Wayne State economist Josh Hendrickson is quoted in this story about lost work time due to employee participation in office pools and conversation about the annual college basketball playoffs. The downtime estimates include time spent tracking game scores online and even watching games. But Hendrickson sees flaws in traditional time-theft estimates by outplacement staffing firms and others. He points out that computers that provide access to game scores also are largely responsible for a huge jump in productivity over the past 20 years and that idle workers may be doing their employer a favor if they surf rather than distract busy co-workers. He also points out that the presumption that the average worker has no downtime is erroneous. Time wasted on "March Madness" is likely being stolen from time that would have been wasted in other ways.