What Do Economic Theorists Do?

From Naked Capitalism;

"Essentially, [economists] make models, which are mathematical tools that are supposed to describe how the economy functions.

The problem is that economists haven’t really built a model of the whole economy that works.

A lot of smart people have spent a lot of time creating tools with names like “dynamic stochastic general equilibrium.” But as of this moment, those models can’t really forecast the economy like our meteorologists can forecast the weather. Furthermore, they contain a lot of obviously wrong assumptions.  ...Economists include things like that to make the models easier to use, and they hope those zany assumptions are actually decent approximations to the way the world really works.

...none of the existing models can do much to predict the economy.

Economists don’t really have good enough data to understand how the economy works, either.

With chemistry or biology, you can put things in a lab and test them out with controlled experiments.

But with macroeconomics — the study of the economy as a whole — you can’t put countries and entire economies in a lab; all you can do is sit there and watch history go by, and try to deduce some patterns.

But often enough, those patterns vanish just as soon as you think you’ve found one.

...when an economist tells you something that is based on a theory or a model, you should be very, very skeptical.

And the more complicated the theory or model is, the more you should be suspicious."
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On the whole, economists are very smart, perceptive people.

Like everyone else, they are liable to overstate their confidence and rely too much on their own unproven theories…”

...as policymakers [economists] are likely to place too much confidence in the policies based on their unproven theories. As a result, economists/policymakers have continued to pursue policies that work in the context of their macroeconomic model, despite evidence that the policy is not working as intended or is having undesirable, unanticipated effects on the real economy, e.g., asset price bubbles.

How should non-economists respond to the limitation of economic models?  Perhaps they should be most skeptical of policies proposed and instituted by economists/policymakers who are the most dogmatic regardless of the particular dogma they espouse.

After all, the more dogmatic the policymaker the more likely he or she will be overconfident and allow minor policy errors to become very costly policy errors.

Policy mistakes are inevitable, but big mistakes are avoidable.

...The economists with the highest public profiles are invariably those economists that are the most dogmatic.

Both the political sphere and the media favor economists with clear ununanced opinions...

Macroeconomic policy can also contribute to inferior outcomes when economists, policymakers and the public become over confident and ignore its limitations."