This paper, which is prepared for the Inagural Conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking in King’s College, Cambridge, 8-11 April 2010, questions the preeminence of theory over empirics in economics and argues that empirical econometrics needs to be given a more important and independent role in economic analysis, not only to have some confidence in the soundness of our empirical inferences, but to uncover empirical regularities that can serve as a basis for new economic thinking.