Fair enough. I retract my statement about falsifiability. Still, even a solid economic theory often requires empirical measurements in order to make predictions, e.g. supply and demand elasticities. In that sense, I would still argue that data work is an indispensable part of economic analysis. I get where the author is coming from, but I also think it's a bit pedantic. Does anyone really ever claim to do economic data analysis apart from a theoretical framework, even if the framework is implicit?