Steve Pischke argued that:
- In recent years, the economics profession has emphasized and recognized empirical work in economics more than it has recognized and awarded theoretical work.
- In recent years, no historical work in economics has won the Nobel Prize, demonstrating the relative unimportance of economic history for economics more generally.
- In recent years, the challenges of explaining the Great Recession have driven economic theorists and economic historians into useless debates when they both should be tackling this important problem in their own ways.
- In recent years, econometrics - which is really a combination of economic history and economic theory - has fallen into disrepute because it failed to predict the Great Recession.