Is the radical plan to change how Harvard teaches economics wrong?

My advice to young econ students is “all of the above”: Learn the fundamental insights and principles of economic reasoning, AND learn how to interpret empirical claims, AND learn how to transform data into insight. — Justin Wolfers

According to Peter Boettke, Raj Chetty’s idea for introducing students to econ in a new way is not the right way to be teaching Econ 101;

You can be brilliantly wrong, which is what I believe Chetty is in making this move. Economic theory, understood correctly, cannot be so easily dispensed with because it is not so easily learned either. Students have to be taught the economic way of thinking to make sense of the big data they are processing and asked to analyze. Theory is the set of eyeglasses through which we can ‘read’ the chaotic world and make sense of it. Without it, we are ‘blind’ to the world we are studying with all its beautiful complexity and creativity.

Hayek’s inaugural lecture at the LSE back in 1933 faced down a similar challenge to the teaching of Economic theory, and Frank Knight addressed a similar concern in his 1950 AEA Presidential address. Everyone would do well to revisit those lectures in light of this development and contemplate what is at stake.

For Discussion: Comment on the following;

“One view of economics is that it is the study of prices and markets, and incentives. That’s fundamentally what economics is,” Chetty told me in his office. “I understand that perspective. I view it as constraining. It depends upon if you want to define a field based on the questions or based on its tools.”