Totally Not About The Speech

...but this has been bugging me for over a month. Can someone please explain to me why Freakonomics is considered so earth-shattering and why Levitt is considered a "rogue"? What others seem to think is "freaky" about his methodolgy is his eschewing of "the unifying theme" and instead turning to the data to draw his conclusions and design his algorithms. If economics has any claim on being any kind of science then that ought to be the way it's done. Or have I just lived my entire life in ignorance of how economists work? If it's suprising to people that analysis of data leads to unintuitive conclusions then science education in this country really is as bad as I hear.