of monster and kill it over and over again, hoping this one will drop some gold or a rare piece of equipment. Elaborate virtual economies exist within these games, with auction houses, banks, and players grouping together and pooling resources as sorts of unregulated corporations (whose mission statements, if they had any, would always revolve around leveraging synergies to proactively kill monsters). As Clive Thompson Edward Castronova semi-famously discovered, one of these games, Everquest, has the world's 77th largest economy.

How can you arrive at a number like that when it's all just make-believe? Actually, as Thompson found, it's pretty easy: you can buy these make-believe currencies with real money. IGE is among the highest-profile of these traders. Right now a piece of gold in Everquest 2 can be bought for a shade under 45 cents; 20 million credits on Star Wars: Galaxies' "Shadowfire" server can be had for $150 dollars.

Here's where gold-farming comes in: it's really fucking boring to amass gold in these games. So these online currency exchanges pay people to sit in the game, stand by creature spawn points, kill them and collect the dropped currency and items. This has created problems for other, casual players of the games: for one thing, the not-actually-that-delicate monster ecosystem is thrown out of whack. For another, spoiled fourteen year olds can use mommy's VISA to ascend to the games' highest levels of mastery -- levels that rightly belong to the world's 40 year old virgins! Because while the meek shall inherit the earth, surely the geek should get dibs on the internet.

So the gold farmer is reviled by players, and companies are cracking down on them. But I think this might be just the sort of industry that the US should embrace. A promising sign is that American virtual currency trading houses are reputed to frequently hire Chinese gold farmers. That's right: we're already outsourcing the labor portion of the pretend economy we've set up! I envision a world where the invisible hand guides a cursor between a game window and its web browser, watching its bank ballance edge skyward as a happy customer on the other side of the world accepts delivery on a few kilobytes' worth of enchanted battle axe.

Special bonus benefit: with such a controllable and idealized set of market conditions, denizens of reality might actually be able to get the world's economists to leave us alone! Everybody wins!

Now: who wants to get in on the ground floor of a promisingly non-substantive business venture?