@CTD - with all due respect, I couldn't disagree more.

In real life many people don't know what they're doing financially, and spend/invest based on naivete, impulse and/or the desire to "keep up with the Joneses". Even people who "control" the market (or thought they did) have been caught with their fiscal pants down and lost a lot of net worth in the past few years.

There are far too many examples of this in the current economic slump (including a depressingly large number of bankruptcies). Sometimes someone's woes are their fault; sometimes they are purely the result of other people's greed or callousness; and sometimes they are due to both.

But the end result is that markets are based on supply and demand, and there's always one or more tangible metrics involved (usually time and ingenuity). And many people often make mistakes with their money (sometimes catastrophic ones), while others can on occasion game the system for big rewards. In these respects I think the WoW economy is a good analogy for many (but not all) aspects of the real economy.