The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber writes the Freakonomics takedown that needed to be written (TNR registration required). It’s a longer and better developed version of the rant I’ve been on for a year or so privately. Steve Levitt is a genius of clever research design, and it’s great in principle to expand the scope of economics. But the discipline runs the risk of putting cleverness before substance and cumulative progress — the academic equivalent of what the counter-intuitive fetish did to liberal opinion journalism:

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?

With the 2005 publication of Freakonomics, the breezy exposition of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt’s oeuvre, the rest of the world has come to see that economists are capable of spectacular feats of cleverness–and to a degree I couldn’t imagine back in my poseur days. In the search for what’s known as “clean identification”–a situation in which it’s easy to discern the causal forces in play–Levitt has turned to such offbeat contexts as Japanese sumo-wrestling and the seedy world of Chicago real estate. He has studied racial discrimination on “Weakest Link,” a once-popular game show, and reflected on the scourge of white-collar bagel-filching. This has, in turn, inspired a flurry of imitators, including papers on such topics as point-shaving in college basketball, underused gym memberships, and the parking tickets of U.N. diplomats.

Within the frequently tedious body of economics scholarship, these papers stand out as fantastically entertaining. Judging from the dizzying sales of Freakonomics and the thousands of lecture halls across the country now bursting with econ majors, they’ve also been wildly successful at ginning up interest in the discipline. But it does make you worry: What if, somewhere along the road from Angrist to Levitt to Levitt’s growing list of imitators, all the cleverness has crowded out some of the truly deep questions we rely on economists to answer?