I wouldn't go as far as to say the profession has stopped doing economics.

I'd say that the need for novelty has trumped common sense, but only novelty that fits within the regime-approved narratives. And of course, the demand for regime-approved novelty is driven by the need to publish.

This is how you get grad students who write papers showing that natives have more accurate views of immigrants if they live near an immigrant, and thereby idiotically concluding that the right policy is to randomly allocate immigrants to predominantly native neighborhoods.