Is Freakonomics Ruining Economics?

Writing in the April 02 issue of the New Republic, Noam Scheiber argues Yes.  The article is no screed - it's well informed about economics and the state of the profession.  Unfortunately, it's gated but do try find a copy somewhere.  This bit gives some of the flavor.

Several years after his paper on schooling, Angrist noticed that the Armed Forces Qualifying Test had been misgraded for a few years in the late '70s. This had opened the doors to thousands of subpar applicants and allowed Angrist to compare the lucky underachievers with the people rejected once the glitch got corrected, thereby isolating the impact of military service on wages. The practical effect was to send the grad students scrambling to find other instances in which life-altering decisions had been handed down incorrectly. In 2000, a Harvard professor named Caroline Hoxby discovered that streams had often formed boundaries to nineteenth-century school districts, so that cities with more streams historically had more school districts, even if some districts had later merged. The discovery allowed Hoxby to show that competition between districts improved schools. It also prompted the Harvard students to wrack their brains for more ways in which arbitrary boundaries had placed similar people in different circumstances.

Every few weeks, when a student would stumble onto some new test-grading error or fatefully drawn boundary--what economists call "instruments"--word of the discovery would rocket through the department. The discoverer would become instantly, if momentarily, famous, like the holder of a winning card at a Bingo hall, and inspiring the same mix of reverence and jealousy. A typical conversation around the snack machine at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where many Harvard students had cubicles, went something like: Hey, did you hear that so-and-so found this crazy example of excess tax refunds in western Manitoba in the early '60s? At which point the other would reply, Uh, no, wow, that's, uh, great, and then scamper back to his desk to brainstorm for some similar quirk of public policy. At an age when most people brood that life is too random and arbitrary, these people's biggest complaint was that it wasn't random and arbitrary enough.

In retrospect, I have come to see this as the moment I realized economics had a cleverness problem. How was it that these students, who had arrived at the country's premier economics department intending to solve the world's most intractable problems--poverty, inequality, unemployment--had ended up facing off in what sometimes felt like an academic parlor game?

I think Scheiber is off in a few ways.  First, he conflates methods and questions.  It's true that clean identification is often found with quirky experiments but a quirky experiment does not necessarily imply a quirky question.  Hoxby's work on education, mentioned above, is asking a big question about the effect of competition on schools.  Levitt's work on crime uses quirks in police assignment as do those of his "pale imitators" (like those guys that used terror alert levels to estimate the effectiveness of police on the street.  Ha, ha!) but we spend well over 100 billion dollars a year combating crime so it's pretty damn important to know how well police, prisons and punishment work.  Scheiber criticizes Emily Oster's work but his criticism has nothing to do with his thesis, Oster's work on AIDS, missing women and so forth is on big questions. It's possible to be clever and to think big.

The second problem is to think that if only people did less Freakonomics they would do more big think economics.  If only it were so.  The truth is that even today most of economics is a wasteland of boring papers on profoundly uninteresting questions.  The choice is not Levitt v. Heckman it's Levitt and Heckman (and many others like Buchanan who neither Levitt nor Heckman might appreciate) versus a huge number of non-entities (many highly paid and famous) who answer trivial questions poorly and do it without even the courtesy of offering some entertainment on the side.

Addendum: Tyler has the first comment.