■"To Prove You're Serious, Burn Some Bridges," by David Leonhardt, New York Times, 17 October 2005, p. C4.

I remain unimpressed with Economics Nobel going to the gamersóagain. In saying it last time, I got some emails making the case that Schelling and the gamers were instrumental in helping the U.S. understand what became Mutual-Assured Destruction, or the concept that nuclear war was unwinnable.

Worth arguing, although it says little about why the gamers get Nobels for economics, but since most social science is just a fancy way of repackaging common sense, let's not get too nasty on the economists.

As for Schelling and the gamers role on MAD, I guess I would feel less queasy about giving them the Nobel for peace, because I do believe MAD was the lynchpin strategic concept. I'm just not sure I'd recognize the gamers as being responsible for its spread as a political-military concept. Instead, there are several military and civilian political leaders I would credit for that.

I would be reluctant to credit the gamers because they came up with a host of concepts, some of which helped enunciate MAD and some which helped to fuel arms races and put us several times on the brink of nuclear war. In short, the gamers brought plenty of both good and bad to the strategic nukes question, as much Strangelovian as Sagan-like. I guess I just see their historical role as being far more conflicted than others.

I view things that way, I guess, because I had to endure ten years of undergraduate and graduate training in an international relations field that, by the 1980s and still to this day, had become overrun with the gamers and their "elegant models" of behavior. Frankly, I think most of that stuff is like crack to your strategic brain: you get all jacked thinking you've figured everything out but you just keep moving further and further away from any sort of reality that most of the world recognizes. I avoid it whenever and wherever possible in my work, because I honestly feel it does more harm than good, making people stupider rather than smarter.

In my mind, game theory has had a hugely negative impact on my field, and I know of plenty of political scientists who'll agree with me--most of them, however, being the practicing sort and not the types to have stayed behind in academia for their entire careers.