WITHOUT PRICE THEORY, YOUR EMPIRICAL WORK IS AD HOC AT BEST.

I think that's what Wall Street Journal contributor Alexander W. Salter is attempting to argue, although the sub-headline of his article, "Today’s researchers have tossed out price theory and don’t realize they’ve been politically compromised." suggests otherwise.  He starts by noting the recent passing of William "Midnight Economist" Allen, perhaps the last of the great UCLA price theorists.  But then he gets into the polemical.

Professional economists are abandoning price theory in droves. The new status quo has upended the field. Economics is increasingly less scientific and more susceptible to political influence.

The absence of price theory in today’s economic research would have befuddled the great economists of the past. Contrary to the field’s naysayers, the golden age of 20th-century price theory was never about “neoliberalism” or “market fundamentalism.” Instead, it applied to markets a simple yet brilliant framework that revealed the hidden ways market prices—exchange ratios between goods—facilitated an extraordinary amount of economic coordination. It also showed why many (but not all) restrictions on price adjustments, such as rent controls, resulted in costly and unproductive secondary effects. This was all a part of a broad explanatory project. While individual economists had their policy preferences, the economic way of thinking was above politics.

For years, economics has been getting less theoretical and more empirical. Economists are spending less time building and thinking through simple models, and more time collecting and analyzing data. The “identification revolution” in economics raised the payoff, in the form of elite publications, to finding good data from quasiexperimental settings and conducting advanced statistical analyses. Better empirical work should certainly be applauded. But it came at a cost: an entire cohort of economists with serious theoretical blind spots.

Those theoretical blind spots will lead to failure of the empirical techniques.  Because the full essay went behind the Journal pay wall while I was working on the post, I'm not sure if the professor noted as much.  As far as economics "getting less theoretical and more empirical," well, forty years ago, the gripe was that it was the other way around, and these days, I fear that often the empirical is more about statistical purity, whether you call it "structural modelling" or "robust estimation" than it is about ensuring that the data gathered (or, more commonly, downloaded from a government site) don't reveal unexploited arbitrage opportunities or other inconsistencies.  "To write a proper dissertation requires understanding both of price theory and of quantitative methods."