I think this is a great metaphor but for very different reasons than you. Reading Proust will help somebody who sits on the sidelines take in the scene of somebody's neurological condition degrading. Studying neurology will help somebody find and (hopefully) cure the disease.
Neurologists save lives, people who sit in armchairs cherishing Proust may enrich themselves but they have no grounds to look down upon those who are getting their hands dirty.
Reading Proust isn't getting your hands dirty? I don't think you've read Proust.
You could hold Proust's greatest work upside down and read it backwards but nothing bad will happen. If a neurologist makes a mistake they could kill their patient, their hands are dirty because part of their job is making mistakes that hurt people.
It's not that Austrian economists can't find their own data models to defend their positions, with an area like economics finding data to support your opinions is the easy part.
Rather, we've found that obsessing over the data provides very little understanding of the underlying cause-and-effect of economics.
It's like neurology. Yes, it's a terribly interesting field, but you'll learn more about the human mind from reading Proust.