The Wall Street Journal summarizes an April 2, 2007 article by Noam Scheiber in The New Republic:
A new generation of economists has become so addicted to cleverness that dull but genuinely useful research is under threat.
"Freakonomics," the 2005 best seller that sought to explain the mysteries of everyday life through economics, is only partly to blame, writes Noam Scheiber. The deeper roots lie in a 1980s crisis of faith over economists’ ability to reliably crunch numbers. Influential economist H. Gregg Lewis kicked it off by demonstrating that a host of broad, worthwhile empirical surveys of unions’ impact on wages came to opposite conclusions, mostly thanks to the differing original assumptions by the studies’ authors.
As a result, some economists retrenched, opting to focus on finding "solid answers to modest questions."
For the full summary, see: