for chrissake, if you are going to slam the door behind you, slam it hard!

Edward Castronova is a Ph.D. economist who got some press for his work on supertimesuck online games like EverQuest. He has an economics position at Cal State Fullerton that he was unhappy with, in part because the discipline of economics has not been that encouraging of his efforts to take virtual worlds seriously. Recently, however, his EverQuest work has landed him a tenured position in the telecommunications department at Indiana University. Now that he will be changing disciplines, he decided to post a parting rant about economics on his weblog. Here, in its entirety:

MATH IS BORING AND STUPID AND HAS ONLY A LIMITED PLACE IN THE DISCUSSION OF HUMAN AFFAIRS. PEOPLE ARE NOT NEUTRONS. HUMAN RATIONALITY IS AN EVOLUTIONARY AFTERTHOUGHT, SOMETHING THAT DOES LITTLE MORE THAN OCCASIONALLY MODIFY BEHAVIORS THAT STEM FROM UNCONSCIOUS AND ALOGICAL IMPULSES. THE TIME I SPENT LEARNING ALL THOSE MATHEMATICAL/ECONOMIC MODELS OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR HAS HAD SUCH A LOW PAYOFF IN TERMS OF GENERAL UNDERSTANDING THAT, WELL, UNTIL I GET A REFUND, I AM GOING TO REMAIN PISSED OFF.

A little namby-pamby, if you ask me. I mean, everybody knows I have a sunny disposition toward every nook and cranny of sociology, so I have no plans or aspirations to be trying to jump disciplines. Still, all I'm saying is, if somebody is going to be writing a finally-I-can-say-this-out-loud rant for their weblog about a discipline that they feel has mistreated them and that they are leaving behind, I think they should compose something sufficiently scathing that some monitors burst into flames when a reader tries to scroll down through the post.